Metaphysical support for the University of Chicago in its fight for Intellectual Morality.

There's a great short documentary on the uniquely strong value the University of Chicago places on the intellectual value of free speech. And before I go on - there's actually much crossover here with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The university was attended by the author Robert Pirsig where he had an infamous showdown with the Chair of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods. And it was the universities president Robert Maynard Hutchins who was a close colleague of the Chair and who had reformed the university into a mirror of what Pirsig uniqely terms in ZMM 'Aristotilean Quality'. But as also mentioned in the book; this reform led to a clash against those who wanted a more value-free 'scientific' education, as well as an eventual clash with Pirsig who didn't agree with the low quality Aristotilean definition of Quality..

Phædrus didn't know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn't feel this tradition should be left unreckoned with. The answer to all this was somehow deeply enmeshed in it and he wanted to know more.

Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

And in along the same lines in the movie..

'Hutchins' envisaged something like a military academy for the mind. One grounded in a demanding core curriculum.'

Rob Montz - 'Silence U Pt. 3: Can the University of Chicago solve the campus free speech crisis?'

Despite a very clear disagreement about the metaphysical place of Quality - it's clear however, that the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) supports the University of Chicago's latest stand for free speech discussed in the documentary. As always - we can use the language of the MOQ to break down the problem into its core evolutionary components and beautifully show why it's moral..

Firstly, the MOQ agrees that students around the world shouldn't need to be shielded from certain ideas they find painful or confronting. Such thinking comes from one of biological suffering where society morally supports and comforts those in pain. But ideas are intellectual, not biological, and so it's moral for our culture to allow a voice to ideas that are challenging to confront and this will eventually change our ideas for the better.

'Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals.. And Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know?'

Robert Pirsig - Lila

And secondly, the MOQ also agrees that students shouldn't demand universities refuse to 'give a platform' to ideas they disagree with. Whilst universities and colleges are cultural institutions, they are much more than this and seeing them as exclusively cultural, is to undercut the intellectual values they are set up to protect and preserve. In other words - it is true that who they give a platform to is in some way a cultural statement, however few cultural statements could be better than for an intellectual forum to actively demonstrate the intellectual value of free speach. Giving a voice to those ideas on the periphery or in opposition to those they agree with is just such an intellectual demonstration.

Thirdly, if they are concerned about the strength of certain bad ideas to take hold within the culture, then it's possible they have not appropriately confronted the issues themselves or rightly asked that of others. Which indeed according to the MOQ is the intellectually moral, and perhaps socially difficult thing to do.

And so finally, in this battle for free speech - in all cases it's clearly between those who are seeing things through a social lens at the expense of intellectual morality. Of course equipped with the Metaphysics of Quality - students could avoid grave errors in logic such as this and be far more likely to choose those ideas that are the best. But until that point, the MOQ still uniqely and rightly calls those seeing things through the social lens as immoral and acting against the intellectual quality of evolution and what's right.

Zen in the art of moral object disposal.

"An idol, that's what this doll was. It was a genuine religious idol of an abandoned religion of one. It had all those formidable characteristics that idols always have. That's what spooked him. Once they've been ritualized and adored, these idols change in value. You can no more throw them away casually than you can throw an old church statue on the dump.

He wondered what they actually did with old abandoned church statues. Did they have a desanctification ceremony of some sort? "

Robert Pirsig - Lila

It's good to take care for the objects around you and dispose of them in the same caring manner you possesed whilst they were valuable to have around.

The Japanese appear to uniquely appreciate this within their modern culture. Such an appreciation is supported by the Metaphysics of Quality.

Biased much? Or do you value things?

What's better. A Metaphysics which has a glaring fault at its core, or one which has a beautiful foundation?

A fundamental assumption of our current Metaphysics is that it’s possible to be unbiased. Want to find the truth of a matter? Well then you need to be dispassionate, logical and unbiased. But what does that even mean? Is that even possible? Can we really have no bias? It might be uncomfortable to consider but thinking about this further; unless we can be dispassionate ’objective’ view-from-God all knowing beings then it quickly becomes apparent that indeed it’s not possible.

This is the insight provided by Psychologist and Cognitive Scientist Paul Bloom. In the video above Bloom points out how impossible it is to be unbiased and gives a few reasons why this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

For starters, in a typical ‘scientific’ Subject-Object Metaphysics way - Bloom links the importance of biases to our general survival.

“If we weren’t able to make guesses(prejudices) about new instances that we encounter we wouldn’t survive.” Paul Bloom

But then he takes the value of them a couple of steps further - firstly pointing out how our biases and emotional prejudices allow us to care for others. And then secondly how it's best if we use our intellect to expand our care for others, in a reasonable way, to those whom we may have never met.

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In Bloom's writing, we can see lots of harmony with the Metaphysics of Quality. Bloom not only provides insight on the mistake of an over-reliance on biological emotions but rightly emphasizes the value of intellect in moral decision making.

What Bloom misses however, is that his statement about bias actually undercuts the philosophical foundations of our current Metaphysics. It would be a cruel irony indeed that in order for us to understand the truth of anything, we must be dispassionate, logical and unbiased when those biases are written into who we are as people.

But of course we do not have to suffer this irony. Rather than using a metaphysics which sees bias undercutting every human judgment, a better metaphysics to use is one which replaces bias with value. Taking this change in perspective changes no data but improves our understanding so that it's infinitely better.

It might seem strange - but this is actually why The Metaphysics of Quality supports Bloom's scholarship better than our current Metaphysics. Rather than cut into the foundation of our current metaphysics it is supporting the foundations of a value based metaphysics. In modern day language - it shows that our values are a feature, not a bug.

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But all that said - does this mean that there is no such thing as a negative bias? No, low-quality biases and prejudices still exist. But within a Metaphysics of Quality - the source of those biases is correctly shown to be low-quality values that need to be questioned and not simply an objective 'mistake' to be corrected.

The Morality of Veganism

Human behavior creating global warming is metaphysically immoral and veganism is a moral solution.

In the previous post we established that not changing our behavior in response global warming is immoral. In line with this, according to a report by two World Bank advisers the animal agriculture industry surprisingly contributes to around fifty-one percent of all global emissions. From this study we can conclude that consuming less meat would dramatically reduce our harmful impact on the planet. But why haven’t we heard of this before?

To answer this, the video above shows some of the statistics found in a documentary called Cowspiracy, and it explores why this might not be as well a known cause as the direct burning of fossil fuels. Reasons provided are the reluctance of charities to confront the public about such a large change in behavior, and the power of the animal agriculture industry in stamping out dissent.

But in addition to morally valuing biological life on earth by not suffocating it with inorganic CO2 there is another benefit of not consuming animal meat. This benefit is the correct valuing of biologically more evolved animals over that of their less evolved counterparts – plants and grains. As Robert Pirsig writes in Lila:

An evolutionary morality,.. would say [eating meat is] scientifically immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution, that is, more Dynamic, than are grains and fruits and vegetables.. It would add, also, that this moral principle holds only where there is an abundance of grains and fruits and vegetables. It would be immoral for Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be killing human beings in favor of a lower organism.

Robert Pirsig

Thirdly, that’s not to mention the growing list of health benefits that can be found in reducing the amount of meat in your diet and improving the overall biological quality of the people on the planet.

Therefore these three key reasons make veganism moral on many levels and supported by the evolutionary hierarchy of the Metaphysics of Quality.

The New Age Movement, Science and Values.

The New Age movement and the MOQ on first glance are well suited for one another. As Wikipedia says:

‘The movement aims to create “a spirituality without borders or confining dogmas” that is inclusive and pluralistic. It holds to “a holistic worldview,” emphasizing that the Mind, Body, and Spirit are interrelated.’

However the problem begins with the addition of the term ‘spirit’. It’s a slippery word which can lead to folks getting burned at the stake because of their bad ‘spirits’. Once ‘spirit’ is brought into the conversation you can say goodbye to the empirically verifiable strength of science and hello to pseudoscience and anyone bringing in whatever pseudo-scientific thing they see fit.

The term value on the other hand cannot be co-opted in such a way. Anything can be valuable but using the MOQ we can break value up into a hierarchy of values, each level of which are part of experience and can be empirically verified.

There is an advantage to the New Age movement however and that’s in its ability to create a space where science, and specifically quantum mechanics, can be discussed in an easily accessible way way that won’t shy away from any apparent logical inconsistencies.

In a popular New Age movie called ‘What the bleep do we know?’ there is a great explanation (above) of the famous double slit experiment. The explanation ends with the statement “The observer collapsed the wave function simply by observing!” and from a value free objective scientist perspective that would be the correct way of putting it. However a better way to put it is that the “values of the observer dictated what was observed” because , unlike a scientist may assume, values are more fundamental than physical matter.