The discovery created quite a sensation. What an enigma! it was exclaimed. What a mystery! What a marvel of nature! When the first stuffed specimens reached England from Australia around the end of the eighteenth century they were thought to be fakes made by sticking together bits of different animals. Even today you still see occasional articles in nature magazines asking, Why does this paradox of nature exist?
The answer is: it doesn’t. The platypus isn’t doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn’t having any problems. Platypi have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along and declare it illegal. The real mystery, the real enigma, is how mature, objective, trained scientific observers can blame their own goof on a poor innocent platypus.
Zoologists, to cover up their problem, had to invent a patch. They created a new order, monotremata, that includes the platypus, the spiny anteater, and that’s it. This is like a nation consisting of two people.
In a subject-object classification of the world, Quality is in the same situation as that platypus. Because they can’t classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it. And Quality isn’t the only such platypus. Subject-object metaphysics is characterized by herds of huge, dominating, monster platypi. The problems of free will versus determinism, of the relation of mind to matter, of the discontinuity of matter at the sub-atomic level, of the apparent purposelessness of the universe and the life within it are all monster platypi created by the subject-object metaphysics. Where it is centered around the subject-object metaphysics, Western philosophy can almost be dejined as platypus anatomy. These creatures that seem like such a permanent part of the philosophical landscape magically disappear when a good Metaphysics of Quality is applied.
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. There are always some pieces like platypi that don’t fit and we can either ignore these pieces or we can give them silly explanations or we can take the whole puzzle apart and try other ways of assembling it that will include more of them. When one takes the whole ill-shaped, misfitting structure of a subject-object explained universe apart and puts it back together in a value-centered metaphysics, all kinds of orphaned puzzle pieces fit beautifully that never fit before.
Almost as great as this value platypus is another one handled by the Metaphysics of Quality: the scientific reality platypus. This is a very large monster that has been disturbing a lot of people for a long time. It was identified a century ago by the mathematician and astronomer, Henri Poincare, who asked, Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?
Should reality be something that only a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists understand? One would expect at least a majority of people to understand it. Should reality be expressible only in symbols that require university-level mathematics to manipulate? Should it be something that changes from year to year as new scientific theories are formulated? Should it be something about which different schools of physics can quarrel for years with no firm resolution on either side? If this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for failing to understand reality? By this criterion shouldn’t all but a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy here and who is sane?
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality this scientific reality platypus vanishes. Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time. Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
A third major platypus handled by the Metaphysics of Quality is the causation platypus. It has been said for centuries that, empirically speaking, there is no such thing as causation. You never see it, touch it, hear it or feel it. You never experience it in any way. This has not been a minor philosophic or scientific platypus. This has been a real show-stopper. The amount of paper consumed in dissertations on this one metaphysical problem must equal whole forests of pulpwood.
In the Metaphysics of Quality causation is a metaphysical term that can be replaced by value. To say that A causes B or to say that B values precondition A is to say the same thing. The difference is one of words only. Instead of saying A magnet causes iron filings to move toward it, you can say Iron filings value movement toward a magnet. Scientifically speaking neither statement is more true than the other. It may sound a little awkward, but that’s a matter of linguistic custom, not science. The language used to describe the data is changed but the scientific data itself is unchanged. The same is true in every other scientific observation Phædrus could think of. You can always substitute B values precondition A for A causes B without changing any facts of science at all. The term cause can be struck out completely from a scientific description of the universe without any loss of accuracy or completeness.
The only difference between causation and value is that the word cause implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of value is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that cause is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles prefer to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. Therefore when you strike cause from the language and substitute value you are not only replacing an empirically meaningless term with a meaningful one; you are using a term that is more appropriate to actual observation.
The next platypus to fall is substance. Like causation, substance is a derived concept, not anything that is directly experienced. No one has ever seen substance and no one ever will. All people ever see is data. It is assumed that what makes the data hang together in consistent patterns is that they inhere in this substance. But as John Locke pointed out in the seventeenth century, if we ask what this substance is, devoid of any properties, we find ourselves thinking of nothing whatsoever. The data of quantum physics indicate that what are called subatomic particles cannot possibly fill the definition of a substance. The properties exist, then disappear, then exist, and then disappear again in little bundles called quanta. These bundles are not continuous in time, yet an essential, defined characteristic of substance is that it is continuous in time. Since the quantum bundles are not substance and since it is a usual scientific assumption that these subatomic particles compose everything there is, then it follows that there is no substance anywhere in the world nor has there ever been. The whole concept is a grand metaphysical illusion. In his first book, Phædrus had railed against the conjuror, Aristotle, who invented the term and started it all.