For some time I have been writing articles about what I think. For this article I am going to write about why I think what I think. We are all participants in reality. We are all co-creators of reality. Each one of us will know something based on that experience. How does that work? My life’s work of inquiry about values has taken me into realms I never would have imagined and given me working knowledge I now believe may be where meaning truly resides.  

Being me, I’ve inquired about values. I wanted to know where values show up. Are there really values?  Should we all hold the same values? Are they just good for Sunday school conversations? What is the root of morality? Ethics? Is it just something someone makes up randomly and then a group adopts them and they become a fact of that culture?  

I don’t believe that significant working knowledge can be based on just ratiocination. Good working knowledge comes from combining personal experience with personal inquiry.

My current working knowledge about value intelligence began with experience in a combat zone in Korea in 1950. As fate had it my job was maintaining airborne radar. To do my job they made sure to keep me safe; but I had a ringside seat to the war. After that I went to MIT as a student with a part time job working in a war laboratory. There I learned how exciting the intellectual challenges of creating high tech weapons could be. Then my memories from the war caught up with me. I saw that sanity required me to devote my life to ending wars. I am cheered by a quote, “He who attempts the absurd can do the impossible.” I don’t remember where I read it.

It occurred to me that to do as we were doing, something was wrong with our values. I did not know what values actually were. Were they just Sunday school propaganda or real rules we should live by? I did not think that anyone else knew either.

Then Robert Hartman, an internationally renowned philosopher specializing in value theory was hired by a foundation to come to MIT to evaluate the humanities program. He taught courses on value theory, called axiology. I took his courses. He became my friend and mentor.  

While I agreed with Hartman’s axiology, it didn’t fit with what I was learning about scientific materialism. Then, in my studies at MIT I began to realize that values only function in life, not in materialism. Yet, all our thinking about life, based on scientific materialism, was totally unable to accommodate the idea of values. Materialism deals with matter and that’s only part of reality. From a materialism point of view, anything that happens is due to forces pushing or pulling things. In materialism the only forces are collisions in random processes, and from physics gravity, electricity, magnetism and the four basic nuclear forces. From that view activity is produced by cause and effect, mechanisms, and determinism. Where are values?

Some who wish to stick with scientific materialism as a point of view in searching for values might realize there are processes going on and such processes are computable, such as those occurring in the brain. It has been thought that maybe some of those processes are random with strange attractors as in chaos theory and they are what we call values. Whew!

I wondered if that would really work. However, in tracking the results of much current research in living process, I have been surprised to see that in life, nothing is computable. For some gross purposes we might simulate an aspect of a living process by computation. Having worked with some of the early attempts in computer intelligence, I often saw great ideas produce promising results when applied to what were called “toy problems”. Advancing to real problems they seemed to hit a brick wall.

The current paradigm
change is between
the old paradigm
based on
the fundamental nature
of matter and
the emerging paradigm
based on
the fundamental nature
of energy.

During the sixties, in research at the University of Texas Linguistic Research Laboratory I participated in a 10-year study questioning the possibility of information theory leading to artificial intelligence. The conclusion that emerged from that study was there had to be a paradigm change concerning our notions of information to make artificial intelligence possible.  In later research, I found life did not work the way we thought. There was something profoundly fundamental missing. In 1970 I realized there had to be a far deeper paradigm change regarding life. Tracking the results of laboratory experiments in physics and biophysics confirmed my expectations. There were results that absolutely could not happen in materialism, and I don’t mean just quantum phenomena. There were results showing absolutely unexplainable connections between people and results indicating the existence of unknown biofields.

That paradigm change is now underway and is being recognized. The Institute of Noetic Sciences has published a report documenting the change; the 2007 Shift Report. Their website summarizes the report as follows:

“The 2007 Shift Report: Evidence of a World Transforming, attempts to chart the transition we believe is underway from a rigid, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview to one that is built on a foundation of interconnectedness, cooperation, and the intersection of science and spirituality;"

There seems to be a lot of confusion today. It is hard to know what to believe. Everything seems to be in chaos of adversarial relations. This is typical during a paradigm change and especially one of this magnitude. There will be a struggle between truths of the old paradigm and truths of the emerging paradigm.

The current paradigm change is between the old paradigm based on the fundamental nature of matter and the emerging paradigm based on the fundamental nature of energy.

The matter paradigm: Matter is the fundamental reality. It exists in space-time. It is a discrete enduring thing. If there is activity or motion it is the result of the forces due to random collisions or forces known to physics, i.e., gravity, electricity, magnetism and the four nuclear forces. Change is simply a rearrangement of existing matter. The Greeks began looking for the smallest non-divisible particles that could be rearranged. This has produced the search for fundamental particles that continues today.

The energy paradigm:  Energy is the fundamental reality, but it is a strange form of energy unknown before the development of quantum theory. It is called zero point energy; it is energy of a system at the temperature of absolute zero. It can be said that the universe swims in a sea of zero point energy. The sea is named the Dirac Sea. This energy is the energy of life itself. This energy can create matter. It can create what we perceive as living entities; material systems created and activated by internal energy flows. (This is where values show up.)

In 1970 I was beginning to think there was no possibility that blind or random processes could create the complex coherence seen in life. Further, I did not accept designer theories because it seemed to me the design kept changing. Working with computers I experienced a form of evolution. In the beginning, 1957, a computer memory of roughly 100,000 bytes required a cabinet the size of a large piece of furniture. Today 2 billion bytes fit in a little thing about two inches long. Computer cycles were in millionths of a second. Then they became billionths of a second. This isn’t evolution as we normally think of it. But my computer experience gave me a realization that evolution occurs not by random processes, but by intelligent “actors” initiating acts based on experience where value intelligence guides the way.

Who are the intelligent actors building advances for natural evolution? It is us, it is life itself. It is not random processes. It is not God the designer. It is life with God a co-creator.

In traditional language living processes work by a constant oscillation between facts and values. Facts establish what can be created next. Values select what will be created next. Living entities are born with two kinds of creative intelligence; one for creating  awareness of what is, and one for valuation. We might call them IQ and VIQ. The living entity develops by the oscillation. If the value intelligence is weak or confused, the life of the entity will degenerate. If the value intelligence is simply not working, the entity’s life will become meaningless. I am saying that living in a world dominated by scientific materialism destroys the meaning of life.

Returning to the question about values; are they merely Sunday school virtues or laws to live by? They are definitely laws to live by. But they only apply to those oscillations between facts and values. Living entities have the ability to choose and initiate acts. The choices are made in those moments of choosing from the facts what will be next.

Each living being is an intelligent actor connected to the energy of life. Within that life-energy are process laws that function as value intelligence. Each being has access to that value intelligence. From those laws evolutionary processes occur. It is not random processes. It is not God the designer. It is life with God a co-creator in a dance with all living entities being themselves.

So that’s me being myself, evolving my working knowledge, not from random thoughts or reading a bunch of random books, but from my life experience, my identity, my inquiry, and yes, my connection to value intelligence provided by the energy of life.