Quality

This framework is centered around this concept from Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, described in his book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.

What is meant by Quality is the state of "goodness" or "betterness". This state is known by all beings. Whether they're conscious of it or not, their perceptions and actions are informed and guided by Quality.

Quality goes by different names in different contexts: health (biology), well-being (life) prosperity (economics), excellence (skill), unity (society), etc. In all these contexts, more is better. A healthier body, a more unified society is better than an unhealthy body or a fragmented society.

Better is what Quality defines.

This is the main axiom of this mathematical framework of meaning: that there are states of being which are ultimately better and not only subjectively perceived as better.

There's some cultural resistance to this idea that some things are higher Quality than other things, because...

"Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows." — Paul Graham's Taste for Makers

But this framework isn't an argument for absolutism or some kind of morality. Although I think the tension between absolutism and moral relativism can be reconciled when the concepts of Quality and Value are teased apart. Both use the same linguistic structures: good/better, bad/worse to refer to different things. Just because a thing is better does not mean it is better for everyone. For example, at my stage of musical development, I enjoy (i.e., derive Value from) music than is lower Quality than some other music; but the fact that music comes in different gradations of Quality, sets a direction for the development of my taste.

This framework is about practical utility of this Quality axiom once it's integrated into a framework, and that's been done before in other contexts, although less formally.

For example, Christopher Alexander based his method of architecture on this postulate. He called it undefined quality, and later he called it Life. To overcome the resistance from the relavistic mindset when judging Quality, he framed his questions in a spiritual language:

"People were obsessed then, as still today they are, with the idea that artistic taste was all a matter of opinion, that they were entitled to think and feel what they thought and felt. And the idea that there might actually be something [higher Quality] was quite shocking.
[...]
I would say, well, don't tell me which one you like and don't tell me which one you think is better, because those questions are all plagued with problems. Tell me which one of them you would you would choose as a picture of your own true Self."

— Christopher Alexander, Nature, life, and self: Christopher Alexander after a pattern language

That's his famous Mirror of the Self test.

If you've read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance you'll know that Quality is a spiritual concept. The fact this framework has a spiritual foundation doesn't mean it can't be used for practical purposes, as Christopher Alexander has clearly shown.

Pirsig also used the name Tao for Quality. Pirsig's dynamic Quality can be likened to the unfolding of the Tao, to the cutting edge of reality. And I would attribute the source of this framework to the dynamic Quality itself. The inspiration came from a spontaneous mystical experience, and it felt like Quality discovering itself and trying to model itself.

The direction I'm currently taking this framework is phenomenological in essence. It's about modeling conscious experience using conceptual primitives derived from Quality.

As described in Understand, treating Quality as a number gives us the first primitive of conscious experience: the degree of undifferentiated "goodness". The higher order concepts emerge from that axiom: Value, Potential, Aim, Action as described in Story of Your Life.

Just as physics has differentiated the totality of material phenomena into meaningful categories (forces, masses, inertia) that we can use to understand the material world symbolically and manipulate it for our purposes, it's possible to understand the phenomenological reality through a system of meaningful categories and use it to gain insight into the nature of meaning.

Understanding the nature of matter gave us power over matter. Understanding the nature of meaning can give us power over meaning. As humans we subsist on meaning as much as on material substance, and so it'll be just as useful to understand its structure and essence.