Quality

What is meant by Quality is the undifferentiated state of "goodness" or "betterness". Any system has some degree of "goodness" or Quality, which is ultimately real, and which is subjectively experienced.

On the subjective plane, this immediate experience of Quality constitutes the phenomenological basis of the structures of our conscious experience. From Quality we can derive a system of conceptual primitives that describe different structures of our conscious experience, such as Value, Potential, Action, Aim, etc.

Representing Quality with a number gives us the first primitive of conscious experience: the felt degree of undifferentiated "goodness". As I described in Understand article:

... This quantity isn't something we could measure, it just serves the purposes of mathematics. Just as George Boole formalized TRUE=1 and FALSE=0, we pretend we have a quantity that represents the degree of Quality. Higher Quality is more, lower Quality is less. The important thing is that it reflects our intuition.

You wake up one morning and you feel good. Your subjective instantaneous perception of Quality is high. Another morning you wake up sleep-deprived, hung over and you feel a state of lower Quality.

Concepts like Value and Potential are derived from this root, and form higher order phenomenological structures. For example, if you start evaluating the sleep, you exit the pure immediacy of the present moment to remember the state of Quality before sleep, and intuitively come to know the Value (V) by $V = Q_{now} - Q_{before}$. You intuitively know that the sleep was good, if the Value is positive, and that the sleep was bad if the Value is negative. Similarly, if you start thinking of the potential of the day ahead, you exit the immediate experience of the present moment to imagine what could happen in terms of Quality: $P = Q_{future} - Q_{now}$. If you anticipate a significant movement upward in Quality (positive potential), you feel positive about the day; if you anticipate movement downard in Quality, you feel negative about the day. In this way, past and future flow into the present moment through the cognitive processes of evaluation and anticipation, which are anchored in Quality.

This shows how Quality, or rather subjective perception of Quality — this ineffable feeling of goodness — can be seen as the phenomenological basis of our conscious experience from which other higher phenomenological concepts can be derived. Besides Value and Potential, concepts like Aim or orientation, Action or frame selection, or even Trust and Reputation can be derived from this starting point. All that is needed is one simple postulate that goodness exists; that there are states of being, which are ultimately better, and not just subjectively perceived as better, and hence that there are things and actions which are ultimately better than other things and actions.

Phenomenological angle can help us understand the structure of our conscious experience, and model human action and behavior with a meaningful system of categories that aligns with how we consciously experience the world.

But this is not the only angle to look at Quality. Quality is a spiritual concept. At the root is the mystery. Quality sets a spiritual direction for our individual and collective development. It says reality is about progress. As Robert Pirsig noted years ago: "Our universe is evolving toward higher Quality." Evolution means a progression toward higher Quality states, regardless of the system: physical, biological, intellectual, linguistic.

Quality is the anchor point around which we weave meaning—personal meaning, collective meaning and the meaning of things. We perceive an event as meaningful insofar as it improves us or the systems we care about. We harmonize our actions as communities, so long as we can identify and establish a shared direction of progress. We understand the meaning of things in terms of how they enable progress in a recognized set of frames or stories (see Story of Your Life article for a more complete articulation of this idea.)

Ultimately what this framework proposes is that meaning is real, and that it can be studied and mined for patterns just as physics studies patterns and structure in matter and physical phenomena. Once, the material reality was just as vague and mysterious (and much of it still is), but through meaningful categories (forces, masses, inertia) the physics has differentiated the totality of material phenomena and made it graspable. In a similar way, I think it's possible to gain understanding of the spiritual and phenomenological realities through the lens of mathematics.