My Big TOE: What motivates continuing evolution?

From reality cells to organization to specialization
We now have relative disturbances (what Campbell calls reality cells), we have uniform and non-uniform states represented by these cells, but we do not yet have structure, order, or specialization of function. Each new state represents new possibilities and opportunities for growth. As we have new states, we have growth of awareness, complexity, and useful control: profitability.

So what to do with the massive number of reality cells that have been created?
1. Organization: arranging the local deformations into patterns, patterns of patterns, and groups of patterns of patterns, limited by memory.
2. Continuation of evolution: diversification and specialization. The Fundamental Process creates pressures to evolve; diversification and specialization are individual strategies to respond to these pressures.



Survival & propagation as pressures to continue evolving
In biological systems, survival and propagation provide the energy and imperative for organisms to implement the Fundamental Process and continue evolving diversifying/specializing. Because we must continually strive to survive and propagate, we are continually evolving (progressing, growing, experimenting).

Why do we strive to survive? Why do we value others' lives? "The survival (continuing existence) of a particular individual member of a species is not only significant to the individual, but also contributes to the profitability and continuance of the species, evolutionary experiment, and ecosystem. Each individual, besides being an autonomous entity, is an integral part of a larger system."

What happens when a system is "out of balance?"
The evolutionary process naturally maximizes the profitability of the overall system. Stability is achieved maintained because the system self-optimizes and self-regulates. If a system is moving towards an out of balance condition, it can do 3 things:
1. Grow in the future towards balance
2. The system regresses to a previous stable state, where the unbalancing factor is brought under control
3. The system self-destructs. In biological systems, a quickly growing cancer. In consciousness systems, a lack of quality in consciousness: self-destructive behaviors (ignorance, fear, desire, need, and ego).

Higher pressures to continue evolving
Survival and propagation weren't primary pressures for either AUO or for the single-celled creatures, both of whom just minded their business with no enemies and no mutual animosity. Most 21st century human beings likewise are not focused on survival issues on a daily basis, but we've created technologies which carry most of that burden for us (glasses, air conditioning). So survival and propagation are not original motivators for these systems to continue evolving.

For AUO, early single-celled organisms, and for the human race to avoid being out of balance and to avoid stagnation and decay (increasing entropy), and to keep increasing profitability and reducing entropy, what will pressure them? It is self-improvement that will provide the pressure. Exploring possibilities to find a better, more profitable existence. It is self-improvement that is the best way to decrease average entropy, and equivalently, to increase useful energy.

And Campbell argues that for humans the best bet for self-improvement is not necessarily intellectual improvement (bigger brains), but spiritual evolution, or improving the quality of our consciousness [he says that self-improvement could also be development of science and application of technology, or even human genetic engineering]: "improving the quality of our individual and collective consciousness is the most important and critical aspect of self-improvement (evolution) facing the human race as we move into the 21st century."

It should be noted that self-improvement, that spiritual evolution, is not a group activity, but an individual, personal one. "Groups raise their average quality level only if individuals within those groups make a personal effort to increase their individual quality."