Expanding the Realm of Science to Include Good

Over the last century, consciousness has gradually entered the domain of legitimate scientific inquiry. Neuroscience and the role of the observer in quantum mechanics are two clear examples of consciousness being treated as an essential component of scientific explanation. As bold and consequential as this shift has been, there is another entity that still remains largely outside scientific ontology—what Robert Pirsig called Quality (by which he explicitly meant good).

Quality is often dismissed as too general, subjective, or value-laden to be suitable for scientific—or especially mathematical—reasoning. Yet, as Pirsig argued, Quality is not peripheral to science but foundational. It is the source of science's very aim: accuracy. Without an implicit sense of better and worse, there would be no motivation to prefer one explanation, model, or measurement over another.

Admittedly, Quality may appear too vague or unverifiable to admit rigorous description. But many entities now central to science—forces, fields, and even information—began as intuitions long before they were precisely defined or quantitatively measured. Their legitimacy did not arise from immediate measurability, but from the necessity of accounting for observable regularities and effects.

Including good within scientific ontology will require its definition to be clarified, expanded, and constrained. This, in turn, demands a broader conception of truth. Just as incorporating fields and consciousness required science to move beyond truth defined solely by mass, locality, and direct sensory perception, so too must truth be expanded beyond mere actuality. It must also account for harmony (persistence across contexts) and benefit (reciprocity within systems).