Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

ENFORMATIONISM

A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.

1. Cosmos :
  The cosmos is an ancient Greek name for the universe. Using the word cosmos implies viewing the universe as a complex and orderly system or entity. Anaxagoras further introduced the concept of a Cosmic Mind (Nous) ordering all things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos

2. Cartesian Theater :
   a derisive term coined by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett to refer pointedly to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialist theories of the mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
   Click here for popup image

3. Enformationism :
   A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

  Post 131.  August 28, 2023

  Creative Mind and Cosmic Order

     Physics and Metaphysics

The “Mind” referenced in Pinter’s book title is the collective intellect of homo sapiens, a species of rational animals whose sensory apparatus has been honed by eons of evolution to “see” not only what is right in front of them, but also what could be in another time & place. Yet, by inference from “Cosmos”¹ in the title, it could also be referring to a Universal mind-field of experience, as in Panpsychism, or to a preter-natural Intellect capable of creating a world with a few sentient creatures from whatever preceded the Big Bang. But, the author carefully avoids any overt religious implications of his description of how the human mind “creates” a world model in its own imaginative information processor, and then views the replica in its own Cartesian cognitive theater². That distinction between the Real world and its Ideal model in the mind has confounded scientists and philosophers for centuries. So, Pinter hopes to unify & clarify that dualistic confusion with his novel interpretation of physical seeing & metaphysical knowing.

The traditional opposing philosophical positions on the Mind vs Matter controversy are Idealism & Realism. But Pinter offers a sort of middle position that is similar in some ways to my own worldview of Enformationism³. His theory has a prominent role for Information, but places more emphasis on how the brain processes incoming bits of information into conceptual chunks that clump together as ideas with personal meaning. That composite way of knowing is called Holism⁴. But the author’s preferred term is Gestalt⁵, which emerged in 20th century Europe as a structural form of psychology. Without even thinking about it, the human brain creates wholes from parts, that we accept as snapshots of the real world. A century earlier though, Immanuel Kant (ding an sich) seemingly foresaw that our notion of Reality replaces the real bits of data with imaginary bytes of meaning that exist only in individual minds. We don’t actually see real things, but mental models of those things as they relate to Self, and as they fit into our memory of past experiences with the world outside the Self.

Pinter begins by noting that the categories by which we parse the world are projected onto the field of view, not detected out there in the world.  “Contrary to commonsense realism, the physical world has no pre-existing segmentation”. So, A> the Spaces separating things, and B> the Connections binding things together, and C>the Borders defining composite objects are drawn by the brain in order to make sense of random energy inputs. For example, when we look at the starry sky, we see only irregular arrays of dots of light. But the brain automatically searches for meaningful patterns, such as the Big Dipper, or Orion-the-hunter [click here for image]. The stars themselves are lightyears apart in various directions. Yet the brain recalls a template from memory and finds a similar pattern in the sky. By analogy, stored associations & inter-relationships are projected by the brain into the mind, and overlaid on a selected segment of the star-studded sky.

      Blog Post 131 continued  . . . . click Next             

4. Holism :
   Philosophically, a whole system is an integrated collection of parts (holons) that possesses properties not found in the parts. The some-thing extra is an Emergent quality that was latent (unmanifest) in the parts. For example, when atoms of hydrogen & oxygen gases combine in a specific ratio, the molecule has properties of water, such as wetness, that are not found in the gases. A Holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part — A system of entangled things that has a function in a hierarchy of systems.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

5. Gestalt Concepts:
  A theory of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns and simplify complex images when we perceive objects.
Note – it’s a similar concept to Holism.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/gestalt-principles

Entangled electrons form a holistic Yin/Yang pattern

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-visualizing-mysterious-quantum-entanglement-photons.html

Ding An Sich
“The ideal world consists of “things-in-themselves” (noumena), which do not exist in space and time and do not enter into causal relations.”
── Immanuel Kant