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.

  Post 132.  March 10, 2024

  How Does the Brain Create Mind?

     Emergence of Metaphysical Mind from Physical Brain

Kastrup describes Panpsychism as “bizarre”, but it may be simply lacking some essential property to explain how we know that we know. Whereas real Matter alone has no active or causal powers, ethereal Psyche¹³ has no inherent connection to bodies & brains. So, Matter lacks Power, and Psyche lacks Form; but Enformationism combines both into a single causal & formative feature of Nature : EnFormAction. Furthermore, there is a novel scientific concept that may point to a surprising instrumental aspect of Nature. Neuro-anthropologist Terrence Deacon calls it the “Power of Absence”¹⁴. He attributes “causal efficacy” to constraints of nature similar to physical laws. These absentials¹⁵ ─ limitations or relationships ─ are not material things, but “non-material presences” that guide material trans-formations. That may sound spooky, but he gives physical examples, such as whirlpools. As a philosophical conjecture though, his metaphysical absences are the defining properties of Life & Mind²². Deacon says "being alive does not merely consist in being composed in a particular way. It consists in changing in a particular way". Therefore, what is lacking in both Materialism and Panpsychism is a plausible scientific explanation for the Downward Causation that allows Nature to produce emergent novelties & complexities within the constraints of evolution, and despite the devolution of Entropy.

Kastrup is not denying the existence of Matter, but merely noting its lack of causal or mental properties. Likewise, he says “don’t get me wrong : the panpsychist is going in the right direction . . . “ So he proposes an alternative to both of those incomplete theories. “In lieu of preserving physical properties alongside experiential states as fundamental aspects of nature, the way to go is to reduce the physical to the experiential”. But that would make Consciousness the prime element, which is the atoms-with-feelings concept that he criticized in this same chapter. That’s also why my thesis reduces both material stuff and mental experience to something even more basic : the power to transform general Potential¹⁶ into specific Actual. And that’s what I call EnFormAction, in order to combine Causation & Knowing & Doing into a single “fundamental aspect of nature”. Plato and Aristotle, in wrestling with the same essential questions, postulated several abstract entities : First Cause (creative agency), Logos (mind, reason), Prime Mover (energy, force), Form (design, structure), and Matter (that which receives Form). So, why not combine all those hypothetical primordial forces into one universal agency of causation?

Before Claude Shannon gave the word “information” a technical definition, it referred to the meaningful contents of a mind. In ancient Latin, it meant : the act of giving form to the formless. In French usage it meant, "act of informing, com-munication of news"¹⁷. In English, it came to mean “intelligence” of the sort that spies risked their lives for. In the 20th century, it became associated with digital computers, and later with Artificial Intelligence. And in the 21st century, Information has been scientifically equated with causal Energy¹⁸.    

        Blog Post 132 continued . . . click Next           

Emergence of Novelty within the entropic constraints of Evolution

13. Psyche :
   the soul, mind, spirit, or invisible animating entity which occupies the physical body.  

14. Power of Absence :
   “Important aspects of human cognition are considered in terms of patterning, which we claim represents a shift from focusing on what is present to what is absent. . . .
We make use of Deacon’s notion of absentials by which he understands the emergence of life and sentience from abiotic matter in his book Incomplete Nature.”
https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/3/4/26

15. Absentials :
   Function, information, meaning, reference, representation, agency, purpose, sentience and values are all absential phenomena with telos, purpose, and end-directedness.
https://somatosphere.com/2014/terrence-deacons-incomplete-nature.html/

16. Potential :
   Aristotle postulated that anything new that comes to exist in the real world must have pre-existed in ideal Potential form. Natural evolution has the power to create new species that never existed before. So the potential for emergent novelty has been inherent in Nature from the beginning.  

17. Information meaning
   From French, "to train, instruct, educate; shape, give form to". From Latin, "to shape, give form to, delineate".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/information

18. Information is Energy
   In 2019, physicist Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth proposed that information is equivalent to mass and energy.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/information-energy-mass-equivalence/
This book defines a dynamic concept of information that results in a conservation of information principle.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-40862-6