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.

19. Idealism :
   A metaphysical philo-sophical worldview which assumes that reality is fundamentally mental. One version says that our world is merely an idea in the mind of God.

20. Cosmopsychism :
   Phillip Goff quote –
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life

21. Universal Mind :
   Kastrup imagines the World Mind as-if a single consciousness with “multiple personality disorder”.
   “He regards reality as the image of a hierarchical structure of mental processes, an evolving ecosystem of minds”.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-hierarchical-structure-of-the-universal-mind/reading/

22. Laws of Life & Mind :
   “According to Deacon, the defining property of every living or psychic system is that its causes are conspicuously absent from the system in which they participate. They are causes not present in the material system itself, even though they produce effects in that system”.
https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/05/23/reading-incomplete-nature-by-terrence-deacon/

  Post 132.  March 10, 2024

  How Does the Brain Create Mind?

     Cosmopsychism : universal mind embodied in matter

Kastrup’s alternative to ancient Materialism & Panpsychism is similar to the equally antiquated worldview of Idealism¹⁹. His updated version of the all-is-mind concept is labeled Analytic Idealism, which some have renamed Cosmopsychism.²⁰ I sup-pose the “analytic” addendum is intended to make it sound more scientific than Plato’s un-grounded conjectures and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In his book, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, Kastrup says, “While being a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and even reductionist view, Analytic Idealism flips our culture-bound intuitions on their head, revealing that only through understanding our own inner nature can we understand the nature of the world”. It postulates a Universal Mind²¹, which somehow takes on multiple local perspectives. That may sound like a traditional deity, but he prefers to refer to the un-seen Great Mind²³ by a variety of non-religious labels. He also has novel terminology for mini-minds, like you and me, which he calls Alters, as in “Alter Ego”. Philosopher Phillip Goff said that Cosmopsychism “provides a robust explanatory model for how the Universe became fine-tuned for life”.²⁰ Like Enformation-ism, it’s logically “robust” except for the first leap of faith to something like a First Cause that became a Cosmos.

I have a few quibbles about terminology. Analytic Idealism sounds like a scientific concept, that reduces reality down to a primordial atom of sentience. But, I prefer Holistic Idealism, to indicate that reality-as-a-totality is an integrated system of proto-consciousness (information), which is more like causal energy than sentient atoms. A related term could be Objective Idealism, which seems to presume that Consciousness is inherent in the separate parts, rather than the whole system. As an alternative, perhaps Subjective Idealism would portray Consciousness as an emergent quality of integrated systems. Transpersonal Mind sounds like a Cosmic Self, equivalent to an all-knowing god. But Potential Mind could be construed as an impersonal universal power to cause and to become, including eventual emergence of local minds. Maybe each term conveys only part of the complete “nature” of the putative First Cause of our natural world.

I won’t delve into his mind-first worldview any deeper. But he seems to have reached a philosophical conclusion similar to my own, primarily based upon the non-classical features of 20th century Quantum science. As have I, he is forced to address criticisms of his mind-first metaphysics as anti-scientific “woo”. But both of our views, are essentially philosophical conjectures derived from certain interpretations of mainstream science. So they are not contrary to Science per se, only to the deter-ministic mechanics of 17th century Newtonian physics, that were undermined by probabilistic quantum physics centuries later. Anyway, all of the noted -isms mentioned in this post are meta-physical speculations, and not intended to be used for the practical purposes of empirical science. Therefore, they can only be critiqued for their logical consistency, not their adherence to the currently dominant metaphysics of Western civilization.  

                  End of Blog Post 132           

 Evolution of Consciousness

Click for pic

Click for pic

23. Kastrup’s God :
   His Cosmic Mind is not viewed as a traditional god, but more as a force of Nature. “Bernardo Kastrup also tells Michael Egnor that he does not think God is self-reflective. That, he thinks, is a unique job for humans.”
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-cosmopsychist-talks-about-the-universe-god-and-free-will/