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 134.  June 16, 2024

  Synchrony : Chaos, Time, and Order

     How Order Emerges From Chaos

This book is about the phenomenon of Spontaneous Order, such as Synchrony¹ : stable interrelationships over time. Strogatz says, “the laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy”. Despite that general trend toward disorder, the universe has evolved specific pockets of structure : galaxies, solar systems, life-bearing planets, and organic creatures such as homo sapiens. We structure & order dependent humans wouldn’t be here if Entropy² ─ mechanical, negative, chaotic, structure destroying, thermodynamic determinism ─ was not offset by another, more positive force : ironically labeled Negentropy. My own term for that constructive tendency in nature is Enformy³.

Strogatz is a pragmatic mathematician, who studies such abstract phenomena as Non-linear Dynamics, of which holistic Synchrony is one of the most beautiful and baffling. For instance, he describes the simultaneous flashing of firefly “sparkles”, and the rhythmic beating of heart muscles. The key element in both  cases is “coupled oscillators” : individuals that switch on & off at the same time as-if conducted by a baton-weilding orchestral director. He seeks to understand how such instantaneous cooperation works, in hopes of producing useful applications for human purposes. One potentially life-saving implementation would be to stabilize cardiac arrhythmia by restoring the synchrony of heart fibers. But, who or what is the mysterious maestro harmonizing the disparate parts?

In complex physical systems, thermodynamic Entropy, unless counteracted by Enformy, will cause any Order to devolve into Chaos. "These, then, are the defining features of chaos : erratic, seemingly random behavior in an otherwise deterministic system ; predictability in the short run, because of deterministic laws ; and unpredictability in the long run, because of the butterfly effect." Since human life is innately dependent on continuing order & structure, thermo-dynamic Chaos is like a descent into Hell. Which is why understanding the law-like cause of Order is so important. Like Life, synchrony is the behavior of systems in which the parts work together for the good of all. One name for that cooperative synthesising behavior is Holism⁴.

Holistic systems are integrated, cooperative, and have collective properties that are not found in their elements. The “more than” feature, in the case of synchrony, is often labeled as Novelty, Surprise, and Creativity. Which can be summed up as Spontaneous Order⁵ or Self-Organization. Ironically, according to the author,  “Chaos is the essence of Holism”. He also says, “chaos is not formless . . . . Chaos has an essence, a quality that never changes”. Mathematically, that essence is expressed as non-linearity, in the sense that the output (Y) is more than the input (X). Which may explain why a holistic system is both creative and unpredictable. Those novel features are philosophically labeled as Emergent⁶.

1. Synchrony :
   This phenomenon occurs when multiple entities march to the beat of a single drum. Strogatz’s book is about the search for that mysterious drummer : the unseen organizer or director.

2. Entropy :
   In the science of thermo-dynamics, it’s the lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

3. Enformy :
   In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypo-thetical, holistic, meta-physical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress & order & organ-ization.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

4. Holism :
   The theory that parts of a whole are in intimate inter-connection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts.
   Oxford Dictionary

5. Spontaneous Order :
   Also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. ___Wikipedia

6. Emergence :
  A term used to designate an apparently discontinuous transition from one mode of causal properties to another of a higher rank, typically associated with an increase in scale in which lower-order component interactions contribute to the lower-order interactions. The term has a long and diverse history, but throughout this history it has been used to describe the way that living and mental processes depend upon chemical and physical processes, yet exhibit collective properties exhibited by living and non-mental processes, and in many cases appear to violate the ubiquitous tendencies exhibited by these component interactions.
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/deacon/

The Mathematical Butterfly Effect

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For video of synchronous
swarms of
fireflies