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 136.August 5, 2024
Holism and Creative Evolution
Transformation & EnFormAction
Bergson was criticized for using an archaic term, Elan Vital, to describe the natural force or tendency that distinguishes Mechanical/Materialist cause & effect from Creative/Ethereal transformation that is capable of producing such immaterial side-effects as Life and Mind. Some critics interpreted that Elan as a divine Spirit/Soul. But Berson was grasping for a term that would sound more philosophical than religious. A few decades later Jan Smuts coined the term Holism to describe the same intangible something that guides generic Causation (energy) toward Complexity and Integration, and away from Division and Disintegration. But even that novel word became asso-ciated with the ancient Chi/Prana/Spirit of New Age non-western religions. And, in fact all of those spooky terms are referring to an immaterial guiding influence on the flow of causation. Yet, both Bergson and Smuts were attempting to avoid that divine implication in favor of a natural self-organizing process. Ironically, it’s difficult even for secular scientists to elude the logical inference of an ultimate power, or First Cause, acting in the space-time universe.
Bergson also expresses his notion of Creative Evolution in terms of sequential transformations that biologists refer to as “descent with modification” in the doctrine of Darwinism.
“It does not enter into our plan to set down here the proofs of transformism¹⁶. We wish only to explain in a word or two why we shall accept it, in the present work, as a sufficiently exact and precise expression of the facts actually known. The idea of transformism is already in germ in the natural classification of organized beings.” In Physics all changes of Form are caused by exchanges of Energy. But in Biology some of those trans-formations are what we call Life and Mind. And the mystery of how animated & ideated matter could evolve from the explosive energy of the Big Bang has not yet been solved. Yet Bergson saw the necessity for something like a Life Force. And Smuts inferred that the transformation of parts into wholes (Holism) was the difference between Mechanical Darwinian evolution and the Creative evolution of Bergson.
My own nascent contribution to dispelling the mystery of Life is to note what physicists have learned in the last century¹⁷ : that physical Energy is merely one form of generic Information, that I labelled EnFormAction.¹⁸ Which suggests a way to model the information processing universe as a Cosmic Computer. Yet, both Bergson and Smuts were writing during the evolutionary transformation of Classical Physics into what Smuts called the New Physics. But another novel way of thinking about the world was emerging, in the advent of transformative Information Theory and electronic Computers. Now, a century later, we can look back and see the fetal stages of the 21st century in those early conceptual & mathematical innovations in Science and Philosophy. My own name for that novel perspective on Cosmology is the amateur thesis of Enformationism.¹⁹ Which is currently evolving in this blog.
16. Transformism : The Transmutation of species and transformism are 18th and early 19th-century ideas about the change of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. ___ Wikipedia
17. Energy is Information : Both information and energy only exist as potential energy in theory. Everything we can see is only because of because of changing energy states and consequently the change of information describing before and after states. The universe can described as a computer or changing energy states. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/92921/is-information-a-potential-or-kinetic-kind-of-energy
18. EnFormAction : Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force (aka : Divine Will) of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change. https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
19. 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 ancient Materialism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Transformation and Enformaction
End of Blog Post 136
The Evolution of Life
Mechanism and Teleology
Henri Bergson
French Biologist 1911
“The universe... is a machine for the making of gods. ”
“And hence, an evolution somewhere would still have to be supposed, whether in a creative Thought in which the ideas of the different species are regenerated by each other exactly as transformism holds that species themselves are generated on the earth; or in a plan of vital organization immanent in nature, which gradually works itself out, in which the relations of logical and chronological affiliation between pure forms are just those which transformism presents.”
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