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 138.October 7, 2024
Holism and Evolution
Orderly Cosmic Transformation
General Jan C. Smuts was the George Washington (military leader), the Thomas Jefferson (philosopher), and the Benjamin Franklin (scientist) of his nascent nation, South Africa. Like the United States, it was an exploited European colony in a less developed land. And, like Washington, he fought against the colonial power to establish a sovereign nation with home rule. Due to his character and leadership, he served as its first Prime Minister. Also, because of his gentlemanly temperament and skill in peaceful statesmanship, the former rebel was received in Europe as a welcomed ambassador. Although his home country was in chaos for most of his life, and he was in great demand as a political leader and public intellectual, he found time to write a seminal book that has influenced both science and philosophy to this day.
Ironically, Smuts was educated at Cambridge in England, the colonial power, and specialized in the the still maturing science of Darwinian Evolution. Yet the “hot” science of his day was what he called : The New Physics¹. In the early 20th century, sub-atomic-scale science was then shaking the foundations of Isaac Newton’s 17th century classical mechanics with statistical uncertainty, instead of mechanical determinism. Consequently, Smuts’ innovation was to combine biological evolution with quantum physics into a science of Complex phenomena and their interactiveSystemsof organization. His first chapter ex-plained why he saw the need for a “reform of fundamental concepts”, especially of Matter & Causation & Method. For example, he said “If indeed there were no common basis to matter, life, and mind, their union in the human individual would be the greatest mystery of all”. That insight is also the reason for my own philosophical thesis of Enformationism². Claude Shannon’s new science of Information — adapted for telephone and computer applications — was emerging around the time this book was being written. But Smuts didn’t make the information connection, for Biology and Physics, with his own notion of Holism. Yet his presentation of the implications of the New Physics opened the door for development of 21st century fields of Systems Theory and Complexity Science³.
Unfortunately, Holism is still controversial in Philosophy. That is primarily due to the practical and commercial success of reductive methods in the physical sciences. Methodological Reductionism attempts to understand a complex system by breaking it down into its component parts. And that approach works well for mechanical devices, but not so well for living things. For example, dissecting a frog will never locate the essence of frogginess : what makes a living frog a successful organism in both air & water. If you disassemble a mechanism, like a watch, into a pile of gears & springs, it can then be re-assembled into a functional time-tracking device. Yet a living organism, when disassembled, loses the very essence that animates it. Likewise, a human brain can be reduced to a tangle of neurons, but like Humpty Dumpty, you can’t put them back together again into a thinking thing.
1. The New Physics : “The advent of holism in the 20th century coincided with the gradual develop-ment of quantum mech-anics. Holism in physics is the nonseparability of physical systems from their parts, especially quantum phenomena. Classical physics cannot be regarded as holistic, as the behavior of individual parts represents the whole.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism
2. Enformationism : Postulates that causal & & vital & meaningful Inform-ation is the common basis for Matter, Life, and Mind. It is not just data in digital computers, but meaning in analog minds, and the Elan Vital of physical & biological evolution. https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
3. What is complex systems science? : “Complex phenomena are hidden, beyond masking by space and time, through nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence”. https://www.santafe.edu/what-is-complex-systems-science
4. Transformed Materiality : “I am amazed at how he provides a platform and context not only for the implications of the new physics emerging today, but also for the myopia that still tends to blind the conventional 'scientific method'. We seem so close to a potential synthesis of physics and philosophy into a new and truly generative metaphysics that it feels almost palpable”. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unpacking-holism-evolution-smuts-gets-grips-nature-van-wyk
A whole system has collective properties not found in isolated components
Blog Post 138 continued . . . click Next
Holism and Evolution
The Synthetic Tendency in the Universe
Jan C. Smuts
Biologist, Statesman
and Philosopher
“The acceptance of Evolution as a fact . . . Must mean a complete revolution of our idea of matter”
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General Jan C. Smuts was the George Washington (military leader), the Thomas Jefferson (philosopher), and the Benjamin Franklin (scientist) of his nascent nation, South Africa. Like the United States, it was an exploited European colony in a less developed land. And, like Washington, he fought against the colonial power to establish a sovereign nation with home rule. Due to his character and leadership, he served as its first Prime Minister. Also, because of his gentlemanly temperament and skill in peaceful statesmanship, the former rebel was received in Europe as a welcomed ambassador. Although his home country was in chaos for most of his life, and he was in great demand as a political leader and public intellectual, he found time to write a seminal book that has influenced both science and philosophy to this day. 
