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 138.  October 7, 2024

  Holism and Evolution

     Fields of Relativity

The triumphant 19th century methods of optical Magni-fication & cognitive Reduction also seem to be of diminishing utility, not just in Biology and Psychology⁵, but also on the elemental scale of Physics & Chemistry. The early quantum physicists were surprised to discover that there were limits to how far Nature can be dissected. In their search for the Holy Grail of irreducible simplicity ─ the uncuttable philosophical Atom ─ they first discovered corpuscles that we now know as Molecules, which can exist in seven states, and collectively comprise the Elements of the Periodic Table. Then they hope-fully labeled the even smaller portions of those elements as the ultimate “atom”. Yet, further slicing & dicing revealed that even Atoms can be reduced into complex systems resembling a solar system, with electrons orbiting a compound nucleus. Over the 20th century, they zoomed even further into that system, and found a plethora of sub-atomic particles that give each “atom” its chemical properties. Alas, in the 21st century, the science of Quantum Physics has reluctantly concluded that there is no material Atom at the foundation of reality. Instead, they now define the sub-sub-atomic Fields of interrelationships⁶ ─ i.e. gravity, electro-magnetism, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force ─ as the fundamental elements of reality.  The most inclusive of those fields is defined mathematically and hypothetically in the Universal Field Theory⁷.

But there’s no there there. No solid matter can be found in the ultimate foundations of the world. The “points” constituting the field are defined mathematically, not materially. So, the field is nothing but abstract statistical relationships in space-time. Even more strangely, the so-called subatomic “particles” of matter can be “entangled” into a state of “nonseparability”⁶ that is essentially equivalent to what Smuts called “Holism”. Which on the cosmic scale of Physics is simply a natural tendency, like Gravity, toward clumping together of bodies, such as stars into galaxies, and opposing the Big Bang expan-sion of matter that would quickly tear the nascent universe apart. At the smallest scale, Holism can be seen in Quantum Entanglement that binds groups of subatomic particles into statistical relationships so that they act as one entity, even when separated spatially. Therefore, what physicists call “gravity” and “entanglement” are the material effects of that holistic tendency in the material world.

But Smuts was more interested in the “synthetic, ordering, organizing, and regulative activity” of biological Evolution and psychological Minds. Biological systems are known as living organisms or animated matter. And Psychological systems are what we call minds or consciousness. These immaterial states or conditions or functions are not susceptible to the reductive methods of empirical science. So Smuts proposed a more inclusive approach, for which there was no common word in English. Therefore, he coined a term from the Latin root “holos” meaning whole, and the suffix “-ism” meaning doctrine or principle. He did not intend to replace Darwin’s theory, but merely to extend it, and to enhance our understanding of how the whole world works. Darwin himself wrote about cognitive evolution, and insisted that the human mind evolved just like all other aspects of the body by means of the four principles of variation, inheritance, selection, and time. To those processes, Smuts added Synthesis.

5. Reductionism in    Biology and Psychology
   “Methodological reductionism has served biology well, but its problems in the study of behaviour include turning open systems into closed ones, defining the units of analysis, and interpreting correlative and causal relationships between processes studied within different biological dis-courses, from molecular biology to psychology The problems become more acute when methodological becomes philosophical reductionism, with its declared goal of collapsing 'higher level' explanations into 'lower level' ones.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9653723/

6. Quantum Holism :
  “It has sometimes been suggested that quantum phenomena exhibit a characteristic holism or nonseparability, and that this distinguishes quantum from classical physics.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-holism/

7. Unified Field Theory :
   “The idea of a "field" originated from Faraday. It just meant, like a field of wheat has wheat growing at every point, that at every point in space there was some invisible influence causing electricity or magnetism.  . . . After Einstein came up with his theory of gravity, the General Theory of Relativity, he made his next step the creation of what he called the "Unified Field Theory", meaning at the time, unifying electromagnetism with gravity. . . . What does it mean to "unify" different forces? It means to see them as aspects of the same thing. You have a single structure or symmetry in nature and when you view it in pieces it explains the separate forces”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmology/comments/olygnp/unified_field_theory_confusion/

 Note : What is the “same thing” underlying all quantum fields? Obviously it’s not a material thing. So is it Mathematical or Spiritual? In Holism, it’s a causal property or subjective qualia.

In the quantum field every point is related to every other point

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