Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Post 38. 06/01/2018 continued  . . .

Enlightenment Now again!

Are We Progressing or Back-sliding?

   One prominent sign of human moral progress is the expansion of the “circle of sympathy” beyond family, tribe, and state, to encompass all of humanity, and of the world in general. This is the goal of philosophical Humanism, “which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.” Before the Enlightenment focus on individuals, the unit of value as a rational moral agent, people typically thought of strangers in simplistic binary categories : self/other, family/outsider, us/them, friend/enemy, tribe/alien, Jew/Gentile. This is the point of Robert Wright's book, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny.  His basic idea is to replace the competitive win-lose strategy for surviving in the social & natural environment with a friendlier win-win cooperative game-plan. Whereas win-lose  1 minus 1 equals 0; win-win  1 plus 1 yeilds 2; and that's what we call progress.

However, Pinker warns that “the Enlightenment belief in progress should not be confused with the 19th century Romantic belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward Utopia.” While I agree that those metaphors for historical progress may be misconstrued, the Enformationism thesis recognizes and affirms that positive evolutionary progress predated humanity by billions of years. It proposes a hypothetical constructive counter-force to the destructive influence of Entropy. Pinker concedes that evolution is progressive, but is uncomfortable with any kind of supernatural causation. And, except for the First Cause that pre-dated the birth of Nature, I concur.

So I'm not proposing a mystical force, but merely labeling the observed pattern of progression in Evolution, which literally means “unfolding” or “revealing” as in the unrolling of a pre-written scroll. Another term for such a sign of positive historical development is Dialectic, which Hegel envisioned as a spiritual force : "world history is thus the unfolding of Spirit in time, as nature is the unfolding of the Idea in space." To avoid confusion with traditional religious notions of pre-destination though, I prefer to use the my own neologism, Enformy , as a more scientific description of what scientists lamely refer to as “neg-entropy”. It's more than just Energy though, its an organizing & enforming tendency within the disorganizing & deforming trend defined by the Second Law of Thermodynamics2. For more on that, see EnFormAction in the Glossary.

The bottom line of Pinker's book is that we don't need to go back the golden age of 17th century Enlightenment, but to look forward to 21st century Re-enlightenment. In chapter 2, Entro, Evo, Info, he reviews the basics of physical evolution, with its chief characteristic being the dissipating trend of Entropy, which indicates that the Big Bang will eventually end with a Soft Hiiissssh, like a deflated balloon, as everything is reduced to a temperature of absolute zero. By contrast to that realistic/ pessimistic outlook, the Enformationism thesis postulates a positive “force” of Enformy, which allows evolution to create pockets of order within the general trend toward disorder. This changes the destiny of the universe from bleak to bright, at least in the short term3.

Post 38 continued . . . click Next

2. Fatalistic Thermodynamics vs Purposeful Programming
“Why the awe for the Second Law? From an Olympian vantage point, it defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving”. __SP
   But humans didn’t pass the law of Entropy or of Enformy. So where did those opposing forces come from? Which makes more sense, random accident or intentional design? Of course, given a zillion years, anything could happen. But the only years we know anything about are those of our little bubble of space-time.

3. Omega Point :
The universe seems to be just about in the middle of its life-span, as defined by Big Bang theory. And it has just recently produced sentient beings. So can we expect something like Ray Kurtzweil’s Singularlity to reverse the downward spiral of Entropy? Could the advent of intelligence, which has spawned Artificial Intelligence, change the ultimate fate of the universe from deflation to divinity? Stay tuned.
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
•https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

The moral
myth of Sysiphus :
are we progressing
or
simply repeating
past mistakes?