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

Concentration
Organization
ENFORMY
within
Dissipation
Disorder
ENTROPY

 Post 52. September 30, 2018 continued . . .

    Origin of Everything

   Dissipation and Direction

6. “I consider this theory agnostic on questions of spirituality.”
   The theory of Dissipation-Driven Adaptive Organization3 says that there is a First Principle (laws of Thermodynamics) that defines the inner workings of our world system. Which implies that there must be a First Cause (lawgiver) to define the existence of our world. Beyond that simple inference, the theory cannot go outside the physical system to describe the meta-physical Creator. But we can expand on what we know to logically conclude that a creator G*D must be superior to (not subject to) the physical laws of the creation, hence is literally Super-Natural. An ancient metaphor for that invisible-intangible kind of existence was “wind or breath”, i.e. Spirit, Soul or Ghost. But I think a more appropriate term for our technological era is "Information"4, in the sense of mind-stuff. All we can know about the conjectured Creator is that it must have possessed the latent potential5 for everything that has emerged from the evolution of the real world : matter, energy, life, mind, curiosity. Otherwise we wouldn't be here to speculate on divine personality traits. Hence, even though we must remain agnostic about the "nature" of G*D, we can still confidently assert the necessary existence of the ultimate Source of Nature.

7. “ the entire operating system of the cosmos could be summed up by a single overriding command : spread energy!”

   Actually the Algorithm of Creation would be better summar-ized as “enform energy”. The Big Bang converted concentrated static potential into dynamic expanding & evolving energy. But as time goes by, some of that otherwise wasted dissipated power is transformed into functional pockets of order. Perhaps the program for creation says something like : 1. spread  the creative potential (energy), 2. condense parts of it (matter), 3. accumulate mass (structures), 4. rinse to remove weak (unfit) structures, then repeat over & over until the whole universe is organized into an image of the Programmer.

8. “Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces to dissipate energy.”
   Why would a physical system need to both concentrate and dissipate energy? I think it's like a thermostat designed to maintain a moderate energy state that sustains   biological organisms. In other words, the laws of thermodynamics were preset to keep the cosmos warm enough for reproduction but not so hot it cooks the life out of the system. Kirsch’s atheist statement sounds anthro-morphic to me.

9. “Humans are evolving into something different.”

   Imperfect Sapiens may be a step in the direction of perfection : Omega Point, Second Singularity, etc. Evolution in full cycle might return to its origin in the storage battery (potential) of Chaos, the infinite creative resource of G*D. I don’t claim to know for sure.

10. “The Seventh Kingdom . . . Technium.”
   Kevin Kelly, WIRED magazine : “Technology as a whole system . . . seems to be a dominant force in the culture . . . a child of humanity.” Human culture is embodied in technology. It is how we take control of natural Evolution. Technium is artificial evolution6.

Post 52 continued . . . click Next

3. Dissipation-Driven Adaptive Organization
A new theory in Physics “that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties”.
www.quantamagazine .

4. Information :
Technically, Information, since Claude Shannon’s quantification, is a mathe-matical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). But meta-phorically, meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of Mathematics, having effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know of its ideal existence only by its effects in the real world.

5. Chaos
    as Latent Potential :
“Eternity” & “Infinity”, as all-encompassing universals and generalities, are obviously ideal & unreal concepts. But we find them useful for logical reasoning because they must exist, in some sense, in order for the real & actual things to exist. That logical “sense” can be defined as Latent Potential, in that it is unmanifest creative power. The actual manifest form of that dormant energy is what I call EnFormAction.

6. Technium :
Cultural technological evolution (physics + mind) as an extension of natural physical evolution.
  Technium

21st Century “Spirit”
Metaphorically, Information exists in the limbo-land of Mathematics, having effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know of its ideal existence only by it's real effects. Thus, it's analogous to the ancient notion of "Spirit".

The Technium :
Kevin Kelly: “We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world, the amount of possibilities. And that’s sort of what technology is doing over time. That’s its role, is to increase the variety, the diversity, the options, and the possibilities that we have so that anybody who is born would be able to surprise God. And so I think that’s what it is — it’s a way of generating surprises. And that’s the spiritual dimension of technology. It makes that much more likely.” [my bold]

• Human creation “As-If”

• The universe is a question