Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Pragmatic Truth Practical Philosophy
Post 28.04/10/2018
Enformation & EnFormAction
Review of Philosophy That Worksby David M. Wolf
I was attracted to this book when I saw the unique term “enformation” in a review of it. That sounded like it might be related to my own made-up word : EnFormAction. I coined it as a way to summarize the basic concept of my personal philosophical worldview : Enformationism, which assumes that everything in the world is composed, not just of matter & energy, but of even more fundamental Mathematical Information (ratios, ideas). That universal “substance”, to use Spinoza's term, is imagined to be something like God's Will, combining creative power with rational intention.
I must hasten to add that my concept of G*D is unlike the anthro-morphic deities of most religions, and more like the abstract Brahman of Hindu philosophy. My still-emerging worldview is based on the assumption that the Big Bang was not an accident, but a deliberate act of creation, of “enformation”. The G*D of my theory serves the same purpose as Wolf's "Absolute Truth" or "Absolute Good", the perfect ideal of which everything in reality is a mere shadow.
As a corollary of my Enformationism thesis, I have developed another coinage to summarize the central problem with our imperfect world, and its relative truths : duality1. The binary nature of our physical universe is reflected in our psychological categories & attitudes. So, to balance the polarizing Either/Or approach of most religions, and even of reductive analytical Science, the BothAnd principle is a unifying holistic notion, similar to Wolf's "Fuzzy Logic"2 version of truth, covering the whole range of the "Excluded Middle"3. Together with conventional physics, these metaphysical concepts cover both the Quanta and Qualia of the real world.
As indicated by the title, the focus of the book is to find a way to make philosophy, and deep wisdom, more relevant in our breezy superficial modern society. Wolf concluded that postmodern attitudes toward Truth, as a disposable social construct, had caused the term to lose its traditional symbolic power as an ideal for humans to reach for. The result is insipid Moral Relativism, in which "true" & "good" are completely subjective, with no basis in objective reality, and no way to discriminate between my truth and your falsehood. So he proposes a more rational approach to truth, and to values in general. It's a statistical evaluation system called "fuzzy logic", along with what he calls an "informative power" scale that ranges from more-to-less true or meaningful, and more-to-less good or useful.
Later in the book, Wolf gets even more down-to-Earth, de-scribing the concept of Informative Power in terms of Physics, and by coining the word "enformation" as a dynamic verb form of the noun "information", which is merely static data. He defines his neologism as "patterns that energy forms of itself". Which is equivalent to my own coinage of EnFormAction, the creative power of evolution, and the act of en-forming. He says that "energy is our way of defining 'enformation'". The meaning of information is in its structure, its pattern. Yet, in physics, energy can be both con-structive & de-structive, and the result of disorganization is called "entropy". So, I had to come up with another new term for the mysterious positive "force" that opposes Entropy: Enformy4.
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Quantum theory is relativistic & probabilistic, whereas Newton's theories were absolute & predictable. Newton's worldview was on the macro scale of the naked eye, assisted by weak technologies. QT goes beyond the limitations of human senses, into the micro and cosmic scales of reality. There, we see intimations of ultimate reality, but only via mentally constructed models (theories).
Observing a quantum system requires acting upon it, which triggers a reaction. Hence, observation is inter-action, a new relationship. Quantum systems interact with each other randomly, hence the total system is neutralized, canceled out, for the moment. But human probes come from outside the system in question. So the observation is intentional, and the reaction is meaningful.
1. Duality v Non-duality : Physical Reality is inherently polarized into opposing forces : positive vs negative or good vs evil. But some spiritual traditions seek an ideal state of unity & peace, called Non-duality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondualism
2. Fuzzy Logic : Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
3. Excluded Middle : A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, false binary, black-and-white thinking, the either–or fallacy,
4. Enformy : In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend, opposite to that of Entropy & Randomness, to produce Complexity & Progress. It is the mysterious tendency for aimless energy to occasionally create the stable, but temporary, patterns we call Matter, Life, and MInd.
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