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

Post 37. 05/25/2018 continued  . . .

Another Theory of Everything

Reality is a Language

When he says that “reality is self-contained . . . its size and duration are undefined, and it cannot expand in an external sense : it has nothing to expand into, and nothing to expand during.”, that sounds like a description of what I call Enfernity. But in my vocabulary, that eternal-infinite state is undefined by space & time, so it is not what we normally call “reality”. I find Langan's extension of reality beyond the Big Bang confusing, and would prefer to substitute “Ideality”, in keeping with the language of Enformation.

In another confusing use of abstruse terminology, he says “Conspansion alternates between two phases : a generative phase in which events produce new possibilities, and a selective phase in which possibilities collapse into new events.” He could have said, in more conventional terms, that Evolution is a process in which random collisions (or mutations) produce lots of new forms, and Natural Selection sorts out which possibilities become actualities. But I agree that this is how the mechanism of EnFormAction works to generate progressive changes over long spans of time.   

The CTMU theory is based on the concept of a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language (SCSPL) envisioned as the meta-mathematical structure of the physical universe. The language has “syntactic operators”, which sounds to me like computer code, with basic functions like IF – THEN. Which is also how I envision EnFormAction working to create a realistic world from simple data. Langan goes on to propose that human Cognition “is just the specific form of information processing that occurs in a mind.” And that's exactly how I see it. Both the physical Brain and the metaphysical Mind are constructs of the same generic Information. No need to add a spiritual Soul, as an afterthought, in order to produce awareness & cognition in a meat brain. The potential for Matter & Mind was included in the original Singularity code of the Big Bang.

The Cognitive Theoretic model seems to imply an updated form of ancient Panpsychism, in which every part of the universe possesses some level of "Consciousness" or "Cognitive" aspects. But, I find those humanistic terms confusing due to the connotation that atoms & rocks are thinking. Instead, I prefer to use the more generic term "Information", which is like Energy, in that it can take a variety of forms : Fields, Forces, Matter, Life, Mind. To his credit, Langan does postulate “levels of cognition” : “rocks are cognitive in the generalized sense – their molecules interact, thereby processing information – but they do not possess independent volition or any intrinsic ability to optimize their environment.” In other words, molecules exchange information in the form of Energy, not Ideas.

Post 37 continued . . . click Next

Telic Recursion

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