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

Akenaten receiving power from sun-god via light rays with little hands
of Blessing

 Post 55. October 22, 2018

    Let There Be . . . Information!

    The Divine Light of Evolution

 While reading an introduction to John Milton's Paradise Lost, I found some poetic notions that seem to be analogous to my own theory of Enformationism. That’s an alternative to the mainstream materialist interpretation of how the world began in the sudden appearance of everything from nothing, and how it subsequently flourished into the “endless forms most beautiful” as grandly described by Darwin1. More importantly, it provides a hypothetical explanation for the apparent purpose behind the seemingly aimless machinery of biology, that even the sober discoverer of that natural mechanism seemed to imagine as the breath or spirit of an implicit Demiurge :

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Mr. Darwin made no attempt to extend his theory beyond the era when single-cell organisms began to differentiate into multi-cell multi-function creatures. This avoided having to explain the beginning of Biology, when dead matter & aimless energy had mysteriously transformed into living beings. He simply took the precedents of that transition for granted. But my own theory2 aspires to go further back to the even more mysterious explosion of radiant-but-formless energy itself, and thence into the unreal realm of what existed before The Big Bang Beginning. For that venture I had to coin a neologism, EnFormAction3, to denote the generic creative power of natural evolution. It’s not merely a metaphor though, but a nutshell definition of how energy transforms raw potential into the "endless" variety of things in Darwin’s wonderful world. No need for “several powers” though, but a single force with almost infinite potential. I say “almost” because even the creative power of evolution is throttled & channeled by the natural laws that are inherent in a space-time universe.

Milton sometimes referred to his muse as "Light". "Was he thinking of the divine Light that sits with Sapience . . . Or simply that we are told "is God" . . . Or the light that Dante said in the Paradise . . . Is God's creative power as well as an aspect of his essence . . ." For my own poetic-theoretic purposes, I assume that G*D is infinite eternal Potential, and that the creation of our world in a cosmic out-burst was an actualization of that latent power. In my updated creation myth, abstract mathematical Information plays the role of the enforming force that eventuated in homo sapiens and scientists, who view that sapiential power via their artificial eyes. What they see as the foundation of reality is an invisible intangible "field" of insub-stantial substance, poetically called "virtual particles". So, our natural world is fundamentally "light" in the adjective sense.

In super-nature, though, G*D's essence is creative power, which until actualized is, in effect, the unformed potential of Greek Chaos. Milton wrote of the light of inspiration that revealed the scenario of Genesis to Moses :

That Shepherd, who first taught the Chosen Seed,

In the beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos.

Post 55 continued . . . click Next

John Milton, Paradise Lost
New Edition
Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes
1962
“I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men.”

1. On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin, 1859

2. Theory :
   A scientific theory must present hypothetical concepts in a form that can be tested empirically before being accepted as practical facts.
   Mine is not a scientific theory, but a philosophical hypothesis drawn from proven facts. Like the Multiverse hypothesis, it is evocative, but will always remain beyond the reach of empirical methods. Hence, yielding no practical facts, but philosophical fodder.
   In this opus, I hope to assert eternal Information and justify the ways of G*D to Science.

3. EnFormAction :
   An analysis of the common word “information”. “En” stands for energy, the physical power to cause change. “Form” refers to Platonic ideals that become real . And “Action” is the metaphysical power of transformation, equivalent to Phase Change in physics, whereby one kind of thing becomes a new kind of thing, with novel properties.
   That’s how creation via evolution works.

   NOTE :
   Technical terms and coinages are indicated in dark blue italic, and a click will open a page in the glossary with a brief definition : Enformationism.
   Direct quotes are shown in gray to distinguish them from my personal opinions.

   DEMIURGE
   Literally - an assistant worker, an underling.
   A being responsible for the creation of the universe, in particular.
   In Platonic philosophy, the Maker or Creator of the material world.
   In Gnosticism and other theological systems, a heavenly being, subordinate to the Supreme Being, that is considered to be the controller of the material world and antagonistic to all that is purely spiritual.

   INFORMATION
   Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". Difference is the cause  or agent of Change. In Physics it’s called Thermodynamics. In Sociology it’s called Conflict.

   VIRTUAL PARTICLES
   We can now say, with mathematical confidence, that the essence of all reality boils down to Quantum Fields of pure unformed Information, described by materialists as “virtual particles”. Those bits of stuff emerge first as photons of light, from which all of the endless forms of matter are descended.