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

   Post 114.  February 16, 2021

  Introduction to Enformationism

    Consilience of Science & Philosophy & Religion

 Materialism has been the dominant theory of Reality since the birth of modern science during the Enlightenment and Renaissance eras of European history. But as a philosophical doctrine, it has ancient roots. The 600BC Greek philosopher, Democritus, speculated that the universe was made of tiny objects, so small that they couldn't get any smaller. That's why he called them “A-toms”, meaning un-cuttable. But other philosophers had different ideas, even though they had little or no empirical evidence. Plato in 500BC — based on reasoning alone — concluded that the essential element of Reality was actually ideas, which he called “Forms”16. He sometimes spoke of the Realm of Forms as an actual place, “a pristine region of the physical universe located above the surface of the Earth . . .  In the Phaedrus the Forms are in a ‘place beyond heaven’ “. Later philosophers developed that vague notion into the more specific concept of Idealism, and located those “ideas” about real things in the Mind of G*D. So, this thesis loosely adopts Berkeley’s theory of Idealism, but replaces his Christian God, with the more generic concept of an unknowable First Cause. However, it rejects any mystical & magical interpretations in favor of realistic & practical applications.

The Enformationism thesis accepts the pragmatic scientific aspects of Materialism and Reductionism, along with the philosophically plausible features of Spiritualism (archaic notion of Energy) and Holism. The result of that strange amalgamation of historical paradigms, is a worldview for the 21st century. It blends Physics with Meta-Physics, Realism with Idealism17, Materialism with Spiritualism, Atomism with Holism, Yin with Yang, East with West, Quanta with Qualia, and Reason with Emotion, into a zesty stew of philosophical oppositions. In science and history, Consilience18 (also convergence or con-cordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from indepen-dent, unrelated sources can "converge" on comprehensive & unified conclusions. In this case, the astonishing conclusion is that everything in this universe, from matter to mind, is a form of Generic Information (Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility : the Platonic Forms).

Many of the information-theoretic areas of study are still in the hypothetical & non-empirical — hence, philosophical — stage of science. But I predict that, by the end of the 21st century, they will be considered established fields with practical applications. Science evolves, new paradigms emerge, and old fields of study fragment into sub-fields. But I believe that Information Science (the arithmetic of reality) promises to re-unite all fields of human understanding: Philosophy, Religion, and Science.

So, this essay is merely an introductory overview of the on-going Enformationism project. In the interest of brevity, many theoretical and empirical gaps have been bridged by the facile assumption that you will know what I’m obliquely referring to. If that is not the case, then you’re in luck. The Website and Blog continue to develop the basic notion of EnFormAction into a more complete understanding of the ubiquity of Information in the Real world of matter, and the Ideal world of mind. 

                                  End of Post 114

    Enformationism Website :     http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html

    BothAnd Blog :  http://bothandblog.enformationism.info/

16. Platonic Forms :
    “According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms", are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

17. Quantum Surreality :
    Quantum theory has proven that the foundation of our Real world is innately
surrealistic : having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream; unreal; fantastic, bizarre. The Enformationism thesis attempts to show how we can make sense of such non-sense, by understanding the shape-shifting nature of fundamental Information.
http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page7.html

18. Consilience :
    Agreement between the approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities. Or, as biologist E. O. Wilson labled it, in his 1999 book : The Unity of Knowledge.

Consilience
of
Yin & Yang

Enformationism

Website

GNOMON
Retired Architect & Amateur Philosopher

“A philosophical worldview  grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe.”

Consilience
Diedre Adams
Artist