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Post 24. March 12, 2018 continued . . .
Re-Enlightenment
Post-postmodernism & beyond
His conspiracy-theory critics reject Pinker's olive branches though, perhaps suspicious of a pretense for an underhanded power-grab by the godless potentates of Reason. They may remember that the original science-minded Enlightenment also inspired a variety of religious & political experiments to replace the entrenched Catholic and Feudal systems of the Medieval era. Deism, for example, was intended to bring peace to a world that had suffered through one religion-motivated war after another : Catholics vs Catholics, Catholics vs Muslims, Catholics vs Protestants. “In any case, many of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers were not atheists, but deists and believers of one sort or another, who nevertheless held that quarrelling religions and their mutually exclusive doctrines and edicts should play no part in determining human ethics or governance.” Unfortunately, religious in-fighting continues to this day. So the peace-making that began with Deism, must continue with Neo-Deism.
Ironically, despite his devotion to the atheistic theory of undirected evolution, Pinker has inadvertently revealed a thread of teleology throughout history, which implies some directional force of intention to offset the aimless meanderings of physical randomness. “The Enlightenment belief in progress,” Pinker cautions at one point, “should not be confused with the 19th Century belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward utopia.” Personally, I do see signs of cosmic intentions in the progression of evolution despite the resistance of Entropy. That positive tendency is called Teleonomy4. In the Enformationism thesis, I call that directional force Enformy5. And, who knows, it may also be the power behind the re-enlightenment of the world.
End of Post 24
4. Teleonomy :
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5. Enformy :
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Teleology in Evolution :
Neo-Darwinian evolution is supposed to be an aim-less process that accidentally bumps things to-gether to create new things. But the current theory is not as undirected as most scientists like to think.
Instead, it is an ongoing sequence of Causes & Effects tracing back to the First Cause : the trigger for the Big Bang. So there you have an external cause that can’t be explained from within the natural system.
In addition to that, Darwin saw that random variations (mutations) were mostly harmful, and were weeded out of the lineage (gene pool). But the fittest traits & forms of each generation were preserved into the next. The “choice” of what to save is called “natural selection”. And the resulting upward pro-gression of fitness, or goodness, is called Teleonomy.
Ironically, the Greek meaning of that term actually refers to “the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by the exercise, augmentation, and improvement of reasoning”. Teleonomy is an apt term to describe the notion of G*D as a programmer in the Enformationism thesis. “Teleonomy is thought to derive from evolutionary history, adaptation for reproductive success, and/or the operation of a program. Teleonomy is related to programmatic or computational aspects of purpose.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy
Moral Progress :
Cultural evolution seems to work with the same trial & error principles as the natural kind, except that human Will (and reasoning) is the primary cause of Cultural Selection. And Steven Pinker has found that human cultures are actually progressing morally and technologically. Moral progress was the topic of his previous book : The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
I’m not aware of any “supernatural force” in the world. But my theory postulates that there is a meta-physical push behind Time’s Arrow and the positive progress of evolution. Just as Entropy is sometimes referred to as a “force” causing energy to dissipate (negative effect), Enformy is the antithesis, which causes energy to agglomerate (positive effect).
Of course, neither of those phenomena is a physical Force, or a direct Cause, in the usual sense. But the term “force” is applied to such holistic causes as a metaphor drawn from our experience with physics.
“Entropy” and “Enformy” are scientific/technical terms that are equivalent to the religious/moralistic expressions “Evil” and “Good”. So, while those forces are completely natural, the ultimate source of the power behind them may be supernatural, in the sense that the First Cause logically existed before the Big Bang, and the subsequent chain of causes & effects.
