The “Cartesian dualism” referred to above harks back to Plato’s theory of eternal Forms, that serve as “ideal” templates for everything in the “real” world. In that case, a process of En-Form-Action is required to convert immaterial Designs into actual material objects. Plato didn’t attempt to explain the how, but the Enformationism thesis is my amateur endeavor to do so now. Although Deacon had no intention of providing support for any god theories, he was forced to repeatedly deny the super-natural implications of his absentee causation. In my thesis, Information is the universal substance from which ideas, energies, and material objects are formed. It’s a “substance” in a metaphysical, not physical sense. But as Deacon noted, Information is conspicuous by its absence from the world of our senses5. That paradox can only be understood or interpreted statistically6. So, Shannon quantified information as the ratio of gain vs loss. It’s always a ratio between two things, meanings or values, hence information is the substance of rational thought (reasoning)7.
Terrence Deacon acknowledged the counter-intuitive implica-tions of defining Information in terms of Absence. Yet he also accepted the challenge : “. . . we will need to find a precise way to characterize its defining non-intrinsic feature – its referential capacity – and show how the content thus communicated can be causally efficacious, despite its physical absence.” It’s not a thing in itself, but a categorical aspect of reality, which functions like a corral to contain & constrain wild things. In humans, information processing gives us the ability to know things that are not present to the senses. Absent things exist only in potential, and humans have a knack for inferring what might-be from what-is. That allows us to consciously think and plan about future events or about things unseen. So Deacon quotes philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano : “This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena.”8And Mind is the very mystery that baffles believers in the Materialism paradigm. That’s why David Chalmers called it “the hard problem” of philosophy9.
Besides being characterized by absence from the senses, the essential function of Information is order (constraint). That makes it an intangible power. In my thesis, Enformation is order plusentention. Signs of entention (directed change) support the notion of either universal consciousness (pan-psychism), or eternal Mind, or both. I find that the notion of Consciousness as the fundamental element of our world tends to lead to some strange inferences. It seems to imply that atoms & photons are aware of their environment, and are able to make deliberate choices. But Enformationism places the ultimate consciousness in a transcendent realm beyond space & time, or atoms & photons. In that case, energy & matter are particles of Being, not of Consciousness. But the potential for awareness is inherited from G*D. As a high-level form of Enformation, Consciousness only emerges at the later stages of evolution. But the universal substance of reality might be called an Information Field, analogous to a Quantum field as an immaterial pool of potential.
End of Post 80
The many faces of Information :
Shannon info = Quantified; a verb; what it does; gain vs loss; energy.
Boltzmann info = Random-ized, absent, what was lost; entropy.
Deacon info = Referential; statistical; pointing to an absent future state.
Colloquial info = Predicate; a noun: what it's about; the meaning; what is gained; the referent.
Teleodynamic info = Semiotic; symbols; words that point to absent things; indicate future possibilities.
The Cosmic Mathematician
My Deist concept of G*D is statistical : what are the odds that our world could be self-existent? If that assessment is low – say 30% -- then it's 70% more likely that it was created by a world-maker of some kind. So, I put my money – my skin in the game – on G*D, and behave appropriately.
Statistics is the logical assessment of a future state that we can't measure directly. Hence, it's metaphysical. It's like seeing ghosts. That's why statistics is so spooky – with Black Swans swooping-in to upset your certain plans. It's a measure of absence.
Probability is a measure of uncertainty that only applies to things that might or might not be, in a future state. “Now” has only two options : being or non-being. But the future is a guess that we must qualify, since we can't quantify.
Signs of Design :The designer of the world system provided a context that would be recognizable, or meaningful, to intelligent creatures as signs of design. So, patterns of entention are everywhere, and we are inundated by redundance. Design is so common that we take it for granted, and fail to see the absent designer.
SpaceTime : The temporal world is made of Information – change, difference, ratio – which in humans becomes mind, meaning, value. Time is sequential, progressive difference. Space is static difference. Mind is significant difference. The time function of brain is to evaluate space-time relative to me.
7. Meaningful Information All meaning is relative. This or That are mere facts. But This compared to That adds useful meaning to bare existence. Ratios & relation-ships quantify degrees of value to the reasoner. Information processing con-verts abstract raw data into useful meanings. Meaning & Value are physically absent, but mentally present.
8. Intentional inexistence : Reference to an absent referent; pointing out-there. Most animals fail to under-stand the point of pointing. It's a human thing.
9. The Hard Problem : Bernardo Kastrup says that the “hard problem” doesn’t exist. “I argue that these problems are thought artifacts, having no ground in empirical reality”. Instead, such ontological puzzles are inherent in physical theories of Being. The Idealist ontology, though, assumes that “all existence is essentially phenomenal”. By that he means what we take for reality is a mental model constructed from abstract sensory inputs. We don’t know objective Reality, but only our subjective idea of reality. We get confused about metaphysical topics, because our vocabulary is based on physical metaphors.
5. Ab-Sense : We obtain information from the environment by sensing the carriers. Which are physical things that convey coded messages from one place to another. For example, when light waves hit your eye, they are converted into electro-chemical signals, which the brain decodes into the colors & shapes that are meaningful to us. There is no color or shape in light – they exist only in the mind. The transformation from sensation to meaning is a mystery for physical theories.
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