Post 131e -- Existence : Potential vs Actual

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ENFORMATIONISM

A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.

22. Information :
The notion of an act of form-creation (enformation) as the directional & causal force behind evolution is what I call Enformy, to contrast with order destroying Entropy

23: Autopoiesis :
Self creation. “Autopoiesis can be defined as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

24. Teleological :
Literally, future knowledge. Philosophically, an explan-ation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. But the cause is usually assumed to be an intelligent agent, as in Intelligent Design. But Jantsch doesn’t seem to think of his agent as a typical religious deity.

25. Elan Vital :
Literally, Life Force. “self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis” (form creation) https://www.britannica.com/topic/creative-evolution-philosophy

Post 131. August 28, 2023

Creative Mind and Cosmic Order

Existence : Potential vs Actual

Materialists typically take the existence of physical objects & forces for granted. But Quantum Physics has subverted the certainty of Classical Physics. In his chapter, Why Do Things Exist?, Pinter notes that Heisenberg wrote, “the concept of existence appears to be quite straightforward, but this appear-ance is deceptive”. The pioneer of quantum physics also said about his Uncertainty Principle, that “the unobserved particle is ‘potential’, and it becomes actual when it is observed”. That noumenal notion has provoked much debate among scientists and philosophers, about the definition of existence (Ontology). So, Pinter suggests that the role of a little-understood natural “force”²² might clarify the confusion about what it means To Be : both Real & Ideal. After describing how reality is too complex for an idividual mind/brain to grasp, he implies that the organ picks out certain aspects of the random background (e.g stars) and makes connections between them to produce meaningful gestalts (constellations). That process of enforming “involves the creation of information [meaning] by the observer. This simple fact reveals that information is an essential aspect of existence”[my bracket]. The implication here is that Reality exists out there, but is undefined (random) until a conscious mind draws the lines (an act) that define randomness into meaning-ful/useful order : i.e. Knowledge & Information.

A conscious observer “is never a passive entity”, but acts with Purpose as an Agent with Intentionality. Biologists Maturana & Varela, in their 1972 book, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, coined that term²³ to describe a living system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating (poiesis ; poetry) its own parts via transform-ation of raw material in the environment into the physical substance of the organism. The most important capability for sentient systems is the organizing power to process & re-configure non-self stuff from its environment ─ physically by digestion and mentally by cognition ─ into it’s own structural form. In 1980, astrophysicist Eric Jantsch applied a similar idea to the universe as a whole in The Self-Organizing Universe. The mechanism for that creative process was mechanical Evolution plus Agency, as a teleological²⁴ force. I call it “Enformy”.

Even Darwin implied that the evolution of cognition enhanced the survival of organisms : “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” In other words, wisdom is the most powerful force for surviving and thriving in a world of constant change, and of competition for life’s necessary resources. In 1907, Henri Bergson published his book, Creative Evolution, in which he postulated the existence of a Life Force (elan vital)²⁵. In my own hypothesis, I denote that creative causal force by a technical term : EnFormAction²⁶, denoting a combination of change-causing Energy and organizing Information. Where Energy provides the transformative force, and Information (blueprint) delivers the design intention for configuration.

End of Blog Post 131

26. EnFormAction :
Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", Likewise, EFA is the general cause of every-thing in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application. It’s a philosophical term, not a religious doctrine.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html