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

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.

  Post 133.  April 24, 2024 continued . . .

  Schopenhauer’s Will as Intention

     The World as Causation &  Organization

       except that statistical randomness has no strings of logical or predictable events that would correspond to lawful behavior. According to Information Theory, meaningful or useful information is the exception to randomness⁵. Also Natural Laws are not mere regularities⁶, but consistencies that point toward Intention and Purpose, which can be recognized by intelligent beings. And Evolutionary progression, from simple elements toward more & more complex organisms, is also an implication of non-random Determinism. Which, in philosophy, is labeled Teleology⁷, the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world. But secular Philosophy does not claim divine revelation, so cannot specify any particular intelligent designer whose “purpose” is supposedly implemented by those Natural Laws. Therefore, other terms, such as First Cause or Prime Mover, are used as place-holders for that unknown, and possibly unknowable, source of Order from primeval Chaos, plus real physical Actuality from the statistical nothingness of Probability.

Schopenhauer argued that the flawed world is not rationally organized⁸. But, if so, how could reasoning beings evolve, and how could human Science gain control over the physical realm? Instead of “consciousness”, he refers to Representation or Reflection. Which sounds mechanical, like a camera, with no awareness of Self or subject. Today, we think of Conscious-ness as how the brain represents phenomena in terms of ongoing Awareness and registered Knowledge (memory). Also, contrary to Kant & Plato, Schop did not attribute Natural Will (causation) to a religious God. So he avoided even the philo-sophical notion of First Cause. For him, there is no intentional Willer behind the random events of Nature. No God, or First Cause, or Logos, or Cosmic Mind. Yet, the power propelling Nature, must have had some aim in order to evade Entropy, and to organize matter into living & thinking organisms with purposeful wills of their own.

    Naturally, without a direct revelation, we can only know the Mind of G*D by observing what Nature does as it cycles & evolves. So, the intents & purposes of the natural forces are not explicit, but must be inferred by rational observers. Which is why 17th century scientists interpreted the predictable actions of nature metaphorically, as-if legislated by human rulers⁹. Like most cultural regulations though, natural laws are mainly re-strictions on total freedom. So, instead of changing in all poss-ible ways (chaos), nature seems to evolve in limited directions, that are understandable to human reason. If there was no direction or intention in Nature, the Big Bang would have been only a brief explosion of Energy & Plasma. But since we now see evidence of eons of progressive development, that Schop had no knowledge of, we need some philosophical explanation for the advancement of evolution from un-formed chaotic plasma into the complex self-sustaining systems of the world today. The concepts of EnFormAction and Enformy¹⁰ are intended to explain how I personally understand the world as Causation and Intention.    End of Blog Post 133  

5. Randomness not lawful
   “The Shannon information is closely related to entropy, which is the expected value of the self-information of a random variable, quantifying how surprising the random variable is "on average".
Note – the information may emerge from a random source, yet it is meaningful to the extent that it is non-random, and does not hap-pen by chance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_content

6. Natural Necessities :
  “On one account, the Regularity Theory, Laws of Nature are statements of the uniformities or regularities in the world; they are mere descriptions of the way the world is. On the other account, the Necessitarian Theory, Laws of Nature are the “principles” which govern the natural phenomena of the world.”
https://iep.utm.edu/lawofnat/

7. Teleology :
  “the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.”
___Oxford Dictionary

8. Irrational World :
   “Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/

9. Natural Laws :
  “Scientists have called the intelligible, measurable, predictable regularities. they find in nature "laws."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709657

10. Enformy :
Anti-entropy force
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Real and Representation

Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves….

___Carl Jung