Philo Forum : First Cause

[Gnomon]

I'm not much in to systematising philosophical positions; explication what you call a worldview. — Banno

Apparently you are not alone in your apathy toward a rationalized worldview. Most people on this and other forums prefer to express how they feel about a particular topic, than to present a logical argument, supported by specific pertinent evidence. Most people's belief systems are based on hand-me-down Faith, instead of personal Reason; hence prove to be narrow, incoherent, and inconsistent when probed by Socratic dialogue. They live in a "reality tunnel" of religion or ideology.

I'm used to such wishy-washy worldviews on general forums. But it's disappointing on a philosophy forum. I suspect that such insipid thinking may be due to the recent teaching of Continental and Postmodern philosophies in universities. Those doctrines tend to be apathetic toward the "grand narratives" and discriminating definitions of Modernism, hallmarks of reason.

Nailing one's flag to a blog tends to set one's feet in mud... (that was dreadful!) — Banno

Personally, I would say that writing a reason-based blog allows one to "take a firm stand" rather than wallowing in the mud of mushy feelings & opinions.

The fun for me is in the exploring, not in the mapping. — Banno

I like to do both : exploring and mapping the world, in order to navigate life with a clear up-to-date worldview.

Worldview : One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview – precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for.[19] However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldview

[Gnomon]

Certainly seems that information is fundamental. A key question is that is information transitory, permanent or a mixture of both? For anything to exist at all in the universe, it seems there must be permanent information associated with it - the first cause is permanent. What about spacetime though? Does it contain permanent information (eternalism) or transitory information (presentism)? It could also be something in-between like growing block theory - information is permanent once created. — Devans99

As I understand it, Information can be both permanent (eternal) and temporal (transitory). I illustrate that BothAnd notion by looking at Shannon's boiled-down basic Information, containing no specific meaning. It's defined as a string of 1s and 0s, something or nothing. I imagine that static dichotomy set in motion as an oscillation of spacetime (waveform) varying between [1] (maximum, and [-1] (minimum, with an average baseline of (0) no signal. Reality though, is a complex waveform, that contains the kind of Information that our senses interpret as Meaning (Mind, ideas), or as Thingness (physical objects).

So the waveform of our universe defines an ontological continuum that varies from positive Reality (actual) to Nonexistence (nothingness) to negative Reality (potential). The positives & negatives describe physical-temporal existence that comes & goes : Life & Death; while the zeros describe a state equivalent to Timeless Eternity. In my thesis, I interpret the baseline nothingness as the normal state of Ontology (BEING), which is also the eternal state of Logos, the Enformer. An act of Creation (Enformation, Causation) causes the neutral state to transition into positive-but-transitory existence (real, actual, Energy), which soon dissipates into (unreal, potential, Entropy). I go further to imagine fast oscillations (lightspeed) as Energy, and slow oscillations as Matter.

I'm sure this Enformationism "explication" sounds speculative & far-out, but your question was also pretty unconventional, and called for conjecture. I feel sure a physicist (Paul Davies) could translate my analogies & metaphors into mathematical equations. But, this is about as far as my layman's interpretation of Information can go into essential Ontology.

PS__I wouldn't recommend that you waste your time debating abstruse Ontological concepts, such as existence of God. You wouldn't convince anyone that you are right, and they won't respect your unconventional erudition.

ESSENTIAL WAVEFORM OF CREATION
ac-waveform-time-thumbnail.png
COMPLEX WAVEFORM OF PHYSICAL EXISTENCE
Waveform-Complexity-660x433.png
23 hours ago

[Gnomon]

Thread closed to further input, probably due to repetitiveness of the ongoing debate on the First Cause concept.

I can sympathise with the appeal of setting out one's thinking systematically as a process of review and consolidation ---Banno
Thanks. That's why I post on forums such as this : not to preach, but to learn; to have my ideas reviewed, in order to clarify & consolidate my own philosophical worldview.

But one must avoid the systematiser's generic fault: going a step too far. --Banno
How do you know when you've reached the limits of a system? I can't see the horizon from where I stand. But then, I don't draw a line in the sand between Science and Metaphysics. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. Merely a layman who was indoctrinated as a child with a systematic worldview, that I came to doubt as I reached the age of reason. So, I have spent the rest of my life constructing a personal worldview from scratch, based on cutting-edge Science and philosophical methods. Are you saying I have wasted my life chasing after wisdom and understanding? Are you recommending that I give-up on my dream of creating a personal worldview, as defined below?

My urgent need to possess a unified worldview derives from the schismatic fragmentation of perspectives among intelligent people today, as exemplified in this thread. I find some wisdom on both sides of most issues, and incorporate whatever fits into my own image of what the world is, and how it works. So, I based my personal construct, in part, on the guidelines suggested by the Systems theorists of the Principia Cybernetica project. https://www.vub.be/CLEA/pub/books/worldviews/#RTFToC13

Worldview : The general, philosophical understanding of a person’s situation relative to the whole world. This fundamental belief system is constructed by each individual from innate dispositions, experienced perceptions, cultural memes, and reasoned inferences to serve as a template for learning and operating within the limits of the physical and social environment. It is an internal model of reality, which frames and filters all incoming information. This mental conception is all we know of Reality.
http://enformationism.info/enformationi ... age10.html


What is of value in his work is not so much the content as the process, the method with which he approached philosophy. --Banno
I'm not very familiar with Wittgenstein. Do you think he repudiated the content of the Tractatus, or did he merely continue to refine his thesis after original publication? My worldview may be similar to his, in the sense that "There is no sense in which he is quite sure that there is a God". I call myself an Agnostic Deist.

However, I may have a different definition of Metaphysics from his, which he seemed to equate with Spiritualism and Supernaturalism. The Enformationism thesis attempts to reconcile the universal human notion of invisible spirits & gods, with our modern understanding of energy & evolution. If all metaphysics is a "misuse of language", then all philosophers since Plato have been abusers of the human talent for putting abstract concepts into words that we can compare & contrast with concrete reality.

Wittgenstein : He believed that metaphysics was a use of language that gave us the illusion of deep insight into a puzzle but it was fundamentally bogus; metaphysical solutions are a misuse of language, often resulting from over-generalizing one case to fit all.
https://www.quora.com/What-did-Wittgens ... etaphysics

Metaphysics : 2. Aristotle divided his treatise on science into two parts. The world as-known-via-the-senses was labeled “physics” - what we call "Science" today. And the world as-known-by-the-mind, by reason, was labeled “metaphysics” - what we now call "Philosophy" .
4. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind. Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is. Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made. Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the “formal” cause of the thing designed.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

[Gnomon]

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... e-rules/p1

Why does the universe have rules?

But why? Why have any consistency to anything? Why not have a gravitational force that changes constantly or a conservation law that works "most" of the time. — Benj96

My guess : You can't have a dynamic universe without organization. And that requires a single whole system with lots of sub-functions. What we call "Laws" are merely structural patterns that link the parts into a whole system. Those inter-relationships are stable, but flexible, in order to allow change. So, the "consistency" of the universe is due to its logical structure, but the "dynamic" aspect of the universe is due to the energy (change) flowing through the structure, both physical and logical. On the macro level of human observation, large-scale structural change occurs via evolution. But on the quantum scale, and on the cosmic scale, the universe, as a system, remains essentially the same over time.

Change only occurs in the moving parts of the "machine", so to speak. The system itself would fall apart if its laws (structure, organization, mechanism) were inconsistent. The "moving parts" are the things we observe evolving over time. Presumably, our world system will eventually "fall apart" when all the dynamic Energy is converted into static Entropy. Then the structure of the universe, like a dead body, will decay back into the unreal potential*1 from whence it came.

System : 1. a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.
2. a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.

Mathematical Logical Structure : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure ... cal_logic)

*1 Potential : what I call EnFormAction, the power to create and to cause change