Process Cosmology --- a worldview for our time

[Gnomon]

The Night was pregnant with a burning need,
No thought, no form, no atom, no dark seed—
Until a sparkless spark did bloom and blaze,
And all the void became a field of speed.

The Cosmos, then, a thought still being spun—
A ruby verse beneath a setting sun—
And we, the readers, cup in hand, amazed,
Still asking how the All from not-there begun.

The void was pregnant with untapped latency,
No things yet, just Ideal Forms for seeds,
Until an unsparked explosion created light,
And the abyss was actualized at cosmic-speed.

The unrealized Forms were thoughts like fluff,
Until intention said "let there be stuff"
Now we, the readers of the sky,
Are still asking "here am I . . . why?" :chin:

[Gnomon]

Is this the shortest poem?
I, . . . . Why?

That may summarize THE fundamental philosophical question. We can look down at our physical bodies, and feel some connection, but we can't look behind the mind's eye to see the questioner. So, we wonder who's looking?


[reply="180 Proof;978760"] seems to think that Whitehead and Gnomon are disguising primitive Animism and Spiritualism under the more sciency label of Process. When early humans saw self-moving animals, they marveled at stolid placid matter in motion, and conjectured some invisible force, like wind or breath, to propel mundane matter, like zephyrs ballooning sails to impel the ship in the windward direction. It's still the same ancient philosophical quandary, but the terminology is modern.

That immaterial-motivating-something came to be known as "Spirit" or "Pneuma" or "Soul". But today, pragmatic scientists call that same pushing or pulling force "Energy" or "Gravity". Ironically, Newton seemed perplexed by his theory of gravity (principle of weightiness) which implied what Einstein later quipped : "spooky action at a distance" . And 21st century physicists are still in the same becalmed boat as the ancients : they know what Energy does, but they don't know what it is : its insubstantial substance. What's the invisible link between substantial Puller and material Pullee, between Pusher and the thing Caused to Change position? In specific cases, we call it simply "Difference", but cosmically, we call it "Evolution".

What Energy is not, is malleable corporeal matter. It is instead the spooky invisible Process of Causation, of Change, in which Matter is Transformed in various ways, including back into ephemeral Energy. And yet an early 20th century engineer transformed our vocabulary of Change by combining the notions of mental Information with physical Entropy (negative Energy). The Laws of Thermodynamics describe Energy in terms, not of material stuff, but of logical relationships : Equations*1. So, what Energy is is the power to initiate the Process of form-change : Causation & Cognition*2. And that is the basis of my Enformationism thesis.



*1. In thermodynamics, the fundamental thermodynamic relation are four fundamental equations which demonstrate how four important thermodynamic quantities depend on variables that can be controlled and measured experimentally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundament ... c_relation

*2. Cognition :
the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
___ Oxford Dictionary

[Gnomon]

So, the Great AI Program as the Ideal God is now micromanaging everything

Yes, the AI program, known as Evolution, is automatically "managing" the process of progressive creation : from near nothing at the Bang, to everything seen on the Webb scope, plus everything back on Earth that the scope is not designed to look at. And that part of everything includes Djinn & Democracy, and all other immaterial products of human imagination that are not objects, but subjects : such as Art, Literature, and Science.

The "Ghost in the Machine" is a sub-routine of the general evolutionary process, that runs on wet-ware. But the Program itself is merely a message (instructions) from the Programmer, not to be mistaken as a world-creating deity.

PS___ 180's own "woo-of-the-gaps" is the metaphysical belief that Matter (clay) can create Mind (idea) by rubbing atoms together. :joke:

[Gnomon]

After you land, a Hari-Krishna will give you a map at the airport. . . .
“Is your answer an untruth,” added Rascal, “for security purposes?”
“I ain’t not lying about nothing no way, no how, or nothing exists,” unanswered Nobody.

[reply="180 Proof;979079"] likes to portray Gnomon as a hippie-dippy hairless-hare-krishnut, chanting praise to an imaginary blue-skinned god-man, with drums, incense, and navel gazing. Ironically, back when the hippies & haries were doing their thing in the US of A, short-haired-but-not-yet-bald Gnomon was in Viet Nam, metaphorically (not really, no how) killing the little yellow commie-farmers.

Be that as it may (or not), by imagining his stubborn "reality-denier" as an ignorant savage, 180 allows himself to feel intellectually superior, and sets-up a 2-dimensional soft target for his mundane-material-metaphysics barbs, and his immanent-nature-god dogma, as revealed by physical-prophet Spinoza.

But Gnomon don't play dat game. He mostly ignores 180's put-down-preaching, and discusses relevant topics with more open-minded un-indoctrinated others : for whom philosophy is a process : an ongoing search for wisdom, not a pre-defined doctrine to defend. Truth is not revealed by magic, it's only approximated by inference. As the bald kid in The Matrix said to Neo, "remember, there is no spoon". It's just an idea. And there are no true ideas, only shadows, in the matter-matrix world of Plato's cave. :joke:

[Gnomon]

The Hari-Krishna had a constant presence in Waikiki in 1971, where I was in the army doing computer programming at Fort Shafter, drafted out of my first year at IBM.

I'm not a computer programmer, but was introduced to digital coding on mainframes back in the 80s. Hippies & Hares were not much of a presence on my southern conservative college campus. Instead, my 2010 Enformationism thesis was inspired mainly by statistical Quantum Physics (energy) and digital Information Theory (entropy). Whitehead's Process Cosmology seemed to me to combine those radical scientific ways of understanding the world into a general philosophical worldview for the 20th century. Here's a review of Whitehead by The Information Philosopher. His criticism of Reductionism (in favor of Holism) and advocation of "purpose" in evolution, may instigate another of [reply="180 Proof;979079"]'s knee-jerk woo-woo attacks.

Whitehead and Information Philosophy :
There are some broad similarities between information philosophy and Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" or his oddly named "organic mechanism." To see the connection, we must sharpen the idea of Newtonian mechanism and even the deterministic motions of matter in special relativity. These both seem well-described by Whitehead's attack on "simple location."
Today we describe this as "reductionism," the mistaken idea that all phenomena are reducible to physics and chemistry, that biological organisms and even mental phenomena are reducible to the motions of their constituent material particles.
Reductionism claims that there are deterministic causal chains coming "bottom up" from matter. If there are "mental phenomena," they are merely "epiphenomena," giving us the illusion of mental events and "mental causation. . . . .
Perhaps the greatest similarity between I-Phi and Process Philosophy is that they both claim to explain a "creative process," which lies behind the "emergence of "purpose" (the entelechy of Aristotle or the teleonomy of Colin Pittendrigh and Jacques Monod) in living things. "
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/ ... whitehead/