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/

[Gnomon]

His prehensions could be the qualia, which get stored in memory for future use.

That may be a simpler interpretation of an arcane term that I didn't grasp 20 years ago, upon first attempting to read a technical philosophical work that was way over my untrained head. I'm using this thread to get a deeper understanding of Process Philosophy, as an adjunct to my own amateur worldview of Enformationism*1.

While searching on Prehension & Qualia I came across the sites below*1. It may take me a while to fully "prehend" the four "habits of thought"*2. But they point to contentious issues that often come up in discussions of Materialism vs Idealism. Enformationism has a foot in both camps. But, I often get the feeling (qualia?) that proponents of Materialism tend to belittle the mental qualities that distinguish humans from animals (Anthropophobia?), and philosophy from empirical science .


*1. What is the Prehension process in philosophy?
Prehension is the experiential activity of an actual occasion by which characteristics of one occasion come to be present in another. Thus, one occasion may prehend certain qualities of an occasion in its past (for example, a shade of red or a certain proposition).
https://iep.utm.edu/processp/


*2. Whitehead's Revolutionary Concept of Prehension :
Hartshorne lays out sixteen habits of thought (comprehensive list below)—from the dominance of subject-predicate grammar and substance-thinking, to the fear of anthropomorphism and determinism—that repeatedly blocked the kind of asymmetric, creative-relational insight Whitehead provides with his concept of prehension. Tim and I noted several that remain relevant to science:
A. Determinism : The common assumption that cause and effect must be symmetrical, stifling any serious account of novelty.
B. Anthropophobia : The dread of reading anything akin to feeling into nature, which ironically yields an anthropocentric stance.
C. Nominalism : Overzealous denial of real potentialities.
D. Hume’s axiom : Confusing distinction with separation, thus missing how events can be distinguished without being externally divided.
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/ ... ry-concept

[Gnomon]

Whitehead models his occasions of experience on the events in Einstein's Block Universe of General Relativity; however, he mixes and matches by using Presentism instead of Eternalism.

I'll have to take your word for that. But I suspect that thinking in terms of Eternalism might be like breathing under water. It doesn't come naturally, as does Presentism. I suppose philosophers, who dare to tread in transcendent terrain, must be somewhat amphibious. For hardline Immanentists, trying to imagine a static, non-processing, space-time-transcendent Block Universe might make them choke.

[Gnomon]

Whitehead models his occasions of experience on the events in Einstein's Block Universe of General Relativity; however, he mixes and matches by using Presentism instead of Eternalism.

More poetic prose from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain :

Thomas Mann was writing in the early 20th century, around the same time that Einstein was forced, by the paradoxes of Relativity and Quantum Physics, to conclude that matter-molding Space and mind-molding Time can be understood as conceptual dimensions in a realm he called Space-Time, and metaphorized as frozen Block-Time. I doubt that Mann was familiar with Einstein's technical writing. But such ideas may have been "in the air" so to speak.

The narrator mused on Time immediately after a chapter in which the German protagonist had his first conversation --- mostly in French --- with his paramour-to-be, whom he had previously only admired from afar across the seven table sanitarium dining room. The scene was during a Carnival (Mardi Gras??) festival, when the patients, of various degrees of sickness, let loose in anomalous costumes and strange behavior. The adored-one told him she was going away --- far away --- just to get away from the hum-drum of sanitarium life. Immediately cut to the next chapter :


"WHAT is time? A mystery, a figment—and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of Space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say a thing’s “brought about” by time. What sort of thing? Change! Now is not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement—for the there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite—apparently in the hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more so than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit in time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less, to zero? Is it possible, in eternity, to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe. "how do these fare? Are they consistent with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adopt? Again we ask, and again echo answers."

[Gnomon]

Whitehead says the ultimate reality is Creativity, a principle:

“The universal of universals, characterizing ultimate matter of fact, is Creativity.”

Everything that exists is a process of creative becoming. Actual entities (also called “actual occasions”) arise by creatively prehending other entities, and in doing so, add something new to the universe.

So the universe is not made of stuff - but made of events; not governed solely by laws, but by relational creativity.

There was no “beginning” in the absolute sense. The universe is a creative advance into novelty. It has always been becoming.

# Creativity is an essential characteristic of a Deity. And also the most universal fact of our contingent (fortuitous) universe.

# In my Enformationism thesis, I coined a new name for "creative becoming" : EnFormAction (energy + form + event) : Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy.

# For the purposes of Chemistry, the universe is made of Stuff (matter). But for the purposes of Physics, even matter is made of "events" of causation : i.e. Energy or Force. Causation (Change) is always a before & after relationship between Cause & Effect ; Input & Output (relational creativity)

# For the purposes of Cosmology, the universe did have a creation event : a T=0 for a linear clock of successive events. But for the needs of Philosophy, the age of the universe is so far beyond our human experience that we make our time-counters go in circles, emulating the solar & lunar cycles. But these local time measurements have a new beginning every 12 hours, or 12 months. So, our time-counting is always relational, not absolute.

PS___ you didn't cite the source for your Whitehead quotes.

[Gnomon]

But it cannot explain the origin of existence of the Earth and life, can it?

No. That's why I have pieced together my own philosophical theory of how the primal Energy (causation) and Laws (information) of the Big Bang could evolve into living and thinking beings.


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 ancient Materialism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's a Theory of Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

Process Evolution :
Alfred North Whitehead’s book, Process and Reality, is a philosophical thesis, not a scientific essay. But it challenges the philosophical implications of Darwin’s mechanistic theory of Evolution. Instead of a simple series of energy exchanges, the Cosmos functions as a holistic organism. Hence, the eventual emergence of subordinate living creatures should not be surprising.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page43.html