Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Those scientists, who address the question of "something from nothing", necessarily assume an omniscient view of eternal existence prior to the Big Bang. For example, a Multiverse, of which our 'verse is merely one of zillions, is necessarily eternal, in order to escape the question of "how do you account for something new and without precedence?" In the multiverse model, a Creator (from scratch) is not necessary. because what you see now, is what has always existed in one form or another. But then, who created the Multiverse, or was it self-created? That eternal power to create new worlds is uncannily god-like. :joke:

But he seems to be in favor of “transcendental framing” of the FreeWill question, — Gnomon

He means that life and mind transcend their worlds by being organisms with an intentional point of view. They are in a semiotic modelling relation which puts them "outside" the material world they have a need to control.

So no. He doesn't argue for a spooky dualist transcendence. He is just talking about how organisms transcend their environments by being in a modelling relation with them.

An organism has choices due to genes and neurons. Humans have even more choices due to linguistic and numeric habits of thought.

So, you agree that the ultimate source of “habitual” [regular, reliable] behaviors, rather than acquired in the process of evolution, could inferred as laws of nature [necessities] that predate the Bang. By that I mean, if-then instructions for system operation that were programmed into the seed (Singularity) of the Big Bang? — Gnomon

I wouldn’t use that computer jargon. My argument is structural. Probabalistic systems go towards their equilibrium states.

That “duh, everybody knows about heat death” conclusion came as a surprise to Einstein, who assumed a stable and eternal universe in his calculations. And only when faced with contrary evidence, was forced to rename his Cosmological Constant as what we now know as Dark Energy. — Gnomon

Interesting version of the history.

To me, that “explanation” is what he is arguing against -- saying “they come to look less like explanations than descriptions". In other words, describing the effect is not the same as explaining the cause. — Gnomon

I don't believe you followed what he says. But then, I don't think Tallis is that hot a writer either.

Those who prefer to call those dependable regularities “habits” are implying that they could have been otherwise. — Gnomon

Nope. The structuralist view is just arguing that the regularities of nature are immanent rather than transcendent. They emerge from the chaos of possibility as structural inevitabilities, rather than being God-given laws that animate matter.

But how would they know that, except by re-running the program of evolution several times to see if each execution followed the same basic path. — Gnomon

It's like when Og invented the wheel. Re-run history as often as you like. Let the whole tribe test every geometric possibility. The story always comes out the same in the end. Wheels wind up being circular. Folk wind up getting into the habit of thinking of circles when they want stuff to roll, regardless of whether they have "freewill" or not.

All we know for sure is that Nature seems to be constrained by built-in limitations. So, if you imagine a reality with different constraints you will be dealing with imaginary “woo”, rather than with Reality as we know it. — Gnomon

I'm not arguing that different realities are possible. As a structuralist, I am instead saying our own Big Bang universe is very likely to be the only one of its kind as a consequence of the "strong structuralism" principle.

Maybe you might want to argue for worlds based on other symmetry breakings than the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) of the Standard Model. But maybe also, these just are the only series of phase transitions by which a material existence could emerge - one that, Og-like, had to fiddle around with triangular wheels, and square wheels, before arriving at the greatest simplicity of a round wheel.

Can you suggest a simpler baseline gauge symmetry than the U(1) of electromagnetism? The symmetry of a single rotation/translation, or sine wave?

Once you arrive at the universal simplicity of a circle, beyond that you can only aim at the greater simplicity of a circle that is even more circular. Or in other words, there is no beyond. You have arrived at the limit of that kind of "endless" possibility.

The contest here is between two ways of looking at the metaphysics of Being - the transcendent and the immanent. And it is not even a contest.

Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But if you study particle physics, you will find this isn't how it works.

We happen to now live in an era where the Cosmos is ruled by its mathematically simplest possible symmetry - the U(1) of electromagnetism.

And when we wind back to recover earlier higher symmetry states, like the SU(3) of the Big Bang's quark-gluon plasma, we see how everything we love and hold dear - all that "matter" and all that "void" - dissolves into a hot confusion of nothing very definite at all.

Keep winding the clock back to the Planckscale and all useful particle structure or spacetime geometry goes out the window. The maths of symmetry itself dissolves. There is a lack of constraint of any kind once you get out beyond 24-dimensional SU(5), or 248-dimensional E8, symmetry stories.

So modern physics rests on concrete knowledge of Lie algebra. The brute facts here are Platonic. :smile:

The onion is tightly structured when its dimensionality is as strongly limited as it is possible to imagine - when all dimensional possibility has been crunched down to just a 3D realm in which the U(1) of EM is present as the concrete limit. But then wind back from that final destination by adding back dimensionality and all that tight structure begins quickly to come undone.

Like leaving town for the country on a dark night, you soon pass by the bright-lit city limits with all its neat regularity of 24 and even edge-of-town 248 dimensional maths. Occasional flashes of sporadic simple groups light up the darkness like truckstops, but even those become increasingly rare.

Travel forever and you may even reach the Monster group.

But the point is that the onion fast runs out of layers to be peeled as its dimensionality expands so fast that it becomes an entirely different kind of thing - a beetroot perhaps. :grin:

And likewise, talk about the Big Bang has to give up on overly concrete notions like spacetime and matter. A 4D vacuum filled with a quantum foam is about where things begin to start.

Beyond that, and there ain't even enough dimensionality to constrain anything in a useful fashion. Everything is too curved or disconnected to be part of any larger coherent sense of structure.

So every philosophical debate about the creation of the Cosmos starts by taking stuff for granted that science and maths already tells us we shouldn't be taking for granted. Beyond the Big Bang, concrete dimensionality and materiality have already left the room.

I like to think of the universe as a ball (universe) eternally rolling down a hill (the vacuum) which cause friction (time) which causes curvatures in the sand (vacuum), which goes back to the beginning of the cycle and on forever. A self propelling system unrevised by anyone bit working because of the basic rules of matter

In reading a lot of this thread, it strikes me that the many competing theoretical physics models of how the Big Bang might have occured are not particularly useful for answering this question in the sense it is often asked.

Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?

It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is unclear to me how anything can give us the "ultimate" answer - one that cannot in turn be challenged with the same question: Why that and not something else or nothing at all?

What does it mean to explain something? We substitute an explanans for an explanandum, reduce what we want to explain to something that does not itself cry out for an explanation, at least in the current context. Something that we assume we already understand. But what could we already understand about a putative ultimate truth? Whence such understanding?

For people who find satisfaction in ultimate explanations, those explanations usually take the form of some religious or metaphysical story or method that appeals to them on some level. When they find something like that, they say to themselves: "Yeah, that sounds about right. I'll run with it." This sort of leap of faith is something that we practice all the time when dealing with minor questions and decisions, as well as matters of taste and preference - we call it intuition, confidence and such like. And that works out alright a lot of the time for practical everyday purposes. But such an approach seems to be incongruous with the sort of thoroughgoing skeptical inquiry that moves us to ask ultimate questions in the first place.

The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.

1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.

2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."

Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree with this, for the most part. The conclusion that I would draw is not that we must strive towards something more fundamental and less contingent than some brute facts du jour. If there is a "God's Eye View" it is in any case epistemically inaccessible to us. So brute facts are all we have to work with. We just need to recognize them for what they are: contingent, mutable, subject to taste and temperament, and most of all, contextual. The explanations that we settle on depend on what sort of answer we are looking for in a given situation.

He means that life and mind transcend their worlds by being organisms with an intentional point of view. — apokrisis

Was that transcendent "intentional" perspective inevitable : due to an accidental structure of the Singularity, or to an intentional arrangement of its structure? Is Life-Mind-Intention a product of combining matter with physical laws? If so, which? And in what proportions? :smile:

Nope. The structuralist view is just arguing that the regularities of nature are immanent rather than transcendent. They emerge from the chaos of possibility as structural inevitabilities, rather than being God-given laws that animate matter. — apokrisis

Well, duh! The structural regularities of our universe are necessarily immanent in the structure of the system. But how the system arrived at that highly-unlikely anthropic structure is an open question. Apparently. by "chaos of possibility" you mean that a human-friendly universe is an astronomical accident. That would be a Weak Anthropic argument. And the Las Vegas odds, of such a cosmic-coincidence-of-initial-conditions occurring in finite time (in eternity anything possible must happen), are a bad bet. Therefore, the theory of Inflation was proposed to cover the bet in a fraction of a Planck second. But, if you believe in such Voila!-instant-universe-from-nothing Magic, I have some prime real estate in Afghanistan to sell you. :joke:

What Are The Odds? :
If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-multiverses-measure-problem-20141103/

The contest here is between two ways of looking at the metaphysics of Being - the transcendent and the immanent. And it is not even a contest. — apokrisis

I agree. To assume that Life & MInd & Intention & Love emerged from "the chaos of possibilities" is believable, only if that infinite Chaos was limited & enformed by the logical structure of Cosmos. Therefore, the infinite potential of Chaos and the finite structure of Cosmos logically must exist prior to the actualization of potential and the realization of Cosmos in the Big Bang. And that priority is what I would call "Transcendent", in that neither Infinity nor cosmic potential can be found immanent in the actual universe we inhabit. So, Transcendence wins by a mile. Yet, it is still Structuralism. :nerd:

Chaos :
In ancient Greek creation myths Chaos was the void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos. It literally means "emptiness", but can also refer to a random undefined unformed state that was changed into the orderly law-defined enformed Cosmos. In modern Cosmology, Chaos can represent the undefined state from which the Big Bang defined (created) space/time.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html

So, Transcendence wins by a mile. Yet, it is still Structuralism. :nerd: — Gnomon

Why would the Big Daddy in the Sky go to all the trouble of pre-arranging an anthropically structured Big Bang that takes 13 billion years to eventually deliver the fleeting blip of a biofilm on some random chunk of real estate?

Creating it in a week, complete as a Garden of Eden, makes more sense if you want to talk probabilities.

And the Las Vegas odds, of such a cosmic-coincidence-of-initial-conditions occurring in finite time (in eternity anything possible must happen), are a bad bet. — Gnomon

Remember that the claim of the Standard Model is about there being a very limited variety of mathematical symmetries for nature to pick from. And indeed, ultimately, just the one final one that is the simplest.

If you want to make an argument here, you need to argue against the odds of wheels being circular. And I note, you carefully avoided trying to argue against that.

Why would the Big Daddy in the Sky go to all the trouble of pre-arranging an anthropically structured Big Bang that takes 13 billion years to eventually deliver the fleeting blip of a biofilm on some random chunk of real estate? — apokrisis

I don't know why an intentional universe creator would bother to instigate a messy world like ours. But I have a theory, based on my Enformationism worldview. It's obvious to me that the mythical creator of the idyllic Garden of Eden is a fairy tale. Other ancient creation myths included the imperfect workman Demiurge of Plato, or the Gnostic's evil god Ialdabaoth. Those gods were not Omnipotent or Omni-benign, and their creative deficiencies are reflected in the imperfect world we inhabit today.

So, anyone postulating a non-accidental creation event must confront the Problem of Evil. And the only resolution I can think of is to assume that the omnipotent Creator has the potential for both Good and Evil. That's the kernel of my BothAnd principle : the real world has both good & bad properties, from the human perspective, so any explanation for the world's existence must resolve that innate contradiction. And just blaming it on random accidents is not explanatory.

Therefore, instead of a loving "Big Daddy", I envision a General Creative Principle that is more like abstract Mathematics than flesh & blood Mankind. Math includes both positive and negative values. So, the entity I call "The Enformer" or "G*D", is an update of Plato's LOGOS, but also includes the principles of Ethos and Pathos. Since Reason, Character, and Emotion are characteristics of our world, specifically the Cultural aspects instead of the Natural properties, the First Cause must have possessed the Aristotelian Potential for those same qualities.

In keeping with the theme of Enformationism, the hypothetical Enformer, was essentially a Programmer, not a Magician. By that I mean S/he initiated an evolving process, instead of merely saying the magic words : "let there be light', and presto! a perfect world appears. As a result of programming a Singularity with design parameters (laws & initial conditions), a prolonged process of Evolution began, and will have an end. The End will be the output of the program. And, due to the inherent randomizing uncertainties, presumably even the Programmer does not know exactly what the Final Answer will be ( maybe 42). Evolutionary Programming is inherently uncertain, but by a process of trial & error, it gradually optimizes itself, by means of looping feedback (mutations & selection).

I won't go into the details of the Enforming hypothesis here, but you can simply think of it as a 21st century Myth, or as Science Fiction, if you like. But remember, that all other explanatory alternatives (Inflation, Multiverse, etc) are likewise fictional projections from what's known, into the unknown territory beyond the boundaries of space-time. So, my story can only be judged by its philosophical explanatory power, not by its empirical evidence. :cool:


G*D :
* An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a creator deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole, of which all temporal things are a part, is not to be feared or worshiped, but appreciated like Nature.
* I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. That’s because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

Demiurge : a god is a deity while demiurge is something (as an institution, idea, or individual) conceived as an autonomous creative force or decisive power.
Note -- the Demiurge functions like a computer program, which obeys the instructions of its programmer as it carries-out an assigned task. In my story, the program works-out a "what-if" question, based on certain parameters. But, if the programmer knew the answer in advance, the program wouldn't be necessary. Yet, there are non-factual philosophical questions that can only be answered in practice, not theory.

the real world has both good & bad properties, from the human perspective, — Gnomon

Math includes both positive and negative values. — Gnomon

This doesn't stack up for me. And organic and immanent metaphysics instead emphasises the complementary nature of symmetry breakings and the reality of chance.

So if there is "good and bad" in the world, this is only a well-formed dichotomy if both sides are part of the one deal.

And if there is "positive and negative" in the world, this is just a simple mirror-level symmetry - easily reversed as it is a symmetry breaking on a single scale of being and so not the complete asymmetry of a dichotomy, a symmetry-breaking that itself produces hierarchical scale.

So symmetry-breakings that work - at the cultural level you seem concerned with - would be ones like competition~cooperation. A functional society is one that balances local or individual differentiation against global or general integration. There has to be the creative energy of selfish striving, and there has to also be a general social project that is the context and meaning for that individual freedom.

To talk of "good and bad" is way too simplistic - a dualism that wants to be reduced to a monism.

If you can't see the need for both sides of the equation - as you can with the matched and yet asymmetric social qualities of competition and cooperation, differentiation and integration - then you aren't thinking in sufficiently fundamental terms.

In maths, positive and negative add up to nothing. If you go left, you can go right, and end up back where you started. Unless your symmetry-breaking produces scale, every difference becomes just a self-annihilating fluctuation.

This is why the Big Bang needs some hidden asymmetry in its particle production. It has to make a difference to be a left-handed or right-handed particle, otherwise particles are produced and just as fast annihilated.

So we know from good argument that reality can only arise via proper dichotomies - ones that result in scale asymmetry. Each side of a pair is defined by it being as far away or unlike its "other" as possible. And yet also, that makes both equally necessary as each is the ground to its other.

Your argument falls apart before it gets started if it is couched in merely anti-symmetric terms like positive-negative and good-bad.

Since Reason, Character, and Emotion are characteristics of our world, specifically the Cultural aspects instead of the Natural properties, the First Cause must have possessed the Aristotelian Potential for those same qualities. — Gnomon

Biology is characterised primarily by the functional dichotomy of competition~cooperation. It is "reasonable" - in the Peircean sense - that life has hierarchical organisation. It is divided by the asymmetry of being locally spontaneous or indvidualistic, and globally cohesive or interdependent.

Even bacteria form biofilms. The planet's climate is regulated by a balance of photosynthesis and respiration that maintains a liveable atmosphere. So from top to bottom, over all scales, life is based on the "goodness" and "reasonableness" of being balanced by its two opposing tendencies.

Aristotle got it to the degree he stressed hierarchical order and the unity of opposites.

But you are taking things back to a simplistic religious framing that just accepts there is a problem of evil, or a problem if a creator isn't the determiner of every detail.

These are just problems if your metaphysics is stuck at the level of symmetry-breaking or dialectics which only thinks in terms of a single scale of being - a world where every left is matched by its right.

A more complete symmetry-breaking produces asymmetric scale or hierarchical order. You arrive at a local~global story where two opposites anchor the two extremes of scale. It then becomes clear that both extremes are necessary for there to be anything at all. As conflicting impulses, both are equally necessary.

Once you have developed your metaphysics to that point, all the causality is within the model. You have arrived at an argument with self-organising immanence.

As a result of programming a Singularity with design parameters (laws & initial conditions), a prolonged process of Evolution began, and will have an end. The End will be the output of the program. And, due to the inherent randomizing uncertainties, presumably even the Programmer does not know exactly what the Final Answer will be — Gnomon

But talking of a programmer immediately makes chance a big metaphysyical problem. Computers are deterministic devices. Chance doesn't even enter the story. And to claim some "swerve" to introduce uncertainty is a patent act of desperation.

So it is much better to argue like Peirce and other organicists. Chance and necessity become the complementary extremes of Being - the two poles that unite to arrive at the balance that is actuality.

And this is what physics argues about the Big Bang. Chance is real in nature as quantum indeterminism. Necessity is also real as the constraints of a decohering thermal structure. At the Planckscale, these two contrarieties have exactly the same scale. The universe is as curved as it is hot. The container is indistinguishable from its contents. But an instant later, the two are already being divided in their opposing directions by the dichotomy of cooling~spreading. The curvature flattens enough that there is some measurable degree of spacetime. The heat spreads enough that there is some measurable degree of localised energy density.

So your story predicts neither what physics has figured out about the start of the Universe, nor what sociology has figured out about the organisation of biological collectives.

So, my story can only be judged by its philosophical explanatory power, not by its empirical evidence. — Gnomon

Good metaphysics grounds good science. But even most scientists don't understand why they wind up where they do. That is why quantum indeterminism, or human altruism, become the scientific version of the old religious puzzles like the problem of evil, or the problem of God's omnipotence.

Everyone's metaphysics must divide the world somehow. Symmetries must be broken to get any kind of reasoning started.

But what we see is that most folk get stuck at the first step - a symmetry breaking that only speaks of two directions at the one scale of being. Go left, or go right. Add more, or subtract to get less. Say yes, or say no.

Productive metaphysics instead continues on from this kind of "dualism yearning to be monism" to a fully-broken dichotomy - one with the asymmetry of a hierarchical or triadically-developed scale. The division has to be complementary - mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive - so that all its causes are to be found within it. No need for transcendence.

To talk of "good and bad" is way too simplistic - a dualism that wants to be reduced to a monism. . . . Your argument falls apart before it gets started if it is couched in merely anti-symmetric terms like positive-negative and good-bad. — apokrisis

I don't emphasize the "good and bad", because my philosophy is BothAnd. It acknowledges the Duality of Reality, but "reduces" to a Monism in Holism. :smile:

Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Note -- there's lots more at the link

But you are taking things back to a simplistic religious framing that just accepts there is a problem of evil, or a problem if a creator isn't the determiner of every detail. — apokrisis

No, I don't believe the Creator is the "determiner of every detail". Instead, the Programmer created an evolutionary program that works out the details via trial & error, not magical intervention. :cool:

Evolutionary Programming :
Special computer algorithms inspired by biological Natural Selection. It is similar to Genetic Programming in that it relies on internal competition between random alternative solutions to weed-out inferior results, and to pass-on superior answers to the next generation of algorithms. By means of such optimizing feedback loops, evolution is able to make progress toward the best possible solution – limited only by local restraints – to the original programmer’s goal or purpose. In Enformationism theory the Prime Programmer is portrayed as a creative deity, who uses bottom-up mechanisms, rather than top-down miracles, to produce a world with both freedom & determinism, order & meaning.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

But talking of a programmer immediately makes chance a big metaphysyical problem. Computers are deterministic devices. Chance doesn't even enter the story. And to claim some "swerve" to introduce uncertainty is a patent act of desperation. — apokrisis

You have missed the whole point of the Enformationism worldview. An Evolutionary Program is not "deterministic", but it is teleological, in that there is an Intention (goal) that drives the Selection of the fittest. No "desperation: needed, just a modicum of Reason. :nerd:

But what we see is that most folk get stuck at the first step - a symmetry breaking that only speaks of two directions at the one scale of being. — apokrisis

A symmetry break does indeed begin with a duality, as in the mitosis of a cell : one becomes two. But that's just the first step. For example, a single stem cell has the potential to evolve into a variety of functional cells. The antique notion of a "swerve" was just an attempt to explain how a linear process could become non-linear. For example light always travels in a straight line --- until it encounters curved space, that is. :joke:

If light bends/deflects due to gravity, then why do we say that light travels in a straight line? :
https://www.quora.com/If-light-bends-deflects-due-to-gravity-then-why-do-we-say-that-light-travels-in-a-straight-line

So your story predicts neither what physics has figured out about the start of the Universe, nor what sociology has figured out about the organisation of biological collectives. — apokrisis

I'm sorry. But you won't have a clue what my "story" predicts, until you have heard the whole story. The Enformationism website is just the first chapter. The rest of the story is told in an ongoing series of blogs. I think you are confusing my 21st century creation myth with the traditional stories of creation, that are steeped in Magic instead of Science. :halo:

Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/

Ultimate Enforming Principle : http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page24.html

Productive metaphysics instead continues on from this kind of "dualism yearning to be monism" to a fully-broken dichotomy - one with the asymmetry of a hierarchical or triadically-developed scale. The division has to be complementary - mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive - so that all its causes are to be found within it. No need for transcendence. — apokrisis

In the Enformationism worldview, the Big Bang "division" was also "complementary" (BothAnd). The only "transcendence" is in the sense that a Programmer transcends the Program. You might say that the metaphysical Intention (Will) of the Programmer is embodied in the physical expression of the evolutionary program. To wit : Mental Information (Idea, Form, Concept), is transformed into Causal EnFormAction (Energy), which then transforms into the physical expression of the original concept (Matter, Sculpture). Just as a pool shooter is not on the table, only the First Cause transcends the Effect : an evolving chain of Causation. Can your "triadic" scale explain the Big Bang without reference to some prior Agency? Could our finite evolving universe be it's own Cause? :smirk:

PS__An eternal circular process has all its "causes within it". But it's going nowhere. By contrast, a linear one-way process, from hot Big Bang to cold Big Sigh (heat death), must have an origin, a First Cause, a Prime Mover -- a Reason for Being.

Does your approach have any connection to Wolfram’s cellular automata theory or Deutsch’s constructor theory? There is a lot of maths in this area - genetic algorithms, edge of chaos, critical systems, etc. Do you ground things in some model?

Why was there a big bang? To let the universe develop?

↪Gnomon
Does your approach have any connection to Wolfram’s cellular automata theory or Deutsch’s constructor theory? There is a lot of maths in this area - genetic algorithms, edge of chaos, critical systems, etc. Do you ground things in some model? — apokrisis

No. I am not a scientist, nor a mathematician. I'm just an amateur philosopher, who created his own personal worldview -- for his own private personal use -- based on a layman's unfettered alchemy of Quantum Queerness and Information Ubiquity. My Enformationism philosophy is not grounded in any particular model of physics or cosmology. Instead, it combines elements of a variety of both ancient & modern models, and both philosophical & physical concepts. But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. The key influences of my model can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and the conceptual offshoots of those seeds have survived the weeding-out process of both Natural and Cultural Evolution.

Speaking of which, Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest" applies, not just to physical organisms, but also to metaphysical concepts. So, the ancient intuition of cosmic Teleology, has been refined in the forge of scientific evolution, and currently takes the form of Eutaxiology. That's why the Enformationism thesis is not a religious worldview, despite the inclusion of the notion of a "Creator" or "Programmer". The logical necessity for such "First Causes" comes not from divine revelation, but from philosophical reasoning and inference. Even after several thousand years of scientific maturation, the basic logic still applies to any space-time process, and to meta-physical thinking. If the Enformationism thesis is "grounded" in any model, it would be the recent revelation of Matter-Energy-Information equivalence. And that equation crosses the artificial boundaries between Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious worldviews. :nerd:


Eutaxiology (from the Greek eu – good, and tax – order) is the philosophical study of order and design. It is distinguished from teleology in that it does not focus on the purpose or goal of a given structure or process, merely the degree and complexity of the structure or process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutaxiology

The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
Landauer’s principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical.
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

Inside knowledge: Is information the only thing that exists? :
Physics suggests information is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time – the problems start when we try to work out what that means
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431191-500-inside-knowledge-is-information-the-only-thing-that-exists/

:cry:

If the Enformationism thesis is "grounded" in any model, it would be the recent revelation of Matter-Energy-Information equivalence. And that equation crosses the artificial boundaries between Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious worldviews. :nerd: — Gnomon

:up: It's the way of the future my friend! Cellular biology will bring Panpsychism home.

Cellular biology will bring Panpsychism home. — Pop

:rofl:

Speaking of which, Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest" applies, not just to physical organisms, but also to metaphysical concepts. — Gnomon

The problem I see with that is that the sole criteria for success in evolutionary theory is just to survive and to procreate. That's why 'evolutionary ethics' can only ever amount to either utilitarianism or pragmatism, there is no sense of being an over-arching purpose or aim. None of which bothers non-rational animals, as they're never capable of asking themselves why they must suffer and die; but humans, having reached the threshold of self-awareness, cannot but be tormented by that awareness.

In cosmic terms I see the evolution of sentient rational beings as the way that the Universe realises horizons of being that it could never otherwise see. Einstein wrote in a letter of condolence to a greiving father 'A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.'

So 'the sage' or the 'awakened being' is in some sense the culmination of that whole process of cosmic evolution. That is something made explicit only in the Indian soteriological traditions although you find hints of the idea in Greek philosophy.

But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. — Gnomon

It’s fine to have your own private metaphysics I guess. But I did think you were aiming to go beyond this kind of simplistic understanding of “information”.

Sure, there is some good reason fundamental physics has shifted its notion of measurement towards entropy and information as basic quantities. This shows an acceptance that “matter” isn’t primal but just a story of generalised potential that has become structurally constrained. It shifts the maths of description towards a probabilistic view - the emergent statistical patterns of systems composed of countable independent degrees of freedom.

And this then couples with the shift toward ontic structural realism - the view that symmetry-breaking in particular describes the fundamental invariant structure of nature. It is symmetry maths that in-forms Being in such a way that it can come to be measured in terms of information theory.

So there is a danger in being dazzled by physics having a flashy new ruler. We have an abstraction - a degree of freedom. And we can apply that in Procrustean fashion to count anything.

But that only then makes sense to the degree the acts of measurement are framed within some specific theory about the global structural constraints which are producing this local grain of countable events or material actions.

So that is why I ask about that side of your private metaphysics. It sounds like you want to invoke some kind of cellular automata or genetic algorithm approach as the cause of the structural invariance found in Nature. But I think history is showing that kind of thinking to be too “computer science-y”.

Particle physics has been hugely successful using the maths of permutation symmetry as its theory about Nature’s structural invariance. Information is likely better understood in that specific context.

The problem I see with that is that the sole criteria for success in evolutionary theory is just to survive and to procreate. — Wayfarer

An evolutionary or developmental view of metaphysics accepts that the basis of reality is an instability that has to become stabilised. The Cosmos exists not because it was brutely given in a materialistic fashion but because it became structured in ways that formed it to have a generalised persistence.

So Darwinian evolution is just an extension of a process or structural view of metaphysics generally. The Cosmos that exists is the one that worked best in the sense of achieving a stable persistence.

So 'the sage' or the 'awakened being' is in some sense the culmination of that whole process of cosmic evolution. — Wayfarer

Cosmology simply demands a capacity to persist. So sentience pops up as something secondary to the primary telos of being - ie: surviving.

Thermodynamics then gives an adequate reason for sentience to evolve. The Big Bang universe fell out of equilbrium due to certain glitches like the Higgs field. Ugly lumps of gravitating mass began to clutter up the place. They tried to radiate away the clumps by fusion - the dissipative structure we call a star. But stars eventually collapse and explode in supernova, scattering even more unpleasant crud - the heavy elements - across the universe.

You get planets - hard core stellar waste. Biological sentience then evolves in places like ocean floor thermal events, doing a little bit of cleaning up in terms of eating rocks, reducing matter back towards the heat which can finally rejoin the cosmic background radiation.

But bacteria becomes complex life. The biofilm becomes Gaian in its ability to regulate the climate of the Earth to its liking.

But fortunately for the Cosmos’s entropy-based telos, all these forms of secondary structure - from stars to humans - are minor and fleeting parts of its general expanding-cooling story.

There is just no way - looking back from the eternal Heat Death - that awakened minds were some kind of culmination of the cosmic reason for its being. :grin:

if you fix your gaze on the realm of flux then that's where your rewards will lie, such as they are.

//hey I'm just perusing a 1967 book by Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. This book is called The Biology of Ultimate Concern. Turns out that Dobzhansky, despite being one of the architects of Dawkin's ballyhoed evolutionary synthesis, was quite a religious guy and speculative philosopher. A snippet.

Darwinian evolution is just an extension of a process or structural view of metaphysics generally — apokrisis

I submit that Darwinism as generally understood, doesn't have any bearing on metaphysics as such. It's one of the characteristics of current culture that everything must be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of Darwinian theory and judged accordingly. It is in this regard that Alfred Russel Wallace dissented from Darwin's philosophical attitude, as did C S Peirce:

In 1893 Peirce used the word "agapism" for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Sr. which he had absorbed long before, Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring, and as God, as Love, does even and especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn **. Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called the process "agapasm", such that: "The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose." Peirce held that there are three such principles and three associated modes of evolution:

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism." — Agapism

I must say I find 'agapism' a dreadful word, although I appreciate the meaning.

Many critics have noted a resemblance between the Christian agapé and the Buddhist 'bodhicitta', notwithstanding the absence of personal God in the latter.

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. — Wayfarer

Now we are looking at evolution as a function of information, where information is the interaction of systems - similar to mechanical necessity, but a little more spiffy, wouldn't you say?

No, as I have explained repeatedly, ‘information’ is too poorly defined to be meaningful in the context. Incidentally that quote is not something I said, it was a quote from another source.

Physics suggests information is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time – the problems start when we try to work out what that means — Gnomon

the Platonic expression 'aporia' immediately springs to mind reading that New Scientist article you've linked to (and hey, I'm a subscriber, although I do often ask myself why, as it's a very expensive subscription).

There is no such thing as 'information' simpliciter. There is only information about something, or information that means something, in some context. The idea of there being 'pure information' is just complete confusion, in my view.

As thrashed out in one of the other threads about this topic, this whole 'information craze' starts with Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics, where he says 'information is information, not matter or energy.' He said something like, no metaphysics which doesn't admit this can survive. Cue the rush to seize on this new so-called 'building block of everything' - not least because Weiner is one of the architects of 'the information age', so what could be more appropriate! But as that New Scientist article so adroitly points out, the result is confusion piled upon confusion.

‘information’ is too poorly defined to be meaningful in the context. — Wayfarer

Information is the interaction of form. Or, information = evolutionary interaction.

But as that New Scientist article so adroitly points out, the result is confusion piled upon confusion. — Wayfarer

Not for information philosophers. The result is clearer by the moment.
Of course in Yogic logic, this is ancient history. :smile:

Information is the interaction of form. — Pop

That is not the definition of ‘information’, That is your definition.

‘The many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common’ ~ Heraclitus.

I must say I find 'agapism' a dreadful word, although I appreciate the meaning. — Wayfarer

Have you read this review from Soren Brier?

It could be better written, but it gives a sweeping coverage of what we’ve been discussing.

‘The many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common’ ~ Heraclitus. — Wayfarer

Zinger of the week. :up:

:up: I'll add it to the list!

//hey that's a terrific paper, right up my street. (I've seen Henry Stapp speak, that passage from him is spot on, in my view, I'll read that paper too). You can really see how the kind of understanding that crystallised in the 1960's (although with roots going back a long time beforehand) is now becoming more acceptable to the mainstream. Very heartening. I also like the way the author links between Eastern philosophy and Peirce's semiotics. :ok: //

That is not the definition of ‘information’, That is your definition.

‘The many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common’ ~ Heraclitus. — Wayfarer

Sounds like naïve realism to me? :chin:

It is a sadness to see, given we know that everything is information, that there are still people who are clueless as to what information is. :smile: