"We do not learn our way out of this world, but can only learn our way into deeper, more intimate, more correlate embodiment of the intelligibility of the Universe" -- this constitutes a goal for a real practice, no? And if evolution is a universal *learning* process, than wouldn't this be the "direction" it follows? How does this change our conception of "information" as fundamental ....
What could that even *mean*? for the atom not to transcend itself in becoming human... rather it is a process of becoming *more of itself*, i.e. becoming *real* ... That's where the insight lies, IMO...
Eager for that conversation. I think there are two big bugs in this conversation: 1) theory of entropic universe and 2) Darwinian attitude ... they plague all the best work, including Michael Levin (who is attached to the Darwinian attitude). I think you rightly called the other out the entropic fallacy here " It is somewhat ironic, then, that the whole shebang is supposedly governed by entropy."
I have offered an altnernative theory of cosmic "growth" with my (albeit naive stab) at A Theory of Complex Potential States, which can simply be understood as the entropic universe and the Darwinian attitude both stem from the fact (as Whitehead complained) we only count actuals and not potentials.
In my book (forthcoming) I will argue that when we look into the past, either with cosmological or biological-evolutionary orientation, the potentials that were in play (the potential field as a whole) gets substracted out of the calculations and observations. How then do we account for them? The "singularity" before the universe has maximum latency (creativity), minimun potency (existence) which means that it would look like "nothing." I suspect that dark matter and dark energy represent the missing, unobservable "links." The situation is much like what Levin is finding out -- that what the cells are doing are choreographed by bio-electric fields, the complex potential state in which they maneuver (navigate morphogenic space), communicate, and generate new information. Something like that will trump entropy in the cosmological sciences, I believe. Eventually, we might be imagining cosmological and biological evolution more like radiant centers that grow (harking back to what you wrote above)
And yeah, let’s make Alfred Russel Wallace great again! Bateson was convinced his rendering of natural selection in terms of the regulatory governor on a steam engine was the most far-reaching idea to emerge in the 19th century. Unlike the Darwinians he was convinced some deeper telos was also at play in the evolutionary process.
Me too! I am so impressed by how Brendan can write so much good stuff so fast. For me, the sentences pour out like cold mollasses. But they are coming.... Thanks. I'm counting on you to proof read in so far that I do not want to bastardize Whitehead ... even as I put a spin on him. You've already helped out a lot!
I am going to take a closer look at this, Matt. But my first impressions suggest that there is a direct connection to Ruth Kastner's Relativistic Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics--NOT quantum 'mechanics' because quantum science can be viewed as an undoing of the mechanistic formalism as a scientific model, recognizing that what is deep and central is the process of informational exchange between entities, as well as a connection to the recent paper by Jaeger et al looking at the non-computational nature of 'relevance realization' in the functionality of organisms, and how this all relates in a deep, fundamental way, not only to the processual philosophy of organism of AN Whitehead, but also to the relational biology of Robert Rosen. All of this, in my mind is critical in making a very clear distinction between the functionality of living organisms and the limited entailment capacity of relational systems that conform to the mechanistic formalism--ie. 'machines'. In my mind, this distinction that Rosen made using the mathematical theory of categories to show that living organisms are categorically distinct from fabricated machines, is of profound significance for many different reasons that I won't go into here. Other than to say that I am now involved in co-editing an issue of the journal, Pari Perspectives, which is the journal of the Pari Center ( http://www.paricenter.com/ ) on the general theme of 'Life Beyond Mechanism. Undoing the Legacy of the Machine Metaphor' ... if you or anyone you may know might have an interest in contributing an essay to this special issue of Pari Perspectives, please reach out to me and let me know! Thank you.
<<. Physicists measure the facts. Measurable material facts are the consequences of energetic activities. Getting at these activities means metaphysically generalizing beyond the physics of space-time and matter-energy. Both are emergent from an “ether of events,”>>
It is true but it is also true that these physical concepts: energy, space-time, matter are very recently invented concepts which have clear limitations. They are not part of reality but usefull concepts mapping reality. So they never emerged in reality but emerged as our concepts. And they are obviously too limited. For example the concept of Energy which Noether demonstrated is equivalent to the fixity of the law of Nature relatively to time is obviously too limited for the period of the Universe where these laws developed. Energy as a concept is too limited to enter this period. There is obviously noit conservation of Energy, nor even a usefull concept of Energy in any instance of creation. Creating is cast out of a world of concepts with the conservation of Energy. Space-time which is the foundational concept of this mode of thinking we call science, concept mostly developed by Galileo and Descartes is the both the foundation of this mode of thinking and also false, in fact the greatest illusion of shadow cast by this mode of thinking. It emerges throw the geometrisation of time. This allow to geometrise all dynamic events into a geometrical cimetary. What is lost here is the most obvious reality that we live into an eternal NOW. Both the past and the future only exists in the NOW but are clearly distinct within it. Hard to see this evidence if you do not walk throw all the steps into which we enter the scientific rabbit hole where the new space-time got established as our Mind. manacles. No chance to return to reality beyound this limited scientific mode of thinking if we do not recover what is evident on the live NOW.
<<It is somewhat ironic, then, that the whole shebang is supposedly governed by entropy.>>
Entropy emerge from the law of big number and describe what happen when one destroy stuff or when gas mixed, what happen when disorganisation take place and chaos arised. It is the law of what happen when there is nothing organising. The law of death.
<<In other words, physical processes do not just blindly repeat themselves until they disperse into nothingness. They grow. Insight accumulates. Intelligence blooms.>>
First there is no such thing as a physical processes. You have bifurcated into a physical mode of thinking. Once you bifurcated, they is no going back and trying to supplement what you got rid off by bifucating.
<<For Whitehead, the cumulative character of evolutionary time means matter-energy must have been mind imbued from the beginning.>>
Two mode of thinking next to each other. The first cannot be supplemented. One has to tell the story in the living mode of thinking, we all have built-in.
<<But I think his physical explanations of meaning still leave many metaphysical questions unanswered.>>
A physical explanation or any scientific explanation has excluded meaning from the start of what this mode of thinking IS. If meaning could be explained then it would be the proof that there is none and that we are dead machines.
<<It takes a great deal of careful attention to our living experience to avoid substituting abstract models for what we are actually aware of in perception.>>
This is the only way to touch directly on reality. It is not a theoretical flee from reality into a secondary world of explanations. Tuff discipline, easy to slip out into explanations but discipline gradually improve us. What make it difficult is that contrary to all other living creatures on this planets, we have two parallel stream of consciousness which sometime are separate and most often mixed and it is so well integrated that we do not know when we switch to one or the other or when it is mixed. The practice of meditation helped for this but also very careful phenomenal observation of Nature and of everything in your life. As a philosopher, this is the primary material: YOUR LIFE. Thinking/language are the secondary self-generated conscious stream which is the evolution of the mammalian dreams. As long one cannot carefully separate the streams then it is very hard to really self-observed and thus KNOW THYSELF and thus KNOW the UNiverse.
<<Whitehead protests against the bifurcation of nature into primary measurable or mathematizable stuff and accidental psychic additions, reminding us that the only truly physical world we’ve ever known or could know is the one we can feel, touch, taste, smell, hear, and see. The math must mean something.>>
Already in the way he expresses himself here by using the expression “physical world” , he has himself bifurcated. Thought throw the scientific mode of thinking we call physics, the world become ceases to exist as a whole and become what can enter this mode of thinking we call physics. The very scientific mode of thinking is from its foundation a bifurcation of our thinking into a scientific mode of thinking versus our “normal” mode of thinking that is reflected in our ordinary language. The bifurcation in fact already pre-exist in the very structure of all human language into what is inanimate and what is animate. The inanimate is acted upon by the living agent and these acts are described by “verb”. No inanimate entity can be the subject or the agent performing an action. Studies in young babies have shown they gradually learned to make this distinction by about the age of 6 months. What the natural sciences, not only physics, are intrinsically confined what the inanimate relational world view on the world. We have to use the word “WORLD” without any qualification otherwise we bifurcate in the filter of this qualification. We have to interpret the sciences for what they are: inanimate filtered reality. There is no non-reductive sciences. Inanimate reduction is the nature of this mode of thinking.
<<Wether or not God existed in the beginning, the World has since created God.>>
Whatever philosophical system one invent in the West has a concept of God in it, it should be the creator of the Universe. I am not saying one cannot create a different Master deity in his philosophical system. But for the sake of respecting the tradition of this particular word “God”, especially the Christian tradition , one has to use the word God with the bare minimal concept of God as the Creator of the Universe. We should respect the traditional meaning of words. This is not to say that one cannot put nuances and thus reasonably expand on these concepts, this is the very nature of a philosophical and religious tradition of constantly doing this. Here is the way I personally nuanced this traditional concept of God. I change it to mean “Creating” and I do not separate it from his creation, the Universe. The later word means “All that Exists”. Is’nt God Exist? If we answer yes then we have to conclude then he is part of the Universe. Then how is it “The creator of the Universe”? The christian tradition always maintain the distinction of God with his creation, The World, The Universe. I think there is a subtle distinction which the tradition never made explicit. A distinction between two type of existence: the stably existing versus the Unstably existing. And once you include this fundamental two type of existence or reality as integral to any living entity : A Living Entity (not limited to a biological living entity) is a self-creating-preserving Interaction. The stably existing part of the Interaction has no self-creating , is in a sense as a machine, it is stably existing but in itself would very quickly face a situation which it cannot responded because no stably existing thing can respond to all possible situations. Since at every moment, a situation where it needs to create something new into its stably existing structure, it has to be self-creating. Traditional notion of learning does not equate this notion since it pre-suppose the organism to have everything within itself to do the learning for all possible situations, which is impossible. A real creating needs to take place when this is the case. This self-creating cannot stably existing, because if it was the case, it would contradict it is self-creating. This self-creating is the consciousness of the living entity.
The Universe by definition has to be self-creating since there is nothing else. This is the definition of the term. And we know it is an evolution or more exactly a developing self-preserving stably existing reality. So it fit the definition of a living entity. It is thus appropriate to call the self-creating core of this living entity: God. Now lets do a thought experiment based on what the science of cosmology tell us about the history of the cosmos. Lets leave how it explains this history, but lets simply look at what it is observed to be. The more we goes in the past and there is less and less stably existing realities to be observed. They we get to the time when the Universe de-ionized itself and let light travel and which we can observed today in the CMB. Physics tells us there was such and such particles at that time, and only the most simple elements in the periodic table. No galaxies yet, no complex atoms, no planet, no stars but few high density of matters. Then what is before this , we know that the density was much greater, and the more in the past we go, it also increased and experiments in particle accelerators shows us what type of particles exist at these higher level of energy density and the more we climb the energy density level and the less there are stably existing particles and the shorter are their existence and we know that at some point our existing theory of quantum field theory and General relativity cannot be used anymore since they are only approximation which are valid only at lower energy density level, but there is certainly better theories valid at these levels but it is likely that the number of stably existing entity diminished and that the laws of physics at these higher density levels are more and more simple, then when we keep climbing the energy density ladder almost nothing stably existing will remain and the Universe will almost be the same as its self-creating or God. So God created the world is true and God is part of the world is true and God is not the world is true as long one recognize the fundamental distinction in between stably existing and self-creating.
When you say 'God and the world recreate in one another' - what do you mean by God? It feels like 'as above so below' or a sort of dualism. Do you not think God is outside of time?
I’m assuming the process-relational understanding of the divine nature as dipolar, with an eternal pole and a historical pole. God’s complete nature includes the world-process. The growth of the world contributes to the divine nature. God is enriched by creation.
"We do not learn our way out of this world, but can only learn our way into deeper, more intimate, more correlate embodiment of the intelligibility of the Universe" -- this constitutes a goal for a real practice, no? And if evolution is a universal *learning* process, than wouldn't this be the "direction" it follows? How does this change our conception of "information" as fundamental ....
What could that even *mean*? for the atom not to transcend itself in becoming human... rather it is a process of becoming *more of itself*, i.e. becoming *real* ... That's where the insight lies, IMO...
Eager for that conversation. I think there are two big bugs in this conversation: 1) theory of entropic universe and 2) Darwinian attitude ... they plague all the best work, including Michael Levin (who is attached to the Darwinian attitude). I think you rightly called the other out the entropic fallacy here " It is somewhat ironic, then, that the whole shebang is supposedly governed by entropy."
I have offered an altnernative theory of cosmic "growth" with my (albeit naive stab) at A Theory of Complex Potential States, which can simply be understood as the entropic universe and the Darwinian attitude both stem from the fact (as Whitehead complained) we only count actuals and not potentials.
In my book (forthcoming) I will argue that when we look into the past, either with cosmological or biological-evolutionary orientation, the potentials that were in play (the potential field as a whole) gets substracted out of the calculations and observations. How then do we account for them? The "singularity" before the universe has maximum latency (creativity), minimun potency (existence) which means that it would look like "nothing." I suspect that dark matter and dark energy represent the missing, unobservable "links." The situation is much like what Levin is finding out -- that what the cells are doing are choreographed by bio-electric fields, the complex potential state in which they maneuver (navigate morphogenic space), communicate, and generate new information. Something like that will trump entropy in the cosmological sciences, I believe. Eventually, we might be imagining cosmological and biological evolution more like radiant centers that grow (harking back to what you wrote above)
And yeah, let’s make Alfred Russel Wallace great again! Bateson was convinced his rendering of natural selection in terms of the regulatory governor on a steam engine was the most far-reaching idea to emerge in the 19th century. Unlike the Darwinians he was convinced some deeper telos was also at play in the evolutionary process.
And I’m eager to read your book!
Me too! I am so impressed by how Brendan can write so much good stuff so fast. For me, the sentences pour out like cold mollasses. But they are coming.... Thanks. I'm counting on you to proof read in so far that I do not want to bastardize Whitehead ... even as I put a spin on him. You've already helped out a lot!
I am going to take a closer look at this, Matt. But my first impressions suggest that there is a direct connection to Ruth Kastner's Relativistic Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics--NOT quantum 'mechanics' because quantum science can be viewed as an undoing of the mechanistic formalism as a scientific model, recognizing that what is deep and central is the process of informational exchange between entities, as well as a connection to the recent paper by Jaeger et al looking at the non-computational nature of 'relevance realization' in the functionality of organisms, and how this all relates in a deep, fundamental way, not only to the processual philosophy of organism of AN Whitehead, but also to the relational biology of Robert Rosen. All of this, in my mind is critical in making a very clear distinction between the functionality of living organisms and the limited entailment capacity of relational systems that conform to the mechanistic formalism--ie. 'machines'. In my mind, this distinction that Rosen made using the mathematical theory of categories to show that living organisms are categorically distinct from fabricated machines, is of profound significance for many different reasons that I won't go into here. Other than to say that I am now involved in co-editing an issue of the journal, Pari Perspectives, which is the journal of the Pari Center ( http://www.paricenter.com/ ) on the general theme of 'Life Beyond Mechanism. Undoing the Legacy of the Machine Metaphor' ... if you or anyone you may know might have an interest in contributing an essay to this special issue of Pari Perspectives, please reach out to me and let me know! Thank you.
You're on fire with this one, Matt! Nicely done. I'm excited to hear your discussion with Brendan.
<<. Physicists measure the facts. Measurable material facts are the consequences of energetic activities. Getting at these activities means metaphysically generalizing beyond the physics of space-time and matter-energy. Both are emergent from an “ether of events,”>>
It is true but it is also true that these physical concepts: energy, space-time, matter are very recently invented concepts which have clear limitations. They are not part of reality but usefull concepts mapping reality. So they never emerged in reality but emerged as our concepts. And they are obviously too limited. For example the concept of Energy which Noether demonstrated is equivalent to the fixity of the law of Nature relatively to time is obviously too limited for the period of the Universe where these laws developed. Energy as a concept is too limited to enter this period. There is obviously noit conservation of Energy, nor even a usefull concept of Energy in any instance of creation. Creating is cast out of a world of concepts with the conservation of Energy. Space-time which is the foundational concept of this mode of thinking we call science, concept mostly developed by Galileo and Descartes is the both the foundation of this mode of thinking and also false, in fact the greatest illusion of shadow cast by this mode of thinking. It emerges throw the geometrisation of time. This allow to geometrise all dynamic events into a geometrical cimetary. What is lost here is the most obvious reality that we live into an eternal NOW. Both the past and the future only exists in the NOW but are clearly distinct within it. Hard to see this evidence if you do not walk throw all the steps into which we enter the scientific rabbit hole where the new space-time got established as our Mind. manacles. No chance to return to reality beyound this limited scientific mode of thinking if we do not recover what is evident on the live NOW.
<<It is somewhat ironic, then, that the whole shebang is supposedly governed by entropy.>>
Entropy emerge from the law of big number and describe what happen when one destroy stuff or when gas mixed, what happen when disorganisation take place and chaos arised. It is the law of what happen when there is nothing organising. The law of death.
<<In other words, physical processes do not just blindly repeat themselves until they disperse into nothingness. They grow. Insight accumulates. Intelligence blooms.>>
First there is no such thing as a physical processes. You have bifurcated into a physical mode of thinking. Once you bifurcated, they is no going back and trying to supplement what you got rid off by bifucating.
<<For Whitehead, the cumulative character of evolutionary time means matter-energy must have been mind imbued from the beginning.>>
Two mode of thinking next to each other. The first cannot be supplemented. One has to tell the story in the living mode of thinking, we all have built-in.
<<But I think his physical explanations of meaning still leave many metaphysical questions unanswered.>>
A physical explanation or any scientific explanation has excluded meaning from the start of what this mode of thinking IS. If meaning could be explained then it would be the proof that there is none and that we are dead machines.
<<It takes a great deal of careful attention to our living experience to avoid substituting abstract models for what we are actually aware of in perception.>>
This is the only way to touch directly on reality. It is not a theoretical flee from reality into a secondary world of explanations. Tuff discipline, easy to slip out into explanations but discipline gradually improve us. What make it difficult is that contrary to all other living creatures on this planets, we have two parallel stream of consciousness which sometime are separate and most often mixed and it is so well integrated that we do not know when we switch to one or the other or when it is mixed. The practice of meditation helped for this but also very careful phenomenal observation of Nature and of everything in your life. As a philosopher, this is the primary material: YOUR LIFE. Thinking/language are the secondary self-generated conscious stream which is the evolution of the mammalian dreams. As long one cannot carefully separate the streams then it is very hard to really self-observed and thus KNOW THYSELF and thus KNOW the UNiverse.
<<Whitehead protests against the bifurcation of nature into primary measurable or mathematizable stuff and accidental psychic additions, reminding us that the only truly physical world we’ve ever known or could know is the one we can feel, touch, taste, smell, hear, and see. The math must mean something.>>
Already in the way he expresses himself here by using the expression “physical world” , he has himself bifurcated. Thought throw the scientific mode of thinking we call physics, the world become ceases to exist as a whole and become what can enter this mode of thinking we call physics. The very scientific mode of thinking is from its foundation a bifurcation of our thinking into a scientific mode of thinking versus our “normal” mode of thinking that is reflected in our ordinary language. The bifurcation in fact already pre-exist in the very structure of all human language into what is inanimate and what is animate. The inanimate is acted upon by the living agent and these acts are described by “verb”. No inanimate entity can be the subject or the agent performing an action. Studies in young babies have shown they gradually learned to make this distinction by about the age of 6 months. What the natural sciences, not only physics, are intrinsically confined what the inanimate relational world view on the world. We have to use the word “WORLD” without any qualification otherwise we bifurcate in the filter of this qualification. We have to interpret the sciences for what they are: inanimate filtered reality. There is no non-reductive sciences. Inanimate reduction is the nature of this mode of thinking.
Sikkens Cetol® BL Deck & W
<<Wether or not God existed in the beginning, the World has since created God.>>
Whatever philosophical system one invent in the West has a concept of God in it, it should be the creator of the Universe. I am not saying one cannot create a different Master deity in his philosophical system. But for the sake of respecting the tradition of this particular word “God”, especially the Christian tradition , one has to use the word God with the bare minimal concept of God as the Creator of the Universe. We should respect the traditional meaning of words. This is not to say that one cannot put nuances and thus reasonably expand on these concepts, this is the very nature of a philosophical and religious tradition of constantly doing this. Here is the way I personally nuanced this traditional concept of God. I change it to mean “Creating” and I do not separate it from his creation, the Universe. The later word means “All that Exists”. Is’nt God Exist? If we answer yes then we have to conclude then he is part of the Universe. Then how is it “The creator of the Universe”? The christian tradition always maintain the distinction of God with his creation, The World, The Universe. I think there is a subtle distinction which the tradition never made explicit. A distinction between two type of existence: the stably existing versus the Unstably existing. And once you include this fundamental two type of existence or reality as integral to any living entity : A Living Entity (not limited to a biological living entity) is a self-creating-preserving Interaction. The stably existing part of the Interaction has no self-creating , is in a sense as a machine, it is stably existing but in itself would very quickly face a situation which it cannot responded because no stably existing thing can respond to all possible situations. Since at every moment, a situation where it needs to create something new into its stably existing structure, it has to be self-creating. Traditional notion of learning does not equate this notion since it pre-suppose the organism to have everything within itself to do the learning for all possible situations, which is impossible. A real creating needs to take place when this is the case. This self-creating cannot stably existing, because if it was the case, it would contradict it is self-creating. This self-creating is the consciousness of the living entity.
The Universe by definition has to be self-creating since there is nothing else. This is the definition of the term. And we know it is an evolution or more exactly a developing self-preserving stably existing reality. So it fit the definition of a living entity. It is thus appropriate to call the self-creating core of this living entity: God. Now lets do a thought experiment based on what the science of cosmology tell us about the history of the cosmos. Lets leave how it explains this history, but lets simply look at what it is observed to be. The more we goes in the past and there is less and less stably existing realities to be observed. They we get to the time when the Universe de-ionized itself and let light travel and which we can observed today in the CMB. Physics tells us there was such and such particles at that time, and only the most simple elements in the periodic table. No galaxies yet, no complex atoms, no planet, no stars but few high density of matters. Then what is before this , we know that the density was much greater, and the more in the past we go, it also increased and experiments in particle accelerators shows us what type of particles exist at these higher level of energy density and the more we climb the energy density level and the less there are stably existing particles and the shorter are their existence and we know that at some point our existing theory of quantum field theory and General relativity cannot be used anymore since they are only approximation which are valid only at lower energy density level, but there is certainly better theories valid at these levels but it is likely that the number of stably existing entity diminished and that the laws of physics at these higher density levels are more and more simple, then when we keep climbing the energy density ladder almost nothing stably existing will remain and the Universe will almost be the same as its self-creating or God. So God created the world is true and God is part of the world is true and God is not the world is true as long one recognize the fundamental distinction in between stably existing and self-creating.
Thanks for clarifying.
“Whether or not God existed in the beginning, the World has since created God.”
I do not see how you can make this statement in sincerity? It feels extremely slippery.
I would be interested to know in what way the “world has since created God” ?
I don’t believe that, I was characterizing what I take to be the metamodern view of God as an emergent product of collective human activity.
When you say 'God and the world recreate in one another' - what do you mean by God? It feels like 'as above so below' or a sort of dualism. Do you not think God is outside of time?
I’m assuming the process-relational understanding of the divine nature as dipolar, with an eternal pole and a historical pole. God’s complete nature includes the world-process. The growth of the world contributes to the divine nature. God is enriched by creation.
thanks. If you were to explain this to a child, how might you say it?
God suffers, too.
Who is God?