Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 107.  March 08, 2020 continued . . .

  The God Problem

   The Upward Arc of Evolution

 Bloom’s understanding of a creative universe is based on Information Theory, but not Shannon’s meaningless 1s & 0s. According to the entropy definition of Information, “everything must tend toward chaos.” But, since the cosmos is heading in the opposite direction, the author looked for a different kind of constructive creative Information. He found it in “the act of informing”, or as I call it EnFormAction. Although Information is related to positive working Energy, there is a distinction : pure energy may be merely transmitted — throughput — while Meaning must be interpreted, relative to some perspective. Like energy, raw information is binary, either positive or negative, attractive or repulsive. Everything else is a variation on that (+ or -) duality, except for meaningful information, which ranges between the polar oppositions. It’s “relational”, and has the quality of “aboutness”24. Since Meaning requires a function or application or usefulness, it also requires consciousness of relationships. Bloom says “then the amount of meaning in this cosmos is constantly increasing. Meaning defies the law of entropy.” Likewise, the “quantity” of consciousness is growing, as inter-relationships become more complex and organized.

But where is that mysterious meaning-stuff coming from? In a different context, physicist David Bohm proposed a hidden dimension in the world, that he called the “implicate order” (implicit, not explicit). And that occult realm of reality became associated with Quantum Entanglement and other strange behaviors of ordinary matter. Unfortunately, “Bohm’s concept of implicate order served as a seemingly scientific platform for the breed of wishful thinking summed up in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know and for mysticism”. That’s why my thesis treads carefully along the fringe of fringey New Age religions. So, as we explore these invisible & intangible layers of the physical world, we must restrain the imagination enough to avoid the slippery slope into unscientific magical and spiritual interpretations. That’s also why I try to use neutral terms like “information” where “consciousness” might conjure images of disembodied minds (ghosts).  

As an aside from his discussion of the Fractal nature of reality, Bloom noted “you will have to hold on tight to ride the long-term curve. The curve of what Herbert Spencer called “progress”. The curve that has defied the law of entropy . . . The curve of cosmic creativity. The curve up.”  Spencer was a Deist, so his belief in progress was based on the assumption of “benevolent design”25. But Bloom is not a believer in top-down design of any kind. Nevertheless, my deistic worldview agrees with both Spencer and Bloom that evolution is progressing in a positive direction. We can infer the upward trend, even though we can’t perceive or predict the final outcome. My general concept of bottom-up evolutionary progress, due to top-down design, is illustrated in the linked blog page and graph26. Bible believers typically view the world as devolving from a high point in the Garden of Eden. But Atheists tend to be more positive in their expectation of technological progress, if not for moral improvement, despite the absence of design. Yet Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature found plenty of evidence to support a cautiously optimistic view of the future. It seems that humanity has the ability to learn from its mistakes. But is that due to random evolution or to “benevolent design”?

                      Post 107 continued . . . click Next

Arc of
Evolution
Positive
or
Negative
?

26. Cosmic Progression :
   An illustration of upward progression from simple Singularity to complex Omega Point. Historical path plus speculative future trends.
http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page28.html

24. Aboutness :
   “The quality or fact of relating to or being about something;”
   It is a “relational stance” as defined by  Dennett. But Terrance Deacon gave it a new twist as the key to Consciousness. It’s the meaningful relationship between subject and object.

25. Benevolent Design :
   “In essence Spencer's philosophical vision was formed by a combination of deism and positivism. . . . This treated the world as a cosmos of benevolent design, and the laws of nature as the decrees of a 'Being transcendentally kind.' Natural laws were thus the statutes of a well governed universe that had been decreed by the Creator with the intention of promoting human happiness.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer

The God Problem

How a Godless Cosmos Creates

Howard Bloom

Psychology; Sociology; Political Science

The Problem of Existence