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

  Post 116.  October 4, 2021 . . . . . continued

   The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

   Anthropocentric versus Cosmocentric?

There he goes again, inferring “design” from a fortuitous sequence of coincidences. But most ancient wise men likewise made the same induction, from much less detailed evidence. “Aristotelian science was based upon presuppositions of an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design”. Ari and Plato preferred the less anthropo-morphic term “Logos” to the more popular concept of super-human gods and formless Fates meddling in the affairs of men. Also, “from the idea of a ‘Final Cause’ there emerged the Aristotelian idea of an internal perfecting principle or ‘entelechy’.⁹” Which is similar to what the Enformationism thesis refers to as “Enformy”¹⁰. So, the notion of Nature as a logical process of evolution has always appealed to deep thinkers. Unfortunately, the idea of humanoid gods & goddesses has usually been more appealing to the common mind. That’s why to this day, most religions retain both romantic mythical stories of Olympian super-heroes, alongside the more prosaic technical theories of theologians.

During the Enlightenment era, a new way of explaining the logical organization of the natural world, without pandering to the vulgar popular imagination, emerged. “Descartes . . . was convinced that the primary qualities of the Universe were mathematical in nature. . . . the Cartesian world-view was ‘Deistic’; that is, it maintained that order was inherent in the properties of inorganic material and endowed at the moment of creation; thereafter all operates by mechanical causes alone”. Ironically, today, we have even more reason to reach that conclusion. The causal force that flows through the world, to re-organize it, is now called “Energy”. But a more inclusive concept is what I call EnFormAction¹¹. Meanwhile, another Enlightenment thinker, “Voltaire is perhaps most succinctly categorized as an anti-Epicurean, anti-Christian, Newtonian Deist. . . . Yet Voltaire was a scathing opponent of anthropocentric design”. Which is understandable to some degree, because humanity is just one small part of the cosmic whole. So, it is short-sighted to call this self-organizing cybernetic system “man-centered”. Perhaps, a better term would be “Cosmo-centric”; meaning that the system itself is the focus of creation. And maybe the process of growth & maturation is more important than the ultimate end product.

Voltaire’s contemporary, skeptical philosopher David Hume, following the new deductive & reductive scientific methodology, reasoned that “the Design Argument is unscientific”. Which is true, because it is an inductive & holistic form of reasoning, which allows inference to leap over gaps in knowledge. But then, Inference, from known to unknown, is always based on incomplete information. That’s why Bayesian Inference¹² is now used to update the probability of an induction, as new evidence begins to fill-in the gaps. Ironically, even Hume “appears to display a vitalist¹³ view, believing matter to possess some intrinsic self-ordering property”. Today, “Information” has begun to replace 1> Atomism as the universal substance, and 2> Vitalism as the self-organizing force in evolution.

                    Post 116 continued . . . . Click Next

12. Bayesian Inference :
a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
Note – The Bayesian method is still a form of induction from incomplete information, but it allows for increasing certainty as more evidence, physical & philosophical, is revealed. It’s also called Subjective Probability.

13. Hume’s Vitalism :
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09608780601087962?journalCode=rbjh20
Note – The notion of Vitalism is ancient, going back to Plato’s Logos and beyond. But Enlightenment Science rejected that theory as a name without a referent. They preferred a more deterministic term, such as “Energy” . But the referent of that word has only become more mysterious since the advent of Quantum Indeterminacy. Because the source of Energy is now pictured as an invisible “field” of potential.

9. Entelechy :
The realization of potential. –
 the supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.
___Oxford

10. Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

11. EnFormAction :
A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force (aka : Divine Will) of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

The Anthropic

Cosmological

Principle

John D. Barrow

& Frank Tipler

1996

“. . . A series of mysterious coincidences between the numerical values of the the fundamental constants of Nature. The possibility of our own existence seems to hinge precariously upon these coincidences..”

The Thinker

ENFORMATIONISM