Laura said:
As I have mentioned elsewhere, my recent reading has included "Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics", eds. Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen. (Cambridge University Press 2010). The entire book is interesting, but there are just a few chapters that stand out in terms of recent discussions and comments from Cs. I've already posted one chapter in the
"Stoicism and Paul: Making a Cosmology, Anthropology-Ethics for Today" thread
HERE. Those of you who have read that chapter (whole thread) will realize the close interweaving of the Collingwood material with the Stoic Paul material, and how both seem to point to Information as the fundament of the Cosmos/Universe. I think that understanding this is very important in respect of how we think, live, and interact with others and our environment. And for those who have been reading Collingwood, a lot of things will begin to make more sense.
In this thread, I am going to post two chapters of the book that I think more directly explicate Collingwood though certainly they could also be in the Paul thread, but I think the weight falls here. In a sense, this is where Collingwood was trying to go I think. Posting the important chapters will save many from having to buy and read the entire book though certainly, if you are able, it's not a bad idea!
Some comments on Keith Ward’s chapter, “God as the ultimate informational principle”. I think he gets a few things close but wrong, but overall, he makes some really good points. His main point is solid: God or Cosmic Mind is the consciousness that holds all possibilities, and actualizes the “best” one(s) on the evaluative principle of “goodness”. The universe is “pulled” towards creating values, and embodying the highest value. There is thus purpose in the universe, and the smallest, simplest bits of stuff must be seen in terms of the end goal, as “preconditions” of the complex whole. Basically, simple particles cannot explain or predict higher complexity, but should be understood as the base which makes the complex possible. The ideal potential future “pulls” the simple, chaotic past “into shape”, into order. Those new levels of order come “with new principles, not deductively derivable from nor reducible to those of their simpler physical constituents.”
Higher levels of organization (information) result in new principles not apparent in the lower levels. Where do they come from? It doesn’t make sense to think that such principles are somehow encoded in electrons, protons and neutrons, and magically “emerge” out of nothing as things get more complex. There must be a higher reality in which these potentials are somehow “contained”, but not yet made manifest at a low level of organization.
These facts have led some scientists to speak of holistic explanation - explanation of elementary parts in terms of a greater whole - as an appropriate form of scientific explanation. Some, especially quantum physicists, extend the idea of holistic explanation to the whole universe, considered as a total physical system.
What “unifies” the total physical system? There must be a higher level of being which “contains” such a system. Sheldrake tried to answer that in regard to smaller systems, but just pushed the question back. What exactly IS a “morphic field”? Ultimately, the best answer is: it’s mind.
This bit reminded me of Collingwood’s “concrete thinking”, linking together all “facts” in a nexus of causes and effects. No fact can be separate from all other facts.
Recent hypotheses in quantum physics suggest that the whole physical universe is “entangled" in such a way that the parts of a system - even the behavior of elementary particles - cannot be fully understood without seeing their role within a greater whole: ultimately the whole of space-time.
What is the “principle of evaluation” that selects one universe over another? The best analogy is a mind. Scale that up and we get the idea of a cosmic mind. Its “goals” will determine what shape the particular universe takes: physical laws that allow for the stability of “matter”, the creation of solar systems, the creation of ecosystems, the functioning of genes, the survivability of organisms, etc.
Ward likes Plato’s “World of Forms”, but points out the problem: how can such an asbtract world influence and interact with the world of facts? (Sheldrake’s theory has the same problem, IMO.) Augustine had the best answer: the World of Forms is the Mind of God. Just as our minds conceive of purposes and can actualize them through our physical actions, God’s mind holds ultimate purposes and actualizes them through the “body” of the universe, which is made up of beings, i.e. us (but not just us).
That is why the “information" carried by DNA molecules is not information in the semantic sense. The code does provide a program for constructing an organism, but no person has constructed it and no consciousness needs to understand and apply the program. It has originated by ordinary evolutionary processes, and, like a computer program, it operates without the need for conscious interpretation.
Ward’s Darwinian bias doesn’t do him any favors. Computer programs need to be programmed by intelligence. My one criticism of the authors of this book is their total lack of knowledge about the problems inherent in Darwinist thought.
Good bit here:
Taken together, these considerations suggest the idea of a primordial consciousness that is ontologically prior to all physical realities, that contains the “coded" information for constructing any possible universe, and that can apprehend and appreciate any physical universe that exists. It would certainly be a strong reason for creating a universe that might contain finite consciousnesses that could share in appreciating, and even in creating, some of the distinctive values potential in the basic structure of the universe: for such a creation would increase the total amount and the kinds of value in existence.
…Only intelligent consciousness can have a reason for bringing about some state, and that reason would precisely be the actualization and appreciation of some as yet merely possible value.
That’s where humans fit in. It’s up to us to actualize the as yet “merely possible” value. We do it through knowledge acquisition and practice - I>X>S.
Ward is closer than he thinks here:
Consciousness and intelligent agency is generated by the central nervous system and the brain of Homo sapiens - and of course there may be further developments in knowledge and power yet to come, in other forms of organism, whether naturally or artificially produced. Rather as DNA may be seen as an informational code for constructing organisms, so the basic laws of physics - the laws of the interaction of complex as well as simple physical systems - can be seen as informational codes for developing societies of conscious intelligent agents out of simpler physical elements.
Scale it up a level: 4D bodies. Paul’s “body of spirit”. A “social memory complex”.
But then we have to see such conscious intelligence as a primary causal factor in the generation and nature of those simple physical elements. To adapt John Wheeler's suggestion a little, the simple originating phenomena of the universe may not even exist unless they are conceived, evaluated, and intentionally actualized by consciousness.
True in principle, I think. But David Ray Griffin developed this idea more fully: both cosmic mind (consciousness) and pure (physical) chaos are equally irreducible. To avoid a “Big Bang”, “creation-out-of-nothing” scenario, it makes more sense that the simplest state of matter was chaotic, lacking stable behaviors and features that persisted over time, as they do now. What we think of as the basic features of matter (particles’ stable characteristics) are habits developed over time, “calibrated” into a stable state that forms the physical substratum of all specified “matter”. As Whitehead put it, physical laws are the habits of nature. Those habits are “conceived, evaluated, and intentionally actualized” by consciousness.
Ward shows his awareness of the problem later on when he writes: “Consciousness needs material objects with which to operate.” So Cosmic Mind might be necessarily “prior” to all physical entities, but only to all “specified” physical entities, i.e., entities that contain some degree of information (like mass, charge, etc.). A cosmic mind would still need a basic information substrate with which to operate, something to “shape” - primal matter of a sort.
It has been objected that a consciousness cannot exist without some form of material embodiment, but this objection seems to rest simply upon a failure of human imagination. It is true that all consciousness requires an object; we are always conscious of something. But there may be many sorts of objects of consciousness. Human consciousnesses are fully and properly embodied, and their objects are normally physical, or at least sensory. But we can imagine, and even to some extent experience, consciousness of non-physical objects such as mathematical realities and unactualized logical possibilities. The cosmic consciousness being envisaged here would have the set of all possible universes as its object, and so it could not be part of any such universe (it may take embodied form in some universes, and Christians hold that it does, but it would also have to transcend any such form in order that those universes could exist in the first place).
I think Ward had a failure of imagination here. Panentheism solves this problem: the world exists “within” Cosmic Mind, in relation to it as a human body is in relation to its own mind. It is both transcendent and immanent.
In that respect, and unsurprisingly, cosmic consciousness is quite unlike any embodied consciousness. It is a primary ontological reality, in fact the one and only primary ontological reality, from which all universes are generated. This consciousness is the conceiver of all possible states and the actualizer of some, for the sake of values that are to be consciously apprehended and appreciated. This is the supreme informational principle for constructing universes.
I wouldn’t say it’s “quite unlike” embodied consciousness. Probably more like than unlike. (And Ward assumes he knows what embodied consciousness is “like”.)
A reason for the existence of evil:
All possibly actualizable coherent universes might be such that it would not be possible to eliminate all evils from them. But some would have higher degrees of value than others, or perhaps different kinds of incommensurable values worth having. So there would be an internal reason for the selection of some such states for existence.
This is compounded by the problem of free will. The more degrees of freedom beings have, the more capacity they have to choose “bad options”.
Another good bit:
I have suggested, following Augustine, that mind or consciousness is somehow involved in such an ultimate explanation, because it is mind that stores possibilities non-physically, and mind that can act for a reason. This is just to say that mind is a fundamental constituent of ultimate reality, and is necessarily prior to all physical entities. For they are actualizations of possibilities apprehended by cosmic mind, the only actuality that is not capable of being brought into being or of not existing or of being other than it is, as it is a condition of the existence of all possibilities whatsoever. Cosmic consciousness is the condition of any and all possibilities existing (which they necessarily do), and not merely a very complex thing that just happens to exist.
Another slight problem:
It is clear that any such “Platonic" view cannot accept that information is necessarily materially embodied, as the primary informational source, God, is not material. But it may still be the case that human consciousness is materially embodied, and that it is not simply something quite different in kind from material objects, as it lies in an emergent continuum with material entities that have no consciousness.
Panpsychism solves this problem (also called panexperientialism in the Whitehead/David Ray Griffin variety). Simple physical entities may not have consciousness per se (on the level of humans), but they have a sense of experience that is basically analogous: they receive, process, output of information. Ward almost gets there a bit later on:
Humans nevertheless stand in a continuum that begins from the much simpler capacity of physical objects to respond to stimuli from an environment of other objects. The registration of the stimulus, the largely automatic response, and the form of interaction with other objects, are elementary forms of what becomes, in humans, conscious apprehension, creative response, and personal relationships with other persons.
Because this continuum exists, we can use the term “information" to apply at various stages. Even the simplest physical object “registers information" from its environment, “interprets" it, and acts on the basis of it - but of course none of these simple capacities involves consciousness or awareness. There is nothing there that is truly creative, and there is no development, as there is with human persons, of a unique historical trajectory, no sense of an inward spiritual journey or a novel and unpredictable history.
There’s an unexamined hole in that “largely” that doesn’t justify the “of course” after it. The best philosophical answer to this is that there is no such thing as a “pure” stimulus-response. There is always a degree of experience, no matter how simple the being. Again, Whitehead got closer, IMO.
Lastly, a good manifesto for doing philosophy:
But such a sense of apprehension of transcendent goodness needs to be supported by a general view of reality that is coherent and plausible, and within which an idea of transcendent goodness has a central place. Precisely because our views of reality must be informed by scientific knowledge, theologians must engage with science in formulating metaphysical theories that, however tentative, show religious commitment to be reasonable and intellectually appealing.
:P
