Amerika

Enduring questions humans may never answer: (a) what is information? (b) where does consciousness reside? and (c) does a metaphysical portion of reality exist?

Most of you will glaze over rather quickly, so this post is effectively in shorthand. Information = conscious perception of patterns found in reality, later potentially encoded in symbolic form; consciousness = arises from biological computation but also has a metaphysical component; metaphysics — for this we defer to Plato.

Plato says that physical reality has a cause in the world of forms, which are the rules of logic that generate our world, and that the world of forms is vaster than our physical world, therefore we are effects of a cause and not causes in ourselves. This is consistent with genetics, Darwinism, and history as well as sound metaphysical logic.

Modernity suffers from the Abrahamic delusion that, going back to Zororastrianism, holds that Heaven and the Mind are separated from the Body and physical Reality and play by their own rules which are contrary or inverted from those on Earth. That is, on Earth scarcity rules; in Heaven, time and material is infinite.

This ancient Semitic belief comes from the Asiatic idea of the symbol, which manages the mind, as being more powerful than reality; it is a rejection of the Indic belief that all of reality originates in a single Will and that because we are products of this Will, as is our consciousness, both persist in some form after death.

In the modern West, Descartes formalized dualism as a mind-body problem: pure thoughts which seemed eternal versus the transient nature of reality.

I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is (Decartes: Discourse on the Method, Section IV, Paragraph 2, Gutenberg).

Metaphysical dualism involves a separate “higher truth” which operates against the logic of the physical world, in contrast to the pagans who believed that metaphysical reality and physical reality arise from the same source and therefore, followed the same set of logical rules.

This brings us back to our three questions. If there is a source to reality, then the patterns of reality reflect the rules of that source, and we represent those as information. If consciousness has a source common to both physics and metaphysics, it persists in both.

With the Platonist view, physics and metaphysics spring from the same source and play by the same rules, therefore neither is inscrutable. What works in physical reality will also be important in metaphysical reality, so we can focus on realism and holism and everything will turn out okay.

Tags: holism, metaphysical dualism, metaphysics, mind-body dualism, neoplatonism, physics, platonism, realism