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

Adam & Eve
accept sweets
from a stranger

 Post 55. October 22, 2018

    Let There Be . . . Information!

    The Fall versus The Ascent

 Similarly, my own genesis myth begins with G*D dwelling in eternal unchanging meditation as formless Potential :  Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss. But then, similar to the sudden enlightenment of the Buddha, a lightbulb appeared above He/r head ─ like a reverse Nirvana, illuminating a new world. In that instant, He/r infinite calm Potential burst-forth in an explosion of actualization. And the rest is, as they say, history. But I can’t resist going into a little more technical detail about that moment of creation. Cosmologists now say that our many-splendored world began in a “bang” of Pure Energy4, the power to cause change. At first, that eruption of raw power wasn’t literally visible light, but an abstract code, the Singularity, which like DNA contained all the information necessary to build a world from scratch. Nevertheless, I like the metaphor of illumination as the enforming power (Will) of G*D.

That’s because light, in the form of photons5, is the closest to pure energy that we normally experience in Nature, and it is the causal force that creates all change in the course of evolution. My term for that transformative enlightenment is EnFormAction, the power to enform, to create new things. I imagine that, in the “dreamtime”6 before the beginning, G*D was simply the eternal essence of existence : BEING. But in space-time Nature, that infinite creative potential became the power-to-evolve, which eventually emerged again in the form of new kinds of beings, with knowledge & creativity of their own.

Just as Milton used Greek mythology as a resource in his reimagined Hebrew myth, I feel free to draw upon well-known imagery to tell my own story of Creation. He filled any gaps in the rather tame Torah story of The Fall, from outside sources. His account of the great war in heaven that resulted in the expulsion of Satan and his rebellious angels, was based on the Greek myths of the uprising of human-like Olympians against the monstrous ruling Titans. Those vanquished gods were cast into the dark abyss of Tartarus, just as Milton's fallen angels were cast into the Christian Hell. Milton’s names for Satan’s demonic lieutenants, such as Beelzebub, were borrowed from the old gods of idolatrous Canaanites and early Hebrews, which the Jews later demonized in order to magnify their own god.

Unfortunately, the erratic & plodding, two-steps-forward-&-one-step-back, evolutionary story of how we got into the fix we’re in, does not lend itself to epic dramatic scenes of Super-hero blood & guts. Anyway, I think Milton wrote legions of lines of eloquent imagery in a vain effort to justify7 the irony & injustice of an implausible Creator who banished two innocent souls from Paradise, and condemned his chosen creatures to brief lives of hard labor, while “visiting the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation”. Adam & Eve were still essentially babes-in-the-garden, who learned their first lesson in Good & Evil, when they began to think for themselves instead of following orders blindly like robots. Their mortal crime was the same “no-no” that every toddler since then has committed, and been lightly spanked for. In my humble opinion, those biblical and poetic stories make God seem more like an evil stepfather, than a God of love. If I was a religious man, I’d call that blasphemy.

 Post 53 continued . . . click Next

4. Pure Energy :
The initial burst was not yet physical energy in the form of photons, but EnFormAction in the form of encoded instructions for building a universe. Technically, Energy is not a substance, but a potential relationship which is a trait of Fields. That relationship is a ratio, which is mathematical information.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14444/what-is-energy-made-of

5. Photon Angel :
What we call a Photon is an immaterial massless area of space that transports a quantum of energy from one place to another. It’s not a thing, but a mental construct. The science equivalent of an Angel, a messenger.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/273032/what-exactly-is-a-photon

6. Dreamtime :
An allusion to the Aborigine myth of a time before time – an “everywhen”, when their god-like ancestors ruled the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime
 
7. Justify the mysterious     ways of God :
Following the Hebrew priests, Milton gave the Creator an alibi, by pointing the finger of blame, first at a fellow god, and then at the creatures themselves. G*D doesn’t need an alibi. The good/evil duality of the world is inevitably inherent in space/time & matter/energy .

RATIONAL vs INTUITIVE JUDGMENT
The human brain is designed to work by categorization : dividing problems into a simple dichotomy of good or bad. That simplicity makes intuitive decisions easy. But it also tends toward prejudice and polarization.
   A more rational way of problem solving is based on Bayesian analysis, which finds the center of gravity (statistical balance point) in any problem set.