A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
Enformy
The organizing principle of the universe. A postulated natural force/principle that opposes Entropy in that it causes an evolutionary tendency toward order, and away from chaos.
Post 145.August 8, 2025
Panpsychism vs Enformationism
Consciousness vs Causation
In Post 130, I discussed the philosophical distinction between the ancient & modern notions of Consciousness as a fundamental force in the world, and my own hypothesis of Causation as more elementary than Mind. Hence, what we know as Mental phenomena — thoughts, percepts, concepts, feelings, etc — did not exist in the physical world until a few million years ago. What necessarily did exist, in order to power the creation of a cosmos from a void or chaos or nothingness, was Causation : the power to create from scratch, and/or to transform from one Form to another. I’m not talking about raw random power, like dynamite, but about Creative Power guided by an “organizational factor”.
That organizing force in Nature is not some supernatural agency, but merely the combination of causal energy and directional information that went Bang about 14B years ago. It is about creativity inherent in nature. The eventual emergence of natural kingdoms is of significance in the evolution of both sentience and knowledge, with the animal and human kingdom both having sentience, and the human having self-consciousness and knowledge propagation, especially through language for the social development of philosophical notions, such as Panpsychism.
In my own personal philosophical worldview, that "organiz-ation factor" is called EnFormAction¹, and the "creative" trend of evolution is Enformy². Both terms are derived from an Information-Centric philosophy³, in which Generic Information works like a computer program in the physical world. It's a combination of Causal Energy and Logical Information. And it assumes that En-formation (power to transform) is more essential than Matter. Hence, Consciousness is an emergent⁴ quality, and not fundamental as Panpsychism postulates.
Working together, these physical (energy) & meta-physical (logic) forces are responsible for creating a complex Cosmos from an initial explosion of Energy (Big Bang) and Information (Natural Laws). Materialists tend to ignore or misinterpret the directional guidance of those laws, including Thermodynamics [hot vs cold = change] and Dialectic [sequential Logic is directional]. Absent those taken-for-granted Laws, the BB would be a pop & poof flash-in-the-pan followed-by-a-fizzle, like fireworks --- instead of the orderly organizing system we now observe.
The source of those original logical & limiting laws in the initial conditions of our universe is a mystery. Some think an eternal mechanical-yet-creative multiverse would explain the explosion of bounded something from unbounded nothing-ness. Others, prefer to imagine an eternal God, with a human-like Mind, to design & program a statistical Singularity into a burst of let-there-be-light. I have seen no hard evidence for either, so both are hypothetical scenarios. Hence, my thesis begins after the Beginning.
PS___ Panpsychism is not an illusion. It's just an incomplete explanation. Life & Mind, as far as we know, are limited to a single blue planet on the cusp of an ordinary galaxy among billions of constellations. What makes our little corner of the universe an ideal habitat for thinking beings?
1. EnFormAction :
Energy + Form + Action = Information
Directional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law [or force] 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 or Schopenhauer's Will) that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite pool of possibility (un-actualized Potential). AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress. Mislabeled in science as Negentropy.
3. An information-centric philosophy, in its broadest sense, views information as a fundamental aspect of reality, potentially even more fundamental than matter or energy. This perspective suggests that the universe, including consciousness and human existence, can be under-stood as expressions or patterns of information. It challenges traditional, human-centered or matter-centric views of the world and proposes that information processing is key to understanding phenomena like consciousness and the nature of reality.
4. Emergent Qualtities : In philosophy and science, "emergence" describes how new properties or behaviors arise in complex systems as a result of interactions between their components.
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