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.
Post 148.December 19, 2018 revised 11/29/2025
Emergent Evolution
Cosmological Phase Transitions
From Quantum Leaps to Phase Changes to Chaotic Structures, Nature seems hide some of its “magic” behind the smokescreen of Randomness. Which is why scientists working on the fuzzy fringes of their specialty ─ like Einstein and the Quantum Theorists ─ are forced to think like artists or poets by leaping from Rigid Reasoning to Fluid Imagination without being able to explain the steps from problem to intuition. Since such leaps-of-Logic cannot be justified by tracing new ideas directly back to their source, they may lend themselves to cynical accusations of incredulity, and are anathema to the scientific method, but not necessarily to non-empirical philosophical methods. Even cosmologists have begun to see evidence of Emergence in the progressive phases³ of expansion from hot gases to living creatures and thinking minds.
In any case, the unprecedented emergence of Life, Mind, and Self-Consciousness from a purely physical process may not be such a mystery⁴, if the reality of Metaphysics⁵ can be taken seriously. We all know that mental processes follow different rules from those of Physics, with only a foundation of mathe-matical logic in common. Which is why EnFormAction theory posits a new kind of causality, uniting thermodynamic physics with non-scientific notions of Holism (versus Reductionism), Emergence (versus Determinism), and Teleology (versus Random Accidents).
These philosophical terms are attempts to explain the mysteries of physical transformation without resorting to obfuscating devices of smoke & mirrors. They are all subsumed under the thesis-coined concept of EnFormAction(EFA), which bears an uncanny resemblance to ancient & modern hypo-thetical notions of evolutionary emergence such as Stoic Vitalism, Spinoza’s Conatus, Bergson’s Elan Vital, Schopen-hauer’s Will-to-live, and A.N.Whitehead’s Process Philosophy. Unlike religious theories of creation though, EFA does not need to hide behind artifacts of blind faith. It’s intended to be completely open & rational, by being scientific and logical, even as it includes room for flights of fancy and leaps of logic, to inject variety & freedom into the strait & narrow path of hard science. At the moment, it’s not proven empirical Science, but reasonable theoretical Philosophy.
3. Cosmological Phases : A cosmological phase transition is an overall change in the state of matter across the whole universe. The success of the Big Bang model led researchers to conjecture possible cosmo-logical phase transitions taking place in the very early universe, at a time when it was much hotter and denser than today
Among the ways that cosmological phase trans-itions can have measurable consequences are the production of primordial gravitational waves and the prediction of the baryon asymmetry. Adequate confirmation has not yet been achieved.
4. Mysterious Emergence The "mystification" of phase transitions can refer to their counterintuitive behavior, such as a material contracting when stretched (a negative compressibility), or the challenge of understanding complex, non-instantaneous transitions.
Continued . . . . . .
Emergence from Simple Singularity to Complex Cosmos
4. Mysterious Emergence . . . . .It can also be a philosophical point about how scientific models of phase transitions represent reality. These phenomena are mystifying because they challenge everyday expectations about how materials and systems behave. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=phase+transition+mystification
5. Reality of Metaphysics The "reality of meta-physics" is that it is the philosophical study of the fundamental nature of reality, existence, and being, exploring questions about space, time, causality, and conscious-ness that are often beyond the scope of scientific verification. It seeks to understand the underlying principles of the universe by analyzing concepts like substance and identity, often using physical objects and processes as examples to challenge or support its theories. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=reality+of+Metaphysics
— End of Post 148 —
Complexity, Contingency, and Emergence are concepts drawn from systems thinking. Complexity describes systems with many interacting parts, often with feedback loops, where the overall behavior is hard to predict from the individual components. Contingency refers to the idea that the system's history and specific, often unpredictable, events have a significant influence on its current state and future development. Emergence is the phenomenon where new, global properties arise from the interactions of simpler components, and these properties are not present in the individual parts themselves.
Popular books on Emergence Theory John Holland's Emergence: From Chaos to Order Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Harold J. Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant”
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