Has the mind emerged from matter?
23
Sep
This question lies in the work of Berkeley’s philosopher, anthropologist and
cognitive scientist Terrence Deacon, in Incomplete Nature: how mind emerges from matter (2013), where Deacon considers information a phenomenon whose existence is determined respectively by an essential absence, something like Not realized that may or may not be the accomplished one.
If in the 19th century the great paradigm was to admit the existence of energy and its relation to matter, now modified by Constantine Tsallis (see our post), the 20th century brings to us its difficulties in assimilating the existential unreality of information. A complete explanation of the real nature of information is such that it would be necessary to distinguish information from merely material or energetic relations which also require a paradigm shift, so a form / background alternation that we call this in-form-action in my blog would still be More fundamentally a counterintuitive vision than that demanded by energy (Deacon, 2013, p.373)
Deacon uses for his argument, several examples from biology and mathematics to justify his idea, essentially emerging from a nothingness, is not really new in philosophy and science, still less in logic and mathematics, but unlike Descartes Where the first certainty is the I, in modern mathematics the first certainty is the 0, the empty set and now with the digital, 0 and 1, that emerges a metamamatic as Gregory Chaitin wants, which we already discussed in another post.
The cardinal number model of the mathematician Von Neumann defines all numbers literally from scratch: there is the empty set. The empty set itself has an element: the empty set itself, Alain Turing and Claude Shannon idealized the machine, but it was von Neumann who built it, if we think the Mark I and Konrad Zuze’s machine were no more than electro calculators -mechanics. A mathematician connected to the theory of Sets, Ernst Zermelo, although he makes a different reasoning, also part of the zero to reach all the cardinals. Information is part of modern man, not only in the city, but now in the so-called Information Society, that we ourselves will produce it from situations where we identify that something is missing.
This appears to be the best approach to address the nature of information She is always something that is missing. As if at all times reality was wondering: now what is missing, and providing what it can. This idea is even known to us. Being proactive, efficient, organized, is always to have a preventive and proactive attitude towards possible situations.
It’s an anticipation. It is to detect what is lacking and to provide. According to Deacon, this logic permeates all reality. In addition to the abundant infosphere in which we stand, emerging information is a constant demand, whether through living beings or not.
Deacon claims the idea of mathematician and communication theorist Claude Shannon, who associated maximum entropy with minimal information and vice versa, bringing information to the origin of the order / disorder dichotomy, so dear to theories of complex systems, the mathematics of chaos and to the irreversible thermodynamics of the dissipative structures of Ilya Prigogini, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977, from where the ideas of Chaos and Complexity emerges.
Constantino Tsallis, Terrence W. Deacon and Gregory Chaitin has talks in EBICC Conference in São Paulo, Brazil.
DEACON, T. W. Incomplete Nature: the mind emerged from matter. 2013.
