by Jeroen B. J. van Dijk
For viewing the paper via the Philosophy Documentation Center, see: http://www.secure.pdcnet.org/chromatikon/content/chromatikon_2011_0007_0075_0084
In its deepest essence, information is not about syntactical data or sequences of symbolic signs. Instead, information... more
In its deepest essence, information is not about syntactical data or sequences of symbolic signs. Instead, information involves the activity of nature’s self-organizing process-structures as they mutually affect (i.e. ‘in-form’) each other by way of their non-equilibrium in- and outflow cycles. Like this, these criticality-seeking open systems actively give form to one another’s structural-functional organization, thus constituting an all-pervading reciprocal process-informativeness.
In this view, information is ultimately a nature-wide reflexive process in which conscious observers are themselves embedded endo-systems within the greater embedding processuality of nature as a whole. Like this, our process-informative natural world is internally meaningful in the sense that all process-structures make a difference to all other process-structures, and vice versa, in an order of undivided wholeness.
Accordingly, Reg Cahill’s Process Physics interprets our universe as an indivisible psychophysical process-informational whole containing all kinds of seamlessly integrated, yet highly differentiated contents, including conscious brain-equipped organisms like ourselves. In this way, Process Physics can be seen as compatible with Max Velmans’s Reflexive Monism and David Ray Griffin’s neo-Whiteheadian panexperientialism. After all, Reflexive Monism states that we – as embedded organisms equipped with a dynamically evolved conscious view on the larger embedding universe – participate in a reflexive process through which nature experiences itself, while panexperientialism holds that conscious experience is a concrescent extension of nature’s inherent psychophysicality.
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