“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead
Have a listen to Greg Henriques and John Vervaeke exploring the limits of reductive naturalism and the dangerous of decadent romanticism:
John and Greg got some thoughts stirring, which I shared in the video below:
For more on the communicative ontology I am proposing here, see this article of mine in Process Studies on Whitehead and media ecology.
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Interesting stuff, Matt. I’ve made the point explicitly in my work that energy is information is energy and you’re the first scholar I’ve come across to also make this point. I’m curious if you would agree that information is a more subjective concept, however, because it depends on a subjective observer to interpret specific energy flows as information?
Yeah that is what I meant by saying “information is a difference that makes a difference *to somebody*”
The concept of information does imply a subjective interpretation, but it also implies objectivity or syntax. It implies a real mark, some *thing* that a subject can take note of, given meaning by its context, ie, what it *is not*.
Got it, sounds like we’re in agreement on that. I suggested in my 2011 paper, Kicking the Psychophysical Laws Into Gear, that while “information” may be a useful concept in many contexts it is not an ontologically fundamental concept b/c of its subjective nature. I think it’s ok to cast energy as an ontological fundamental and we can quantify energy either with traditional energy terms or information theoretic terms if we’re trying to carve out specific energy flows as “differences that make a difference” to the system at issue. Would you agree?
Hmm, no not quite. I follow Whitehead in rooting nonconscious subjectivity in fundamental ontology. I don’t think it makes sense to separate subject and object, as if energy was simply objective rather than part of the salience landscape carved out by the modes of attention cultivated by physicists. “Energy” as such is a mathematical abstraction. I don’t mean to reduce a scientific category to social construction, at least not if we are talking about human societies. But if like Whitehead we are thinking in terms of electromagnetic societies, then there’s already subjective and conceptual prehension at work in each energetic pulse. Again, in general the laws of physics hold as statistical regularities; but this says nothing about what, concretely speaking, a particular flash of energetic activity is accomplishing in terms of self-enjoyment, aim, and creative advance.
I’ve never understood what “nonconscious subjectivity” means unless you’re adopting the convention of calling self-consciousness “consciousness”? You’re right in pointing out that I was using the other convention of discussing “objective reality” as though it’s not enjoying experience/consciousness all the way down. I guess to be more precise in my earlier statement I would state: information is a concept that depends on advanced consciousness like human consciousness because it attempts to discern what differences make a difference to the dynamics of any given system; whereas energy is an ontological fundamental because it exists in every aspect of the universe whether or not information should be deemed to be present. Thoughts?
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?