Thursday, June 20, 2019

Science Uprising, Episode 3

The great theoretical physicist John Wheeler once said that when he first started studying physics he believed the world was composed of particles. Looking more deeply, he discovered that it was really composed of waves. But then, after a lifetime of study, he concluded that, "it appears that all existence is the expression of information."

Wheeler's conclusion that information is the fundamental component of all of physical reality is slowly spreading throughout the scientific world, and it's generating an intellectual revolution. In many quarters the revolution is exceedingly reluctant, but it seems to be ineluctable nonetheless.

Consider, for example, that the DNA in our cells is a library of information, a kind of computer program, that directs the construction of a body. DNA itself is not information, of course, but is rather the vehicle or medium which carries the massive quantity of information necessary to build and maintain each individual organism.

This has interesting metaphysical implications since in our experience, information, at least complex information such as we find in a book or computer program, is always the product of a mind. Whenever we encounter it we always infer that a mind has generated it because we know that blind, mechanical processes cannot by themselves write books or software.

We might say that information always lies downstream of mind, so the question is, what is the provenience of the information that is expressed in the nucleic acids and proteins in every cell of our body?

To emphasize this point the Discovery Institute has released the third episode of their series titled Science Uprising. The series is designed to demonstrate how the knowledge gained by scientists over the last couple of decades is sparking the aforementioned revolution, especially among younger thinkers, a revolution that rejects the suffocating materialist orthodoxy that has reigned in our culture for a century and a half.

Materialism, while enjoying hegemony in the media and the academy, has refused to permit acknowledgement that the universe and life appear to be the intentional product of a Mind, or, if such an acknowledgement is allowed it's usually so that it can be subjected to ridicule.

But that hegemony is eroding.

The philosopher William James once wrote that, "Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

James was, of course, correct. The methodological rule that prohibits all but material explanations in science is not only irrational, it's arbitrary and inconsistently applied, and a lot of people are beginning to notice.

In any case, here's Episode 3 of Science Uprising: