Between Physics and Philosophy, finding the meaning of life
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Is there a relationship between
- Existentialism, with its value and measure of Man as choice-maker being that he chooses and acts against the odds…
- Norbert Wiener’s anti-entropic value of information according to how improbable is the (true) information or structure….
- and our Socratic-Montessori-Moore-Ramon y Cajal-Diamond-Wenger theory and model, beginning with the thesis that learning, growth and development come from the expression of the individual and the feedbacks upon that expression — with behavior’s main law, the Law of Effect, required for survival of any complex system in a changing world….
…extended into the notion of value and the measure of meaningful life being the function of subtler-derived responses feeding their effects into the baser mechanisms of the world? (This certainly as part of the building of complexity and subtlety in the phenomenological behavior of the universe.)
“Convergence” — Moiré pattern by Jacob Yerex
Those existential choices — whether due to interference-pattern physics of intermodulation between ongoing streams of energy and events, or due to some higher spiritual infusion a la neo-transcendentalism or in keeping with some religious theses, or due to the negentropic break-up into complexity as cited by Ilya Prigogene, or due to the negentropic effects of (entropic) selection as cited by Win Wenger (to the extent those choices derive from beyond the crude immediate mechanisms of world process) — would fit with and virtually define “the value and the measure of meaningful life being the function of subtler-derived responses feeding their effects into the baser mechanisms of the world!”
This view is a close parallel to the widely-shared value of life being meaningful if one manages in living it to somehow make a meaningful difference.
The initial thrust of such philosophizing would seem at first blush to be primarily teleological and perhaps axiological. At first blush its epistemology would seem unextraordinary, except that, at closer inspection, once one admits the convergence principle as a defining quality — convergence of observations, convergence of considerations, convergence of observations with considerations — once the convergence principle is entered, we look upon the prospect of a re-convergence of the house of philosophy with the house of natural philosophy.
The whole revolves then around a value and practice aligned with a sense of what works in our universe.