Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

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Alternative Theory of Reality & Deity

  Panqualia vs Embodied Information

Another article in the Philosophy Now magazine attempts to find “a balance between two extreme views of consciousness. . . . Physicalism and panpsychism sit either end of a metaphysical seesaw, and when one is in the ascendancy it is only by bringing the other unduly low.”  The author, Dr. Sam Coleman, proposes a different kind of stuff (essence) that is “neither mental nor physical in itself, but which possesses properties capable of generating both the mental and the physical.” The “one fundamental stuff” he's referring to is Consciousness, but for technical purposes I think that the scientific term “Information” fits the description better. As Claude Shannon discovered in mid-20th century, Information is not just ideas in human minds, it is also the substance of physical objects; it's both physical and mental5. Coleman also offers a novel term to replace Panpsychism : Panqualityism. He admits that name is a merely a placeholder for unspecified “neutral properties” (potentials) that are able to emerge into reality as either physical or metaphysical, depending on the context. Yet again, Information already has this monist/dualist BothAnd property, which could explain how metaphysical minds emerge from the functioning of material brains.It might also suggest how a physical universe could emerge from a mathematical Singularity consisting of nothing but the information for constructing a universe from scratch : a program for creation.

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5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information