ARGUMENT*
The book is aimed to give a unified explanation to the physical, biological, informational, mental and psychological processes by a philosophical model. By virtue of this model, the world develops in universes, each universe having two connections with the deep matter. The first connection emerges upon the birth of the universe. The second comes with the formation of the living matter, which is intro-open in the deep matter, and so a ring of the material world takes form.
The Ring of the Material World (RMW) - [Note of March 29, 1998: today is better called The Ring of Existence (RE)] - is also a model of the material unity of the world, given that the mere statements that all things are rooted in matter and that phenomena are largely interdependent are no longer satisfactory. An ontological justification of all these things are now required.
The scientific effort to find the unity of the physical forces is no doubt the implicit outcome of the ideas on the material unity of the world and of self- consistency of the matter. Notwithstanding the successful attempt to account for the unity of the electromagnetic forces and of the weak forces by an electroweak force which combines the two of them, the ideal unification of the physical forces, even if successful, would not manage to account for information, the mental process or the phenomenon of life. Otherwise stated, irrespective of the progress made along this line, the material unity of the world will remain unaccounted for. The ideal of the unity of the basic forces is an ideal only with respect to the physical universe, and so the material unity of the physical- biological universe (briefly referred to as biological universe), which is more comprehensive than the strictly physical universe as it encompasses also the living, is left open.
The unity of the physical forces would be sufficient if the force or what underlies the force could also account for the information. Nowadays, we observe that the abstract informational structures can decide on the action of physical forces, as happens in the casae of intelligent robots. Like processes are already of long history in the human mind. Information is no force, but something else, another form of reality of the material world, though it is always hosted in the substance, i.e. in the matter. This scientific fact found experimental validation in terms of the recent technological objects produced by the information technology using the information science and artificial intelligence. Had the human mind been observed (more) like an objective rather than subjective process, then information should have long been considered as something different from the natural forces in the universe and as a basic ingredient of the world.
Hence, another basic idea of the model of the Ring of the Material World is the universality of informational processes.Otherwise stated, information must be inherent to matter. The natural non-living matter is no explicit information-carrier, whereas the non-living matter can be artificially organized so as to include and develop information explicitly (for this reason, sometimes it is herein referred to as intermediary matter). The better organized living matter manipulates and generates information, part of which as mental senses. According to the data furnished by biology, the ontological generalization of information enforces the idea that mental-like senses, i.e. a form of special informationn, are also at play at lower life levels. This special kind of information, i.e. the phenomenological information, might ultimately be a property of the deep matter, given that the living is viewed as intro-open in the deep matter. Then the whole thought of information may be viewed in a different light. This book shows that this is the only way to give ontological grounds to the information notion qua primary notion in philosophy, then in science.
Can we still view the world through physics alone? Obviously we cannot if we refer to the “physics” of the universe (i.e. beyond the physical universe, as the universe appears in terms of life, conscience, society); but we can view it through physics to a certain extent, if we dwelve into thew roots of the universe, into the deep matter, which by by appropriate physical processes generates the phenomenological information used by the living matter. Additionally, this information is in all likelihood responsible for the laws of the universe themselves provided that it is self-channelled in a different way.
Hence, the origins of the unity of the physical forces in the universe might be of informational nature, i.e. without reducing the forces to information, they are determined by the deep information.
There exists a deep matter. This statement, which is duly justified in the two titles strung together in this volume, is now more certain in the author’s view than it was at the time when the text was being written. Today, both science and philosophy can support such a statement. How the deep matter is like has thus far been no concern of science, which philosophy can no longer avoid. What appears to be positive as soon as we recognize the existence of the deep matter is that we can expect it to have properties less ordinary with respect to what we know about the matter of the universe, but which should account for the properties of the matter in the universe.
By virtue of this philosophy, beneath the quantum world there lies the deep matter which consists of two principles: the informatter, i.e. a matter endowed with informational properties of phenomenological type (like the mental senses); the energymatter, i.e. a non-organized matter endowed with energy properties which can be organized by informatter. The image given by the author for these constituents of the deep matter and their properties is not fairly accurate, now that it is pre-mature to make final statements. There might be only one deep matter endowed with two principles - one informational and the other energetical - which may or may not interact, as the case may be. The existence of two principles is however decisive. In defect of this, any dialectics of the matter would be difficult to conceive and to atune to the dialectics of nature as we know it today. Energy alone could not explain the deep dialectics of the world, though some philosophers attempt to explain the world on energy bases. On the other side, information alone would be conductive to idealism, even to an ontological mental stand. The informatter shows that the question is about a type of deep information in the matter; the energymatter shows that the question is about a form of deep energy in the matter.
The matter is the fundamental principle, the ultimate reality; the deep energy and the deep information are in the matter and responsible for the motion and the dialectics of the matter.
This approach is peremptory for it is the only way to find the common source of physics, biology, mathematics, psychology and conscience. As may be observed, all philosophies are directly or indirectly ranging over larger or smaller portions of the Ring of the Material World. In this respect, all past philosophies can be used as mainstays in defending the R.M.W. model. Any new philosophy can no longer be satisactory unless it gives support to understand the unity of the material world and, more specifically, the unity of science, i.e a basis for a simultaneous explanation of the living and of the non- living, of the mentral and of the informational, psychological and spiritual phenomena. This means that we may witness the rise of science-based philosophies which would be as many incentives to future investigation. Meanwhile, after having joined, but also broken away from science, philosophy must revert to the isuue of man, of his conscience and spirituality. This book gives only some of the these break-throughs, as most of them are the object of the volume Spirituality, Information, Matter, Bucharest, Editura Academiei, 1988.
The Depths of the Material World (Note of March 29, 1998: today named The Depths of Existence in an english edition on INTERNET 1997: http://www.racai.ro/books/doe/ ), gives some ex- perimental results which envisage a reality deeper than the space-time property of the universe. A new philosophy is not an invention that could be born all of a sudden. That is it cannot be formulated in a fairly systematical way, shortly after it has been generated. What really matters is to separate what is new, and how this separation can be conceived.
Orthophysics develops most of the ideas contained in The Depths of the Material World and marks a transition from the structural science and view to a structural- phenomenological science and view of the world.
The author observes the weakness of the structural science today, and because of that its future crisis, which is no source of misfortune. For this crisis is caused by the obvious inability to explain the living, despite the success of molecular (actually structural) biology and the inability to reach the deep matter by high-energy particle collisions (that is, for the time being a philosophical standpoint by virtue of the R.M.W. model. The insatisafction principle of the structural knowledgewhich can be induced from the experience of the molecular biology with respect to the mental processes, justified by virtue of the R.M.W. model and subsequently applied to the elementary particle physics (i.e. present-day physics), shows together with the principle of the selfconsistency of matter,which leaves no other path to take, that there must exist some matter endowed with non-structural, phenomenological properties and which is responsible for the formation and operation of the living matter. Such a phenomenological matter is the informatter which is essential in explaining the living and the mental processes but also in generating an universe. The existence of informatter appears as a certainty in the light of the two principles mentioned above, but it is so only with respect to the living substanece and the mental processes. This informatter might not be deep, but as it has not so far been experimentally traced in the space-time reality of the living matter, and given the ontological generalization of the information, we are entitled to regard it as a deep matter. This does not not necessarily appear to be a certainty in physics; instead, it is a plausible philosophical stand which finds the ultimate mainstay in the whole view advanced in the Ring of the Material World.
Is what is not a certainty or a semi-certainty an uncertainty?
The uncertainty only shows the unsafety of some concepts or models. The semi-certainty shows that only little is missing to have a certainty.
The mystery is the unknown, of which we have no idea. Sometimes the mystery is the unknown of which we cannot, nor will we ever, have an idea. Kant’s thing in itself is the mystery we cannot know, but about which we may have, as Kant says, inevitably antinomical ideas.
Strange enough, the structural science of today introduces a mystery of the unknown type about which we cannot know anything. As the mental processes cannot be explained by structural ingredients, then the mental contains something of the order of mystery which cannot be known. Then the structural science finds a narrow escape by attributing the brain limited abilities to know the mind and the reality.
Why should science stop here? How could we know that these are the limits of the human brain and not the limits self-imposed by our view (our cognitive framework) about the world and above the mind?
The ring of the material world is an attempt to extend the cognitive framework of knowledge ant to suggest a structural phenomenological science in the aftermath of, and striding beyond, structural science.
Let us suppose that the R.M.W. model would be validated scientifically. Then the phenomenological information in the deep matter would account for the birth of many physical processes in the universe and for the mental, creative phenomena. Then we would know the properties of the deep matter which will help us to understand all that is going on in the universe.
Similarly, nowadays, we know much of what is going on in the physical universe starting from the elementary particles " qua " given. Hence, we do not know exactly how the true elementary particles are formed.
The deepo matter accounts also for the elementary particles. How- ever, the deep matter will keep the still unexplained phenomenological senses ( the orthosenses), which have only been noticed, and which will be in a way a mystery for the next time period. The deep matter being the ultimate reality, there will be nothing beyond it and when we are familiar with the orthosenses, as we are now with the elementary particles, the mystey of the ortosenses will only be an unknown waiting for a behavior mode of the informatter which, one way or another, should be subject to experimental validation. It is the author’s belief that with the rise of a structural-phenomenological science, the classical methods of immediate experimental validation of theories and concepts will give way to some indirect methods which will become familiar and methodogically acceptable to the scientist. No attempt was made - nor could be made in the present state when the available knowledge is insufficient in this respect- to model the actual way in which the informatter behaves so as to generate orthosenses. This would be untimely before the beginnings of a structural-phenomenological science. For the time being, the assumption on the orthosenses is philosophically justified in the manner of the structural-phenomenological thought. In this respect, this book is only an outline of ontology.
Bucharest 1989.
*This Argument is the preface to the volume The Ring of the Material World, Bucharest, Editura Stiintifica si Enciclopedica, 1989, which contains as a second edition the volumes “The Depths of the material World” ( Depths of Existence) -1979- and “Orthophysics” -1985.