The Reflexive Character of Nature

From Information Theory to Process Physics

(292 words)

Mainstream physics usually tends to interpret the process of measurement as the transmission
of information-conveying data signals from the physical world to an external, target-repre-
senting observation system. Eventually, empirically adequate theoretical representations of the
system under investigation should thus be attainable. However, information is not just a
representation-enabling intermediary signal or the content of target-representing data sets, but
rather a nature-wide non-representational process.
Reminiscent of David Bohm’s active information, nature’s coupled dissipative
structures ‘in-form’ each other as self-organizing reciprocal dynamics continuously develop
within and between them. Like this, nature forms one huge interconnected whole of immens-
ely rich and complex forms of organization, such as galaxies, solar systems, and also the
earth’s sun-dependent biosphere with its abundant variety of life forms. Above all, however, it
has given rise to intelligent organisms whose mind-brains facilitate higher-order conscious
experience.
This experiential consciousness is not just a representational inner-projection of the
external ‘real world out there’, or some elusive ‘mental ghost in the material machinery of the
organism’s body’, but a naturally developing within-nature activity that can be characterized
as an ‘anticipatory remembered present’. As such, our higher-order conscious experience
follows from nature’s inherent processual in-formativeness – as a highly evolved confluent
extension of it. Accordingly, as suggested by Reg Cahill’s Process Physics, nature is to be
regarded as a giant self-organizing process-information system in which embedded dissipative
structures are engaged in open-ended evolution.
Analogously, Max Velmans’s Reflexive Monism – a philosophical view akin to
Whiteheadian-Griffinian panexperientialism – holds that the universe is one psycho-physical
whole containing all kinds of differentiated contents, including conscious organisms like
ourselves. And in so far as we are embedded organisms equipped with a dynamically evolved
conscious view on the larger embedding universe, we participate in a reflexive process
through which nature experiences itself.