Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for a lovely essay. You wrote:
> Does life descend to play in or with form, bestowing consciousness and creativity? Or does form rise and evolve to acquire these attributes, so it may play in the heavens? Science favors the latter view, and relegates the former to Religion, but because "It from Bit" makes information more primal than form, this changes things profoundly.
In my essay Software Cosmos I describe the simulation paradigm and construct a model for a computable cosmos. Taking the view that the material cosmos we observe is the result of software allows us to ask questions about the software architecture, and its layers. Defining the properties of these layers has the potential to answer your question.
> Perhaps to catch the universe as form and information at play, we need to see reality as a play. Information as author, forces as director, and objects as actors may be the metaphor we seek.... While we can identify the script as 'Bit' with the author as its generator, and the character as 'It' with the actor as its generator, there is a third personage who helps to guide the process to its completion, called the director.
I have been using the term "animator" for the agents at one level that make possible the operation of a higher level of reality. In the software model of the cosmos you can have a multi-level architecture. Each level "animates", or implements the foundational constructs, of the level above. Agents at each level do not know how they are implemented, as from their perspective, each primitive operation "just happens". It is the lower levels that know more what is going on.
> As I stated earlier; possibilities lead to actualities, in general, but any specific condition or environment leads to new possibilities... General information and open possibilities lead to actualities, then specific conditions engender new possibilities - and this cycle repeats - without end.
Joseph Brenner (who is also an essayist here) has prevoisly written a paper entitled "The philosophical logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900-1988)" that describes Lupasco's alternate "Logic of the Included Middle" and argues that it better applies to reality. You may find Lupasco's view consonant with your own.
> The key observation here is that information is more real or fundamental than substance, which is much like saying that things are comprised of mind-stuff - on a deeper level than the physical... In fact; it demands we tackle what David Chalmers refers to as the 'hard problem' of consciousness, defining what constitutes conscious perceptual experience.
If we can build only on top of the material world, then what we get when we try to create consciousness is a "zombie", not a consciousness as we experience it. But a computational cosmos does not have to start at the material level. It could be composed of several levels, only the most obvious top level one being material. In the sense defined above, the cosmos may consist of Mind animating Life and Life animating Matter. This, I think, more closely models what we actually know of the world.
Hugh
