It's interesting when Gilder says, up front, that "the concept precedes the concrete". He's identifying himself as a philosophical Idealist; he also identifies proponents of evolutionary theory as Materialists. He claims to be basing his views on "the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science." Readers of this blog should know by now that it is precisely the old 17th century ideas of materialism and idealism that are being superceded today. Gilder's argument does not come from the Age of Information; it comes from the Age of Steam.

So "the concept precedes the concrete," eh? As always, this notion conveniently lets us off the hook for having to actually investigate how real-world things work. If the concept precedes the concrete, then the concrete need not participate in its own explanation. We can turn to dialectic, argument, or the Word of God to know the physical world; at best, the physical processes themselves are obstructionary, full of inexplicable behaviors, noise and contingency. Better to forget about the physical, and concentrate on the Ideal.

*Yawn.* The 17th century view of the world that led us to separate the material from the conceptual is gone, folks. Gilder is playing on a false dichotomy so his argument doesn't even get off the ground. He's trying to invoke the notion of the universe as dumb matter infused with a motivating Spirit. If you want to see the union of matter and concept, though, just run any one of Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata--and then consider that the developing embryo of a human being works the same way. As Wolfram has shown in exhaustive detail, mind-boggling complexity can be produced by fundamentally simple processes. The basic claim of the "intelligent design" folks that natural selection alone can't explain the complexity of organic life might be trivially true--but natural selection operating in a universe where Wolfram's cellular automata are possible does explain it. And, a curious thing about Wolfram's automata is that as physical processes they are in a sense stateless--they are their state, in other words they store information about themselves and their environment but not in any abstraction separable from themselves. They are simultaneously information systems and physical systems and the one can't be teased apart from the other. If it could, it would be possible to predict the behavior of all automata but there are automata that have to be run in order to determine their behavior--their result cannot be abstracted from their operation even in principle. Ergo, if Gilder's identifying information with the Concept (as he pretty clearly is) then in many systems in Nature, the concept does not precede the concrete.

The defense of "intelligent design" is in any case a great example of the relevance of this blog. The ideas I'm talking about are foundational and political when they become clothed in such guise as school curricula. Examine Gilder's position and you see the old system that I'm claiming we've moved past. And if you're wondering about the importance of these ideas, consider the political context of that position.

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