*5.2. Geometry*/*Position or Energy*/*Force*

In seeking the grounding for philosophy and knowledge, one is confronted by at least two age-old, unresolved arguments. One is whether space, defined by position and geometry or energy, defined by movement and change is more fundamental—has ontological priority—in the universe. Another is whether matter is somehow constituted by our consciousness of it, the doctrine of anti-realism, or consciousness evolved from or together with matter. Those who prefer the first elements of these two pairs, including the major figures of Norbert Wiener and John Wheeler, also favor the position that information is *sui generis*, neither matter nor energy, present in some way in the form of digital bits, the so-called It (things, processes) from Bit position.

The proposal of Logic in Reality outlined above and in [80] is that what emerges from the still unknown ground of the universe, position and energy, or statics and dynamics, can be rigorously described in dialectical terms as two di fferent, opposing but non-separable aspects of that ground, a position similar to that taken by Diaz Nafria and Zimmermann [81]. Digital bits, now part of knowledge are an emergen<sup>t</sup> epistemological phenomenon—the 'Bit-from-It' position, and the overall situation can be described by an 'onto-epistemology', whose components are 'ontolons' and 'epistemons'.

If as argued energy is fundamental, so in our view are its properties, in any real system, of actuality in a non-separable relation to potentiality. Change is a consequence of our existence within an overall energy gradient moving locally from higher to lower grade forms, finally to heat (low energy photons). The movement of elements itself is sinusoidal, from predominantly actual to predominantly potential and the reverse. No element goes to the absolute, idealized limit of 100% one or the other, except in trivial cases in which there is no interaction between the initial and final states, as in snooker balls falling into pockets. The hypothetical pre-thermodynamic universe is supposed to be something like a quantum vacuum, with elements moving into and out of existence, without reference to time. As attempts to show a direct coupling of such a world with ours, we feel that they are not required for our subsequent analysis. The desire to demonstrate such coupling must be placed in the same domain as that of religious beliefs which by definition cannot be the subjects of scientific proof, except of their *own* existence.

As proposed by Lupasco and discussed by Brenner in [1], whether a dialectics of energy and position, or of consciousness and non-consciousness or of a polarized position of absolute opposites is preferred is a question of individual psychology. Lupasco saw individual human beings as instantiating change and hence preferring the stability conferred by belief in identities, stasis, rather than the dynamics of diversities. This dialectics, the dualistic oppositional properties of energy is reflected in the properties of information. Information and energy are both the same *and* di fferent, as the focus of the mind moves from one aspect to the other.

The major di fference is, of course, that information is alleged to be and convey meaning, and the emergence of meaning from a meaningless substrate has been impossible to explain. In our view, the question of the emergence of meaning is equivalent to that of consciousness as a higher order of mental processing by animals capable of that processing, related to their survival. We admit the tautology here, but claim that the fact that no explanation of the emergence of meaning exists does not mean that the ascription of dialectical properties to information is invalidated.
