Customer Reviews

From Primeval Chaos to Infinite Intelligence: On Information As a Dimension and on Entropy As a Field of Force (Avebury Series in Philosophy)

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Arie Issar's idea about Information as a viable dimension of our reality is groundbreaking for several reasons. The greatest support for his ideas has been the recent publication of several popular science books expanding on that thesis of information as a separate dimension with entropy as field of force acting on that dimension.
His thesis ties many ideas together about evolution, the very presence of life as a reversal of entropy. His explanations of complexity, order and information engages you to think about possibilities in a universe with Space, Time and Information as dimensions. He argues that the pure "mutation" model of evolution as pushed by Dawkins does not provide sufficient explanation for what we see in nature, but he is not suggesting intelligent design by any means. He is more in line with thinkers like Stuart Kauffman who suggest that order emerges out of complex inter-relationships.
He presents a model that relates energy and levels of order in an intriguing way, making you think about the nature of gravitational attraction.
If you can get though the awkward phrasings in the book, you will be enlightened, and it does not matter at all if you agree with his thesis, it will challenge you to re-evaluate how you view the world, and in the end that is all you can ask for a book of this nature.

He also does not stop at physics and biological evolution. He views Information and Entropy as ways to study the fabric of evolving societies. He attempts to weave all processes into this paradigm, and overall he made a strong case.

If this book ever needs to be reprinted, I truly hope it is edited properly. His ideas shine through despite a very poor presentation

The reason I only gave 4 stars-
1- Issar's prose is difficult to work with at times, he is way too dry, and he tends to ramble.
2- The sentence phrasing was quite poor.
3- Chapter 7 refers to the author in the 3rd person, and is quite confusing, until you get to the end of that chapter and realize it was written by Issar's collaborator. Meanwhile chapter 8 is written by Issar. This was distracting.
4- The Appendix felt out of place.

This could quite possibly be the most ground breaking work of physics of the 20th century. Time will tell on its lasting impact, but in the very least it is an EXCELLENT example of someone working outside the box but sticking to the most logical conclusions when 'not hindered by the box'.
The idea of dimensions has been one that has puzzled me since I was a young child. It seemed so simple when I first heard about it, until I began to think about it. 3 dimensions; we live in three dimensions. And the fourth dimension, it is time. And what is a dimension anyway? I began to come to the conclusion that dimensions were something that rules over everything. It is a spatial and temporal co-ordinate orginization system. But where the first 3 spatial dimensions SEEM so simple, the temporal dimension SEEMS to make no sense. There is something more to the dimension problem than we had any idea of. And idea of many current physicists (scientific philosophers) that there are many (even thousands) of other dimensions in the universe that explain the mathematical anomallies that they are coming across is ludicris. The next step in human evolution is apparent, and it is in explaining the temporal dimension and in finding the next dimension on top of that.
Another concept which has bothered me since early childhood is the idea of intelligence. Do we really know what intelligence is? And what is its relationship with order?
Arie is able to take this two concepts to their logical interlocking. He applies Entropy to the problem, to me the most puzzling phenomenon outside of paradox and the placebo effect. And he does so in a straightforward, easy to read manner. Read this book, and read How Real Is Real? by Paul Watzlawick and tell me your universe hasn't been changed.