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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Great Problems of Philosophy and Physics - SOLVED?

Published on September 15, 2016.

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472 pages, 45 figures, bibliography, index.

To request a review/examination copy, send an email with your philosophy department mailing address to bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com.

Contents Click to download chapter
Contents, vii
Preface, xi
1. Introduction, 3

How to Use this Book, 1; The New Ideas of Information Philosophy 4; The Three Worlds of Information Philosophy 9; Information Creation in the Material World 10; Information Creation in the Biological World 11; Information Creation in the World of Ideas 12; What Does Creation of Information Mean? 13

2. Metaphysics, 15

Possibility and Possible Worlds 22; Naming and Necessity 24; Actual Possibles 25; Actualism 28; Identity 30; Criteria 30; Coinciding Objects 33; Composition 38; Aristotle Essences 45; Why Modal Logic Is Not Metaphysics 47

3. Ontology, 55

The Metaphysicist’s Approach 56; Continuous or Discrete? 58; Meta-Ontology 61

4. Free Will, 63

The Two-Stage Model of Free Will 64; Neuroscientific Evidence for the Two-Stage Model 66; History of the Free Will Problem 69; The Standard Argument Against Free Will 74; Possible Worlds and Alternative Possibilities 76; Free Will and Creativity 77

5. Value, 79

An Information-based Moral Code? 84; A Minimum Moral/Political Message? 85; An Information-based Social Contract? 87; Information and Negative Entropy as Objective Values 89

6. Good and Evil, 91

Information (Negative Entropy) as Objective Good? 92; Evil 93; A Statistical Comparison with Societal Norms 95

7. God and Immortality, 97

No Creator, But There Was/Is A Creation 98; Theodicy (The Problem of Evil) 98; Omniscience and Omnipotence Contradictory? 98; The Ergod 99; The Problem of Immortality 100

8. Epistemology, 103

The History of Epistemology 104; The Search for Knowledge Turns Inward 109

9. Universals, 119

The One and the Many  122; Philosophical Triads 126; Three Sources for Authoritative Knowledge 128; Types of Triads 128; A Few Tetrads 129

10. The Problem of Induction, 131

Induction and the Scientific Method 137

11. The Problem of Meaning, 139

Meaning in the Theory of Information 142

12 Mind, 147

The Scandal in Psychology 147; Mind as Immaterial Information 148; Information Evolves to Become Mind 149; An Information Mind Model 150

13. Mind-Body Problem, 155

Interactionists 156; The Mind-Brain Identity Theory 158; Eliminative Materialism 159; Mind/Body and the ERR 163

14. Consciousness, 165

The Binding Problem 168; Four “Levels” of Consciousness 170

15. Self and Other Minds, 171

Mind Over Matter? 172; The Problem of Other Minds 173

16. Mental Causation, 177

The Problem of Mental Causation according to Kim 179; The Emergence of Life from Matter and Mind from Life 179; Ribosomes Select Randomly Moving Amino Acids  181; Ion Pumps in Neurons Select Individual Atoms  183; Information Solves the Problem of Mental Causation. 185; “Bottom-up” Physical Processes Are Not Deterministic 186; Molecular Machines 187

17. The Information Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, 189

The “Possibilities Function” 194; Possibilities and Information Theory 196; Other Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics 198

18. The Measurement Problem, 201

Von Neumann’s Two Processes 205; Designing a Quantum Measurement Apparatus 207; An Irreversible Example of Process 1 208; The Boundary between the Classical and Quantum Worlds 210; The Role of the Conscious Observer 211; Three Essential Steps in a “Measurement” and “Observation” 214; Quantum Collapses Can Produce New Information 215

19. Determinism, 217

Indeterminism 219; Determination 220; The Emergence of Determinism 222; The History of Determinism 222

20. Collapse of the Wave Function, 225

What is the Wave Function? 225; Information Physics Explains the Two-Slit Experiment 227; Where Is The Information About Probabilities Embodied? 230

21. Entanglement, 233

Einstein’s Discovery of Nonlocality and Nonseparability 235; The Importance of Conservation Laws in Entanglement 240; Can a Special Frame Resolve the EPR Paradox? 242; Do We Need Superdeterminism? 245; EPR “Loopholes” and Free Will 246

22. Decoherence, 249

The Decoherence Program 251; The Measurement Process 257; The Measurement Problem 259; What Decoherence Gets Right 261; What Decoherence Gets Wrong 263; Quantum Interactions Do Not Create Lasting Information 263; The Transition from Quantum to Classical World 263; Decoherence and Standard Quantum Mechanics 264

23. Schrödinger’s Cat, 269

How Information Physics Resolves the Cat Paradox 274

24. The Arrow of Time, 277

The Thermodynamic Arrow 277; The Historical Arrow 281; The Radiation Arrow 282; The Cosmological Arrow 283

25. Microscopic Irreversibility, 285

The Origin of Irreversibility 287; Detailed Balancing 290

26. The Recurrence Problem, 293

Zermelo’s Paradox 293; The Extreme Improbability of Perfect Recurrence 295

27. Emergence, 297

Emergence or Reduction? 297; History of the Idea of Emergence 298; Three Kinds of Information Emergence 302; Emergence in the Body 305; Emergence in the Brain 306; The Emergence of Immaterial Information Processing 306; The Emergence of Determinism 307; There Was a Time with No Determinism 308; Emergence Denied 309

28. Origins of Life and Information, 311

History and Evolution in the Universe 312; The Origin of Information 316; Information in Biology  317; Biological Machines 319; Ribosomes 321; ATP Synthase 323; The Flagellum 324; Chaperones 326; Motive Power? 326; Life, Love, and Death 327; Working Backwards in Time 327

Appendix A. Information, 331

Information in the Universe 334; Information and Entropy 342

Appendix B. Entropy and the Second Law, 345

Discrete Particles 345; The Second Law of Thermodynamics 349; Entropy Flows in the Universe 354; Positive and Negative Flows 356

Appendix C. Quantum Physics, 361

Basic Quantum Mechanics 366; The Principle of Superposition 367; The Axiom of Measurement 368; The Projection Postulate 369; Dirac’s Three Polarizers 371; The Wonder and Mystery of the Oblique Polarizer 374; The Quantum Physics Explanation 375; Einstein and Quantum Physics 376

Appendix D. Chance, 379

The Calculus of Probabilities 381; Chance and Free Will 392

Appendix E. Experience Recorder and Reproducer, 395

The Binding Problem 398; Speed and Power of the ERR 399; How the ERR Works 400; The ERR and Consciousness 401; Four “Levels” of the ERR 403; What It’s Like To Be A... 404; Mental States? 405; Summary 406

Appendix F. The Cosmic Creation Process, 409

The Fundamental Question of Information Philosophy 409; The Two Steps in Cosmic Creation 411; The Flatness Problem in Cosmology 414; The Problem of Missing Mass 416; The Horizon Problem 417

Appendix G. Biosemiotics, 419

Will Biologists Accept Biosemiotics? 420

Bibliography, 423

Arrow of Time 423; Biology 423; Chance 424; Consciousness 424; Cosmology 424; Decoherence 425; Einstein 425; Emergence 426; Entanglement 426; Epistemology 426; Free Will 427; Information in Biology 428; Information 428; Meaning 428; Metaphysics 429; Mind 429; Origin of Life 431; Philosophy 432; Physics 432; Psychology 433; Quantum Mechanics 434; Theology 435; Value 435

Index, 437

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