Dualisms
Over the centuries many philosophers have seen a fundamental dualism. Most have invented their own names for this dualism. Not all have meant the very same things, but the great similarities allow us to collect all these dualisms into a quasi-chronological table, where similarities and slight differences become more clear.
Of course many have claimed to be monists. "All is One," they said, as they generally reduced the physical world to the ideal, or vice versa, or argued that the ideal and physical worlds were somehow both something else. But their underlying dualism was inescapable.
Many philosophers saw the need for the two sides to work together.
Immanuel Kant wrote
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer.
Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.
Charles Sanders Peirce rewrote it as
If Materialism without Idealism is blind,
Idealism without Materialism is void.
With a nod to Kant and Peirce, we can say
Concepts without Percepts are empty.
Percepts without Concepts are blind.
And although
Freedom and
Values are not a Dualism, they too require one another and we can observe
Freedom without Values is Absurd (Continental Existentialism).
Values without Freedom are Worthless (British Utilitarianism).
In Information Philosophy, we divide the world into three fundamental parts, the material, the ideal (ideas are the same kind of abstraction as pure information), and the biological/human, a middle world that combines ideality and materiality.
The Information Philosopher's three levels are seen in our tri-color I-Phi logo.
- The Physical/Material (green) - Ilya Prigogine's "order out of chaos," when the matter in the universe forms information structures
- The Biological/Material (red) - Erwin Schrödinger's "order out of order," when the material information structures form teleonomic self-replicating biological information structures
- The Mental/Immaterial (blue) - Bob Doyle's abstract "information out of order," when organisms with minds process and externalize information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment
See other important
triads.
Information Philosophy offers a new solution to the
Mind-Body Problem, which is perhaps the quintessential version of the Great Dualism that began in ancient times as Idealism and Materialism.
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