The Information Philosopher - dedicated to the new information philosophy
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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. 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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. 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Pears Charles Sanders Peirce Derk Pereboom Steven Pinker U.T.Place 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 John Duns Scotus Arthur Schopenhauer John Searle Wilfrid Sellars David Shiang Alan Sidelle Ted Sider Henry Sidgwick Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Peter Slezak 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. 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The Information Philosopher
See Bob's talk on the Brain in Olivier Wright's PSI project on Free Will
Bob's Desktop Video Group How is information created? Answering this most profound question in philosophy and in science gives us plausible answers to some of the "great questions" of all time about the nature of reality. For the metaphysical implications of these solutions to great problems, see our companion website The Metaphysicist. One answer tells us how information structures initially formed and how today they are being continuously created. Information philosophy has shown that novelty in the universe ("something new under the sun") requires a temporal process that depends first on the existence of new possibilities and then second on the selection or choice of one actual outcome. See our description of the cosmic creation process. This irreversible temporal process decreases the physical entropy locally, requiring a compensating increase in global entropy to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. There is a deep relationship between immaterial information and material entropy that John Wheeler calls "It from Bit." These two-step or two-stage temporal processes explain not only the cosmic creation process, but also at least five other great problems in science and in philosophy. They include the two-step process of biological evolution, chance variations or mutations in the genetic code followed by natural selection of those with greater reproductive success, and the two-stage model of freedom of the human will, first random alternative possibilities followed by an adequately determined practical or moral choice to make one actual. Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information also involves these two steps or stages (see the Shannon principle). The amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages. With eight possible messages, Shannon says one actual message communicates three bits of information (2³ = 8). If there is only one possible message, there is no new information. This is just as if there is only one possible future, both it and the entire past would have been completely determined from time zero, and the information in the universe would be a conserved constant, as some physicists, and some world religions, believe. The "weird" phenomenon of entanglement does not communicate information at faster than light speed as mistakenly thought. It causes two widely separated quantum particles, each with two random possible states, to coordinate their collapse into two actual perfectly correlated states. A common cause, a constant of the motion that conserves spin angular momentum, and a spherical symmetry can explain the perfect correlations of newly created bits of information at widely separated locations. Our model of the mind as an experience recorder and reproducer stores information in random possible synapses of neural networks and recalls actual memories from these wired Hebbian assemblies. These six examples (and possibly many more) of solving problems with information creation are why I call myself the information philosopher and encourage others to become information philosophers. You may need years of graduate and post-graduate education beyond my introductory material to help solve these problems. But as I go "beyond language and logic" (using both of course) in these few thousand web pages and in my books, I hope to be around for a few more years to answer your questions about information philosophy. You can email me at bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com. Note that just as language philosophy is not the philosophy of language, information philosophy is not the philosophy of information. Luciano Floridi is a philosopher of information. He studies the ethical use of information technology, including the spread of misinformation and disinformation. I use immaterial information and material information structures to explain problems in philosophy and physics. My formal training is in astrophysics and quantum physics, though all my life I've been reading the works of philosophers in the left navigation column. My 1954 Providence Classical High School yearbook noted "of science and logic he chatters." I understand the quantum wave function Ψ as pure information. It is the mathematical solution to Erwin Schrödinger's wave equation. Understanding it as pure information can help to clarify what Richard Feynman called the one and only mystery in quantum mechanics. Understanding the quantum wave function Ψ as pure information will help us to develop an information interpretation of quantum mechanics. The square of the wave function Ψ2 gives us the exact probabilities of different possibilities, which are objectively real, if immaterial. These multiple possibilities for a property of a quantum object when it is observed and measured bothered Albert Einstein, who wanted physical properties to exist independently of observations (they don't), to be determined by physical conditions in the immediate locality of the object and not "influenced" instantly by widely separated objects (they aren't). He called this "spooky action at a distance." As Feynman put the one mystery of the two-slit experiment, "The question now is, how does it really work? What machinery is actually producing this thing? Nobody knows any machinery." As I see it, the one mystery is how quantum waves of abstract and immaterial information going through the two slits can cause the motions and create the properties of concrete and material particles landing on the distant screen. Understanding this mystery will better explain both Feynman's two-slit experiment and Einstein's "spooky" entanglement. An information explanation of the cosmic creation process shows how the expansion of the universe opened up new possibilities for different possible futures. My cosmological work is based on suggestions made by Arthur Stanley Eddington in the 1930's and by my Harvard colleague David Layzer in the 1970's. Multiple possible messages correspond to multiple possible futures. If there is only one possibility, there is only one possible future. Some scientists (e.g., Seth Lloyd) think that the total information in the universe is a conserved quantity, just like the conservation of energy and matter. The "block universe" of special relativity and four-dimensional space-time is interpreted by some as the one possible future that is "already out there." This flawed idea of a fixed amount of information in the universe supports the idea of Laplace's demon, a super-intelligent being who knows the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, one who could use Newton's laws of classical mechanics to know all the past and future of the universe. Such a universe is known as deterministic, pre-determined by the information at the start of the universe, or pre-ordained by an agent who created the universe. This conservation of total information since time zero also supports the much older idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God with foreknowledge of the future, which threatens the idea of human free will. Logically speaking, a god can not be both omniscient and omnipotent. In our study of how Albert Einstein invented most of quantum mechanics a decade before Werner Heisenberg, we showed that Einstein saw the existence of ontological chance whenever electromagnetic radiation interacts with atoms and molecules. This means that many future events, like Aristotle's famous "sea battle," are irreducibly contingent. Future events cannot be known until that future time when they either do or do not occur. The statement "the sea-battle will occur tomorrow" is neither true nor false, challenging Aristotle's bivalent logic and the "excluded middle." A contingent future means an omniscient being can not exist. The indeterminism of quantum mechanics invalidates the idea of physical determinism as well as the idea of an omniscient being. Our work on free will limits indeterminism to the first "free" stage, where it helps to generate alternative possibilities (new thoughts), and our model requires an adequate determinism in the second "will" stage, to ensure that our actions are caused by our motives, desires, and feelings. First "free", then "will." The great scientist and philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr described evolution as a "two-step process" involving chance.
A Two-Step Process
In his 1988 Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Mayr wrote...
Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.
A Two-Stage Model
The great philosopher of mind William James described free will as what I have called a "two-stage" process. He wrote...
And I can easily show...that as a matter of fact the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental out-births of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively instable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, - selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort. In my 2011 book Free Will, I report over two-dozen other philosophers and scientists who independently invented this two-stage model of free will, both before and after my independent idea while a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970's.
A "Two-Bit" Information Explanation for Quantum Entanglement
We examine what information is being created by entanglement and whether and how it is communicated, whether it is meaningful, and if the information is valuable. We also hope to debunk various extravagant claims about quantum weirdness.
Today's standard entanglement studies are based on an experimental apparatus suggested in 1952 by David Bohm to explore the possibilities of "hidden variables" that could explain Albert Einstein's life-long concern about "spooky actions at a distance" and the so-called Einstein-Podoldsky-Rosen paradox of 1935. Bohm's "hidden variable" proposal described a "molecule of total spin zero consisting of two atoms, each of spin one-half. The two atoms are then separated by a method that does not influence the total spin. After they have separated enough so that they cease to interact, any desired component of the spin of the first particle (A) is measured. Then, because the total spin is still zero, it can immediately be concluded that the same component of the spin of the other particle (B) is opposite to that of A." A possible experimental apparatus to realize Bohm's proposal would emit entangled particles in opposite directions. The particles could be Bohm's molecule disassociating into atoms heading toward Stern-Gerlach devices that measure their spins as up or down. But Bohm's experiment with material particles was never realized. Today experiments are done with photons and polarizers measuring the photon spin. The quantum mechanics is the same. The spin of an atom can be up or down. An S-G device measurement creates a single bit of information we can call 1 or 0. We traditionally give the experimenters measuring particles A and B the names Alice and Bob. When Alice observes an up particle, she gets the bit 1. Instantly, Bob observes a down particle and gets the bit 0. These are well-established experimental facts on which to construct a theory of entanglement. Or we can, and we do, develop a principle theory, as Einstein strongly recommended. Once the two particles have separated to a great distance, the naive theory is that one bit of information about Alice's up particle must have been "communicated" to Bob's particle so it can quickly adjust its random spin to be down. Or perhaps, that a "hidden variable" travels at faster than light speed to "act" on particle B, causing its spin to be down. Most simply, perhaps hidden variables are traveling along with the particles. But all these theories are flawed, leading to claims that entanglement "connects" everything instantly in a "holistic" universe. My Ph.D. thesis at Harvard in the 1960's solved the Schrödinger equation for the wave function Ψ12 of a two-atom hydrogen molecule, exactly what David Bohm proposed in the 1950's to explain "hidden variables." This provided me with a great insight into entanglement. Before a measurement, quantum objects like hydrogen atoms, electrons, or photons have two possible spin states. A measurement makes one of the two possible states an actual state. The founders of quantum mechanics described this process in terms that remain controversial a century later. Werner Heisenberg said the new state is indeterministic, with possibilities, one of which comes randomly into "existence." Einstein hoped for a return to classical deterministic physics, in which objects have a "real" existence before we measure them.
The quantum mechanical wave function describing a single-particle spin is a linear combination (also called a superposition) of an up state [
Ψ = (1/√2) [
The (1/√2) coefficients are squared to give us the probability 1/2 of the particle being found in either the up or down state. Half the time we find [ A measurement is said to "select" one of the states, or to "project" a particle into one state. The wave-function Ψ is said to "collapse" into one of the states. It is another two-step or two-stage process, first possibilities, then selection of one to be actual. The entanglement apparatus entangles two quantum particles so we need a two-particle quantum wave function Ψ12 and its a bit more complicated.
Ψ12 = (1/√2) [
We can simplify the notation
| ψ12 > = 1/√2) |
Instead of one particle found randomly in an up or down state, we find the two particles half the time in an up-down state and the other half in a down-up state. Note that each individual particle is still randomly in an up or down state, but the joint condition of opposite spin states is not random at all! The states are certain to be perfectly correlated. Quantum mechanics exactly predicts the outcomes of entanglement experiments. But is this enough of an explanation? Can we find a causal description of what's going on? The apparatus entangling the two particles sits in the center between Alice and Bob's measuring devices. It is also in the past light cone of their measurements so is the most likely candidate for a contributing cause. We call it the causal center (CC).
Alice ← Causal Center → Bob
Our model of a "common cause" explaining entanglement is a causal chain of events that begins with the local causes in the entangling apparatus that establishes the initial symmetry of the entangled particles. The particles are put into a spherically symmetric two-particle quantum state Ψ12 that Erwin Schrödinger said cannot be represented as a product of two independent single-particle states Ψ1 and Ψ2. The causal center sends the particles off in the spherically symmetric state with total spin zero to Alice and Bob. This total spin zero is conserved as a constant of the motion. The final causal interactions in our "causal chain" of events are the two measurements by Alice and Bob, which create two bits of digital information. As long as local measurements are made at the same pre-agreed upon angle their planar symmetry will maintain total spin zero, the particles will have perfectly correlated opposite spin states up-down or down-up, and individual spin states will be randomly up or down. Should measurements at A and B differ by angle θ, perfect correlations would be reduced by cos2θ, as predicted by quantum mechanics. When Alice measures her quantum particle, let's say up, the two-particle wave function Ψ12 collapses and instantly her distant partner Bob's particle is projected into the correlated down state, conserving total spin. This is not because any actionable information is communicated from Alice to Bob. There is no "spooky action at a distance." The two bits of information that "came into existence" were not present in the initial entanglement or in the entangled particles as they traveled to Alice and Bob. They were created by the two symmetric measurements. See more on how a Common Cause, Constant of the Motion, and Spherical Symmetry are needed to produce the perfectly correlated (and random) outcomes of two-particle Bell experiments. Does entanglement have something to do with the one mystery of quantum mechanics, how the abstract wave function can predict the locations or properties of concrete material particles without any causal power, without any known machinery (as Richard Feynman said), to move them? Yes, but there's more to it. In the two-slit experiment, Feynman's classic example, there is no obvious mechanical causal chain of events, no "machinery." But in a Bell experiment, there is first a mechanism (a local causal process) that prepares the two particles in a singlet state with total spin zero, second there is conservation of this spin angular momentum state as the particles move apart, and third, the measurements by Alice and Bob are two distinct causal processes that (again locally) create two new bits of perfectly correlated information at widely separated points in space. No information at all is "communicated" faster than light between Alice and Bob as "spooky action" theories about entanglement suggest. Nor is information traveling faster than light from the causal center to Alice and Bob, carried by the two entangled particles. If the particles are photons, they travel at the speed of light; if electrons or atoms, then below light speed. The individually random and jointly perfectly correlated results of experiments by Alice and Bob are thus a consequence of three successive events in a causal chain starting with the local causes in the entangling apparatus that establishes the initial symmetry of the entangled particles. The particles are put into a spherically symmetric two-particle quantum state Ψ12 that conserves the total spin angular momentum as a constant of the motion. The spherical symmetry keeps the spins perfectly correlated at all times as the particles travel apart. As long as nothing interacts to disturb them during their travels, symmetric measurements will (locally) measure the spins as still correlated. The entangling apparatus at the causal center sends the entangled particles off to Alice and Bob, each particle capable of producing one of the two bits of information. Alice and Bob share this information or knowledge "at a distance." But because each of their sequences of successive bits is quantum random, the random sequences provide no meaningful information immediately to Alice or Bob. When they later compare their sequences using ordinary communication channels however, quantum magic happens, as we shall see. The popular science-fiction idea that entangled particles connect everything in the universe, that telepathic communication of meaningful messages are being exchanged between different galaxies, even some galaxies billions of light years away, is simply nonsense. Without a common cause coming from a causal center between Alice in Andromeda and Bob (me!) in the Milky Way no "entangling" cosmic connection is possible! The sad truth about quantum entanglement is that there is nothing at all going from Alice to Bob or from Bob to Alice. What is going from the common cause in the center to both Alice and Bob is the two particles and the spherically symmetric two-particle wave function Ψ12. When Alice and Bob make their measurements, whoever measures first (in the special frame of reference in which they and the causal center are at rest) collapses the two-particle wave function Ψ12, separating it into a product of two single-particle states Ψ1 and Ψ2. It is essential that Alice and Bob do not measure at just any angle. They must agree to position their polarizers or Stern-Gerlach devices in the same plane to measure at the same pre-agreed upon angle. Their planar symmetry combines with the spherical symmetry of the wave function to conserve the total spin angular momentum. Let's look more carefully at Ψ12 and describe what happens using the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics as formulated by Paul Dirac's "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" (actually one principle, an axiom, and a postulate).
Ψ12 = (1/√2) [
Dirac's principle of superposition describes the particles in a linear combination (or superposition) of | Dirac's projection postulate and the coefficient 1/√2 when squared says there is a 50% chance of being randomly projected into either product of two single-particle states (either up-down or down-up and either will conserve total spin zero). Dirac's axiom of measurement says that measuring a system in a known "eigenstate" will yield its "eigenvalue." Our particles have only two states, up or down, described with bits 1 and 0. Alice and Bob individually produce a string of perfectly random bits, carrying exactly zero information! But despite the 50% randomness of each particle's measurement, the perfect correlations of entangled particles emerge in their joint measurement as always opposite, up-down or down-up, continuing the conservation of total spin! Now despite these random bit strings individually containing no information, their perfect correlation turns out to be extremely valuable for encrypting and decrypting secure communications between Alice and Bob later over ordinary communication channels!
Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Key Distribution.
Alice's measurement sequences appear to her to be completely random, with approximately equal numbers of 1's and 0's, approaching equality for longer bit sequences, like this.
00010011011110101100011011000001
And Bob's sequence looks to him to be equally random, with 1's and 0's approaching 50/50.
11101100100001010011100100111110
Should Alice send her bit sequence to Bob (over ordinary channels) for comparison, he finds when he lines the bit strings up with one another, they are perfectly anti-correlated. Where Alice measured a 1, Bob measures 0, and vice versa. This is explained by the condition of conserved total spin coming from the causal center, so I call it a common cause.
00010011011110101100011011000001
11101100100001010011100100111110 Although they contain no information, these random but perfectly correlated bit sequences are perfect for use as a one-time pad or "key" for encrypting coded messages. And the sequences have not been "communicated" or "distributed" over an ordinary communication channel. They have been created independently and locally at Alice and Bob in a secure way that is invulnerable to eavesdroppers, solving the problem of quantum key distribution (QKD). As long as Alice and Bob measure at the same angle, the spherically symmetric wave function with total spin conserved gives them the symmetric result. If their angles differ by θ their results will vary as cos²θ, which the violation of John Bell's theorem and his inequality has shown.
Beyond Logical Positivism and Language Philosophy to Information Philosophy
Answering deep philosophical questions with words and concepts has sadly been a failure. We need to get behind the words to the underlying information structures, material, linguistic, and mental as well as information communication processes between some structures, especially living things. Although analytic language philosophy is still widely taught, it has made little progress for decades. Language philosophers solve (or dis-solve!) problems in philosophy by an analysis of language, using verbal arguments with words and concepts. They discover (rediscover) the same ancient problems, forever republishing old concepts with new names and acronyms. An information philosopher studies the origin and evolution of information structures, the foundations for all our ideas, solving the problem of knowledge. Information philosophy is a dualist philosophy, both materialist and idealist. It is a correspondence theory, explaining how immaterial ideas represent material objects, especially in the brain and in the mind. In a deterministic or "block" universe, information is constant. Logical and mathematical philosophers follow Gottfried Leibniz and Pierre-Simon Laplace, who said a super-intelligent being who knew the information at one instant would know all the past and future. They deny the obvious fact that new information can be and has been created. An information structure is an object whose elementary particle components have been connected and arranged in an interesting way, as opposed to being dispersed at random throughout space like the molecules in a gas. Information philosophy explains who or what is doing the arranging. A gas of microscopic material particles in equilibrium is in constant motion, the motion we call heat. Some macroscopic properties, like pressure, temperature, volume entropy (and information content), but its total matter and energy, are unchanging. At the origin, it is said to have been in equilibrium and have maximum possible entropy, or disorder. It contained minimal, possibly zero, internal information, apart from information about the structures of the atoms and molecules. When the second law of thermodynamics was discovered in the nineteenth century, physicists predicted that increasing entropy would destroy all information, and the universe would end in a "heat death." That is not happening. Many philosophers, philosophers of science, and scientists themselves, still see deterministic "laws of nature" as models for their work. The great success of Newtonian mechanics inspires them to develop mechanical, material, and energetic explanations for biological and mental processes. In recent decades some have gone beyond classical mechanical laws to explain evolution in terms of the laws of thermodynamics and the increase of complexity. Ilya Prigogine argued that non-equilibrium thermodynamics can bring "order out of chaos." But it takes more than non-equilibrium physics. It takes the expansion of the universe. Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. Why should it become the preferred basis for all philosophy? As most everyone knows, matter and energy are conserved. This means that there is just the same total amount of matter and energy today as there was at the universe origin.
But then what accounts for all the change that we see, the new things under the sun?
The Cosmic Creation Process
Many philosophers and scientists mistakenly think the universe must have begun with a vast amount of information, so that the information structures we have now are left over after the increasing entropy of the second law has destroyed much of the primordial information.
But the physics of the early universe, famously the first three minutes according to Steven Weinberg, shows us a state near the maximum possible entropy for the earliest moments. How can the universe have begun in equilibrium - near maximal disorder and minimal informational, yet today be in the high state of information and order we see around us. This I have called the fundamental question of information philosophy. The answer to this fundamental question was given to me by my Harvard colleague and mentor David Layzer in the 1970's. In short, it is the expansion of the universe, which continually increases the space available to the limited number of particles, giving them more room and more possibilities to arrange themselves into interesting information structures. This is the basis of a cosmic creation process for all interesting things. Cosmic creation is only possible because the expansion of space increases faster than the gas particles can get back to equilibrium, making room for the growth of entropy and disorder, but also of order and information, in local pockets of negative entropy. The entropy of the early universe was maximal, in equilibrium, for its time, but it was tiny compared to the actual entropy today, which is smaller than today's maximum possible entropy, making room for lots more information structures (negative entropy). I have now found that this powerful insight was first seen by Arthur Stanley Eddington in his 1934 book New Pathways in Science, where he said (p.68) "The expansion of the universe creates new possibilities of distribution faster than the atoms can work through them."
As pointed out to me by Layzer in 1975, Eddington's arrow of time (for him, the direction of entropy increase) points not only to increasing disorder (positive entropy) but also to increasing information (negative entropy). At the earliest times, purely physical forces (electromagnetic, nuclear, and gravitational) changed the arrangement of the most fundamental particles of matter and energy, quarks, electrons, gluons, and photons, into information structures like atoms and molecules, and much later into planets, stars and galaxies. Billions of years later, living things became active information structures. Living things control the flow of matter and energy through themselves and do their own arranging of their matter and energy constituents! New immaterial information is forever emerging. We human beings are creating new ideas! Purely physical objects like planets, stars, and galaxies are passive information structures, entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. Living things, you and I, are active dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And the communication of biological information controls those flows! Before life as we know it, some information structures blindly replicated their information. Some of these replication processes were fatal mistakes, but very rarely the mistake was an improvement, with better reproductive success. In life today, those random errors produce some of the variations followed by natural selection which adapts living things to their environments. Even the smallest living things develop behaviors, sensing information about and reacting to their environment, sending signals between their parts (cells, organelles) and to other living things nearby. These behaviors can be interpreted as intentions, goals, and agency, introducing purpose into the universe. The goals and purposes of living things are not the "final goal" or purpose of Aristotle's Metaphysics that he called "telos" (τέλος). Teleology is the idea that there is a cosmic purpose that preceded the creation of the universe and which points toward an end goal. Teleology underlies many theologies, in which a creator God embodies the telos, just as a sculptor previsualizes the statue within a block of marble. Perhaps the best known is Teilhard de Chardin whose end goal he called the "Omega Point" is Jesus Christ. In many religions, the creator predestines or predetermines all the events in the universe, a theological idea that fit well with the mechanical and deterministic laws of Nature discovered by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth-century age of enlightenment. The biologist Colin Pittendrigh coined the term teleonomy to distinguish the purpose we see in all living things from a hypothetical teleological purpose from before the origin of the universe. Jacques Monod and Ernst Mayr also stressed the important distinction between teleonomy and teleology. Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine, the mind in the body. It is the soul. When we die, it is information that perishes, unless the future preserves it. The matter remains. Information philosophers think that if we don't remember the past, we don't deserve to be remembered by the future. This is especially true for the custodians of knowledge. In the natural sciences the most important references are usually the most recent. In the humanities and social sciences the opposite is often true. The earliest references were invented ideas that became traditional beliefs, now deeply held without further justification. This website is not based on the work of a single thinker. It includes the work of over five hundred philosophers and scientists, critically analyzed over six decades by this information philosopher, with extensive quotations from the original thinkers and PDFs of major parts of their work (sometimes in the original language). Information philosophy can explain the fundamental metaphysical connection between materialism and idealism. It replaces the determinism and metaphysical necessity of eliminative materialism and reductionist naturalism with metaphysical possibilities. Unactualized possibilities exist in minds as immaterial ideas. They are the alternative actions and choices that are the basis for our two-stage model of free will. The existence (perhaps metaphysical) of alternative possibilities explains how both new ideas and new species arise by chance, the consequence of quantum indeterminism Neurobiologists question the usefulness of quantum indeterminism in the brain and mind. But it is the sometimes random firing of particular neurons and their subsequent wiring together that records an individual's experiences, experiences distinctly different in ways that contribute to every unique "self," - what it's like to be me. Faced with a new experience, the experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) causes some neurons to "play back" those encoded past experiences that are similar in some way to the current experience. The "playback" is complete with the emotions that were attached to the original experiences. Memory of and learning from diverse past experiences provides the context that adds "meaning" to the current experience. The number of past experiences recalled may be very large. William James described this as a "blooming, buzzing confusion." He called for us to focus attention on the alternative possibilities in his "stream of consciousness." These possibilities are the past experiences of the audience members whose hands are raised in Bernard Baars's "Theater of Consciousness," that give them something relevant to add to the conversation. Some information enthusiasts claim that information is the fundamental stuff of the universe. It is not. The universe is fundamentally composed of discrete particles of matter and energy. Information describes the arrangement of the matter. Where the arrangement is totally random, there is no information. The organized information in living things has a purpose, to survive and to increase. Information is the form in all discriminable concrete objects as well as the content in non-existent, merely possible, thoughts and other abstract entities. Information is the disembodied, de-materialized essence of anything. Perhaps the most amazing thing about information philosophy is its discovery that abstract and immaterial information can exert an influence over concrete matter, explaining how mind can move body, how our thoughts can control our actions, deeply related to the mystery of how the quantum wave function (randomly) controls the probabilities of locating quantum particles. It is immaterial information in the collapse of the two-particle wave function Ψ12 that ensures perfectly correlated measurements no matter how far entangled particles are separated. But the random generation of alternative possibilities for thoughts and actions does not mean that our deliberations themselves are random, provided that the deliberative choice of one possible action is adequately determined. For example, compatibilist philosophers argue that libertarians on free will cannot see that if there is a random element involved in the generation of possible actions, agents would have no control over such actions and cannot be held morally responsible. But on the contrary, if an agent chooses to flip a coin to decide on an action, that choice can still be a deliberative act, and the agent can accept full responsibility for choosing either outcome of the coin flip. Information philosophy goes beyond a priori logic and its puzzles, beyond analytic language and its paradoxes, beyond philosophical claims of necessary truths, to a contingent physical world that is best represented as made of dynamic, interacting information structures. The creation of new information structures exposes the error of determinism. In a deterministic universe there is no increase of information. All the past, present, and future information is present to the eyes of a super-intelligence, as Pierre-Simon Laplace argued. Isaac Newton's classical mechanical laws of motion are not only deterministic, they are reversible in time. It is believed by many that if time could be reversed, the entire universe would proceed back in time to its earliest state, like a motion picture played backwards. Information philosophy has discovered the origin of irreversibility in the early work on quantum mechanics by Albert Einstein. Quantum indeterminism and irreversibility in turn contribute to the origin of information structures, which we have found in the work of Arthur Stanley Eddington and David Layzer. Thirdly, quantum indeterminism and the creation of information structures are the bases for our two-stage model of free wil, which we trace back to the thought of William James. Information is said by some to be a conserved quantity, just like matter and energy. This is not the case. Determinism is a false belief, originating either in the tragic idea that an omniscient and omnipotent God (or in the Newtonian idea that unbreakable laws of nature) completely control every event, so there can be no human freedom in a completely determined world. Indeed, belief in determinism is the modern residue of the traditional belief in an overarching explanation - a determinative reason - for everything. Knowledge can be defined as information in minds - a partial isomorphism of the information structures in the external world. Information philosophy is a correspondence theory. Sadly, there is no isomorphism, no information in common, between words and objects. As the great Swiss linguist and structuralist philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out, the connection between most signifiers (words and other symbols) and the things signified (objects and concepts) is arbitrary, a connection established only by cultural convention. This arbitrariness accounts for much of the failure of analytic language philosophy in the past century. Although language is an excellent tool for human communications, it is arbitrary, ambiguous, and ill-suited to represent the world directly. Human languages can not "picture" reality, despite the hopes of early logical positivists like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Information is the lingua franca of the universe. The extraordinarily sophisticated connections between words and objects are made in human minds, mediated by the brain's experience recorder and reproducer (ERR). Words stimulate neurons to start firing and to play back those experiences that include relevant objects. Neurons that were wired together in our earliest experiences fire together at later times, contextualizing our new experiences, giving them meaning. And by replaying emotional reactions to similar earlier experiences, it makes then "subjective experiences," giving us the feeling of "what it's like to be me" and solving the "hard problem" of consciousness. Beyond words, a dynamic information model of an information structure in the world is presented immediately to the mind as a simulation of reality experienced for itself. Without words and related experiences previously recorded in your mental experience recorder, we could not comprehend words. They would be mere noise, with no meaning.
By comparison, a diagram, a photograph, an animation, or a moving picture can be seen and mostly understood by human beings, independent of their native tongue. (Right click on the cat movie to show controls that make it play and pause) The basic elements of information philosophy are dynamic models of information structures. They go far beyond logic and language as a representation of the fundamental, metaphysical, nature of reality. Visual and interactive models "write" directly into our mental experience recorders. Computer animated models can incorporate all the laws of nature, from the differential equations of quantum physics to the myriad information processes of biology. Computer simulations are not only our most accurate knowledge of the physical world, they are among the best teaching tools ever devised. We can transfer knowledge non-verbally to coming generations in most of the world's population via the Internet and nearly ubiquitous smartphones. Consider the dense information in Drew Berry's real-time animations of molecular biology. These are the kinds of dynamic models of information structures that we believe can best explain the fundamental nature of reality - "beyond logic and language."
If you think about it, everything you know is pure abstract information. Everything you are is an information structure, a combination of matter and energy that embodies, communicates, and most important, processes your information. Everything that you value contains information. And while the atoms, molecules, and cells of your body are important, many only last a few minutes and most are completely replaced in just a few years. But your immaterial information, from your original DNA to your latest experiences, will be with you for your lifetime. You are a creator of new information, part of the cosmic creation process. Your free will depends on your unique ability to create freely generated thoughts, multiple ideas in your mind as alternative possibilities for your willed decisions and responsible actions. Anyone with a serious interest in philosophy should understand how information is created and destroyed, because information is much more fundamental than the logic and language tools philosophers use today. Information philosophy goes "beyond logic and language." Information is the sine qua non of meaning. This I-Phi website aims to provide a deep understanding of information that should be in every philosopher's toolbox. We will show why information should actually be the preferred basis for the critical analysis of current problems in a wide range of disciplines - from information creation in cosmology to information in quantum physics, from information in biology (especially evolution) to psychology, where it offers a solution to the classic mind-body problem and the problem of consciousness. And of course in philosophy, where failed language analysis can be replaced or augmented by immaterial information analysis as a basis for justified knowledge, objective values, human free will, and a surprisingly large number of problems in metaphysics.
Above all, information philosophy hopes to replace beliefs with knowledge. Instead of the primitive idea of an other-worldly creator, we propose a comprehensive explanation of the creation of this world that has evolved into the human creativity that invents such ideas.
A Personal Note
As this information philosopher approaches his end of life, of physical and material life, of mental and ideal life, and especially of creative life, it is unlikely he/I will get to finish five more books on information philosophy, some of whose draft material is found on this website.
So I added a brief summary of my forthcoming fifth book on information philosophy, Mind: The Experience Recorder and Reproducer to the 61st version of my I-Phi home page. (You can see the past twenty years of versions of this page preserved in SkyBuilders TimeLines persistent archive, as suggested to me and my son Derek by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1990's. You can also see the version of any of the site's 2500 pages at a particular date and time by pressing the @ key and selecting a time.) This page began with the fundamental question of information philosophy - how is information created? We answered that information structures were created shortly after the universe origin by a two-step process, first the opening of new possible cells in phase space caused by the universe expansion, followed by the adequately determined four physical forces (strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) forming atoms, stars, and galaxies, despite the second law of thermodynamics and the universe being initially in a state of chaos and disorder, of maximum entropy for that time. We now know that the entropy of the early universe was much smaller than the actual entropy today. More importantly, today's maximum possible entropy is much larger still, making room for the large amount of negative entropy (information) in today's universe. Our Mind book proposes a new model for how the human mind has come to know the cosmic creative process. Our model stands in opposition to the dominant mind model for the past eighty years in psychology and cognitive science, namely the computational theory of mind. We will argue that wo/man is not a machine and the brain is not a (digital) computer. The metaphor that mind can be viewed as immaterial software running in the brain's material (biological) hardware is attractive but flawed. We will show how and where information is stored in the brain and how it is recalled, but without address buses connecting to digital data storage and without central or parallel processors "operating" on the data. We will show how the stored information is not represented as viewable syntactical structures. There are no "neural computations" on "neural representations." Instead, past experiences are reproduced or re-presented, with all the "wired-together" neurons of an experience firing again. We call our mind model the Experience Recorder and Reproducer. See the entries under the Mind menu for further details... I want to point out that many ideas I now think of as my own had their origins in my reading the works of all the hundreds of philosophers and scientists in the left navigation column. I've been most fortunate to have had the time to read them all. My work on cosmic creation started with ideas of David Layzer and Arthur Stanley Eddington. Work on my two-stage model of free will began with Eddington and with William James. My theory that the universe geometry started flat and has always been flat depended on the critical observations of Walter Baade. I saw the origin of irreversibility in the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann's "molecular disorder" and the quantum randomness in Albert Einstein's directions of photon emission. And the critical idea that information in the mind is stored in neurons that have been wired together by our past experiences depended on the insights of neurophysiologist Donald Hebb. I owe so much to them all. But what is information? How is it created? Why is it a better tool for examining philosophical problems than traditional logic or linguistic analysis? And what are some examples of classic problems in philosophy, in physics, and in metaphysics with information philosophy solutions?
What problems has information philosophy solved?
Why has philosophy made so little progress? Perhaps it's because philosophers prefer problems, while scientists seek solutions? Must a philosophical problem once solved become science and leave philosophy? Bertrand Russell thought so.
Russell said: "as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science...while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy."This information philosopher thinks not. In order for problems to remain to remain philosophical, interested philosophers should consider our proposed information-based solutions as part of the philosophical dialogue.
Among the proposed solutions to classic philosophical problems are:
Information analysis also makes significant progress on a number of the classic problems in metaphysics, many of these virtually unchanged since they were identified as puzzles and paradoxes over two millennia ago, such as The Statue and Lump of Clay, The Ship of Theseus, Dion and Theon, or Tibbles, the Cat, The Growing Problem, The Debtor's Paradox, The Problem of the Many, and The Sorites Problem. Among the metaphysical problems with suggested information philosophy solutions are:
For more details, see our companion website The Metaphysicist. It also turns out that the methodology of information philosophy can be productively applied to some outstanding problems in physics. Philosophers of science might take an interest in the proposed information-based solutions to these problems in the "foundations" of physics.
A common definition of information is the act of informing - the communication of knowledge from a sender to a receiver that informs (literally shapes) the receiver. Often used as a synonym for knowledge, information traditionally implies that the sender and receiver are human beings, but many animals clearly communicate. Information theory studies the communication of information. How is information created? Ex nihilo, nihil fit, said the ancients, Nothing comes from nothing. But information is no (material) thing. Information is physical, but it is not material. Information is a property of material. It is the form that matter can take. We can thus create something (immaterial) from nothing! But we shall find that it takes a special kind of energy (free or available energy, with negative entropy) to do so, because it involves the rearrangement of matter. Why is information better than logic and language for solving philosophical problems? Broadly speaking, modern philosophy has been a search for truth, for a priori, analytic, certain, necessary, and provable truth.
The Fundamental Question of Information Philosophy
Our fundamental philosophical question is cosmological and ultimately metaphysical.
What are the processes that create emergent information structures in the universe? More simply, How is information created in spite of the second law of thermodynamics?
Given the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any system will over time approach a thermodynamic equilibrium of maximum disorder or entropy, in which all information is lost, and given the best current model for the origin of the universe, which says everything began in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago, how can it be that living beings are creating and communicating vast amounts of new information every day?None of these processes can work unless they have a way to get rid of the positive entropy (disorder) and leave behind a pocket of negative entropy (order or information). The positive entropy is either conducted, convected, or radiated away as waste matter and energy, as heat, or as pure radiation. At the quantum level, it is always the result of interactions between matter and radiation (photons). Whenever photons interact with material particles, the outcomes are inherently unpredictable. As Albert Einstein discovered ten years before the founding of quantum mechanics, these interactions involve irreducible ontological chance. Negative entropy is an abstract thermodynamic concept that describes energy with the ability to do work, to make something happen. This kind of energy is often called free energy or available energy. In a maximally disordered state (called thermodynamic equilibrium) there can be matter in motion, the motion we call heat. But the average properties - density, pressure, temperature - are the same everywhere. Equilibrium is formless. Departures from equilibrium are when the physical situation shows differences from place to place. These differences are information. The second law of thermodynamics then simply means that isolated systems will eliminate differences from place to place until all properties are uniformly distributed. Natural processes spontaneously destroy information. Consider the classic case of what happens when we open a perfume bottle. ![]() In the late nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann revolutionized thermodynamics with his kinetic theory of gases, based on the ancient assumption that matter is made up of collections of atoms. He derived a mathematical formula for entropy S as a function of the probabilities of finding a system in all the possible microstates of a system. When the actual macrostate is one with the largest number W of microstates, entropy is at a maximum, and no differences (information) are visible. Boltzmann could not prove his "H-Theorem" about entropy increase. His contemporaries challenged a "statistical" entropy increase on grounds of microscopic reversibility and macroscopic recurrence (both problems solved by information philosophy). He could not prove the existence of atoms. In the early twentieth century, Just before Boltzmann died, Albert Einstein formulated a statistical mechanics that put Boltzmann's law of increasing entropy on a firmer mathematical basis. Einstein's work predicted the size of miniscule fluctuations around equilibrium, which Boltzmann had expected. Einstein showed that entropy does not, in fact, continually increase. It can decrease randomly in short bursts of local higher densities or organized motions. Though quickly extinguished, Einstein showed that the occasionally correlated motions of invisible atoms explains the visible "Brownian motion" of tiny particles like seed pollen. Einstein's calculations led to predictions that were confirmed quickly, proving the existence of discrete atoms that had been hypothesized for centuries. Sadly, Boltzmann may not have known of Einstein's proofs for his work. Later Einstein saw the same fluctuation in radiation, proving his revolutionary hypothesis of light quanta, now called photons. Although this is rarely appreciated, it was Einstein who showed that both matter and energy are discrete, discontinuous particles. His most famous equation shows they are convertible into one another, E = mc2. He also showed that the interaction of matter and radiation, of atoms and photons, always involves ontological chance. This bothered Einstein greatly, because he thought his God should not "play dice." Late in life, Einstein said that if matter and energy cannot be described with the local continuous analytical functions in space and time needed for his field theories, that all his work would be "castles in the air." But the loss of classical deterministic ideas - which have ossified much of philosophy, crippling philosophical progress - is more than offset by the indeterminism of an open future and Einstein's belief in the "free creation of new ideas." In the middle twentieth century, Claude Shannon derived the mathematical formula for the communication of information. John von Neumann found it to be identical to Boltzmann's formula for entropy, though with a minus sign (negative entropy). Where Boltzmann entropy is the number of possible microstates, Shannon entropy is the number of possible messages that can be communicated. Shannon found that new information cannot be created unless there are multiple possible messages. This in turn depends on the ontological chance discovered by Einstein. In a deterministic universe, the total information at all times would be a constant. Information would be a conserved quantity, like matter and energy. "Nothing new under the Sun." But it is not constant, though many philosophers, mathematical physicists, and theologians (God's foreknowledge) still think so. Information is being created constantly in our universe. And we are co-creators of the information, including Einstein's "new ideas." Because "negative" entropy (order or information) is such a positive quantity, we chose in the 1970's to give it a new name - "Ergo," and to call the four phenomena or processes that create negative entropy "ergodic," for reasons that will become clear. But today, the positive name "information" is all that we need to do information philosophy.
Answering the Fundamental Question of Information Philosophy
How exactly has the universe escaped from the total disorder of thermodynamic equilibrium and produced a world full of information?
It begins with the expansion of the universe. If the universe had not expanded, it would have remained in the original state of thermodynamic equilibrium. We would not be here. To visualize the departure from equilibrium that made us possible, remember that equilibrium is when particles are distributed evenly in all possible locations in space, and with their velocities distributed by a normal law - the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. (The combination of position space and velocity or momentum space is called phase space). When we open the perfume bottle, the molecules now have a much larger phase space to distribute into. There are a much larger number of phase space "cells" in which molecules could be located. It of course takes them time to spread out and come to a new equilibrium state (the Boltzmann "relaxation time.") When the universe expands, say grows to ten times its volume, it is just like the perfume bottle opening. The matter particles must redistribute themselves to get back to equilibrium. But suppose the universe expansion rate is much faster than the equilibration or relaxation time. The universe is out of equilibrium, and in a flat, ever-expanding, universe it will never get back! In the earliest moments of the universe, material particles were in equilibrium with radiation at extraordinarily high temperatures. When quarks formed neutrons and protons, they were short-lived, blasted back into quarks by photon collisions. As the universe expanded, the temperature cooled, the space per photon increased and the mean free time between photon collisions increased, giving larger particles a better chance to survive. The expansion red-shifted the photons. decreasing the average energy per photon, and eventually reducing the number of high energy photons that disassociate matter. The mean free path of photons was very short. They were being scattered by collisions with electrons. When temperature declined further, to 5000 degrees, about 400,000 years after the "Big Bang," the electrons and protons combined to make hydrogen and (with neutrons) helium atoms.
![]() These fluctuations mean that there were slight differences in density of the newly formed hydrogen gas clouds. The force of universal gravitation then worked to pull relatively formless matter into spherically symmetric stars and planets. Thus is the original order out of chaos, although this phrase is now most associated with the work on deterministic chaos theory and complexity theory, as we shall see.
How information creation and negative entropy flows appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics
In our open and rapidly expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy (if the particles were "relaxed" into a uniform distribution among the new phase-space cells) is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy. There is an intimate connection between the physical quantity negative entropy and abstract immaterial information, first established by Leo Szilard in 1929.
Two of our "ergodic" phenomena - gravity and quantum cooperative phenomena - pull matter together that was previously separated. Galaxies, stars, and planets form out of inchoate clouds of dust and gas. Gravity binds the matter together. Subatomic particles combine to form atoms. Atoms combine to form molecules. They are held together by quantum mechanics. In all these cases, a new visible information structure appears. In order for these structures to stay together, the motion (kinetic) energy of their parts must be radiated away. This is why the stars shine. When atoms join to become molecules, they give off photons. The new structure is now in a (negative) bound energy state. It is the radiation that carries away the positive entropy (disorder) needed to balance the new order (information) in the visible structure. In the cases of chaotic dissipative structures and life, the ergodic phenomena are more complex, but the result is similar, the emergence of visible information. (More commonly it is simply the maintenance of high-information, low-entropy structures.) These cases appear in far-from-equilibrium situations where there is a flow of matter and energy with negative entropy through the information structure. The flow comes in with low entropy but leaves with high entropy. Matter and energy are conserved in the flow, but information in the structure can increase. Remember, information is not a conserved quantity like matter and energy. Information is neither matter nor energy, though it uses matter when it is embodied and energy when it is communicated. Information is the immaterial arrangement of the matter and energy. This vision of life as a visible form through which matter and free energy flow was first seen by Ludwig van Bertlanffy in 1939, though it was made more famous by Erwin Schrödinger's landmark essay What Is Life? in 1945, where he claimed that "life feeds on negative entropy."
![]() Note that the 300K (the average earth temperature) photons are dissipated into the dark night sky, on their way to the cosmic microwave background. The Sun-Earth-night sky is a heat engine, with a hot energy source and cold energy sink, that converts the temperature difference not into mechanical energy (work) but into biological energy (life). When new information is created and embodied in a physical structure, two physical processes must occur. The first process is the collapse of a quantum-mechanical wave function into one of the possible states in a superposition of states, which happens in any measurement process. A measurement produces one or more bits of information. Such quantum events involve irreducible indeterminacy and chance, but less often noted is the fact that quantum physics is directly responsible for the extraordinary temporal stability and adequate determinism of most information structures.
We can call the transfer of positive entropy, which stabilizes the new information from Process 1, Process 1b.
The second process is a local decrease in the entropy (which appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics) corresponding to the increase in information. Entropy greater than the information increase must be transferred away from the new information, ultimately to the night sky and the cosmic background, to satisfy the second law.
Given this new stable information, to the extent that the resulting quantum system can be approximately isolated, the system will deterministically evolve according to von Neumann's Process 2, the unitary time evolution described by the Schrödinger equation. The first two physical processes (1 and 1b) are parts of the information solution to the "problem of measurement," to which must be added the role of the "observer." We shall see that the observer involves a mental Process 3. The discovery and elucidation of the first two as steps in the cosmic creation process casts light on some classical problems in philosophy and physics , since it is the same two-step process that creates new biological species and explains the freedom and creativity of the human mind. The cosmic creation process generates the conditions without which there could be nothing of value in the universe, nothing to be known, and no one to do the knowing. Information itself is the ultimate sine qua non.
The Three Kinds of Information Emergence
Note there are three distinct kinds of emergence:
The negative entropy (order, or potential information) generated by the universe expansion is a tiny amount compared to the increase in positive entropy (disorder). Sadly, this is always the case when we try to get "order out of order," as can be seen by studying entropy flows at different levels of emergent phenomena. In any process, the positive entropy increase is always at least equal to, and generally orders of magnitude larger than, the negative entropy in any created information structures, to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. The positive entropy is named for Boltzmann, since it was his "H-Theorem" that proved entropy can only increase overall - the second law of thermodynamics. And negative entropy is called Shannon, since his theory of information communication has exactly the same mathematical formula as Boltzmann's famous principle;
S = k log W,
where S is the entropy, k is Boltzmann's constant, and W is the probability of the given state of the system.
Material particles are the first information structures to form in the universe.. They are quarks, baryons, and atomic nuclei, which eventually combine with electrons to form atoms and eventually molecules, when the falling temperature becomes low enough. These material particles are attracted by the force of universal gravitation to form the gigantic information structures of the galaxies, stars, and planets.
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Microscopic quantum mechanical particles and huge self-gravitating systems are stable and have extremely long lifetimes, thanks in large part to quantum stability. Stars are another source of radiation, after the original Big Bang cosmic source, which has cooled down to 3 degrees Kelvin (3°K) and shines as the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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Our solar radiation has a high color temperature (5000K) and a low energy-content temperature (273K). It is out of equilibrium and it is the source of all the information-generating negative entropy that drives biological evolution on the Earth. Note that the fraction of the light falling on Earth is less than a billionth of that which passes by and is lost in space. A tiny fraction of the solar energy falling on the earth gets converted into the information structures of plants and animals. Most of it gets converted to heat and is radiated away as waste energy to the night sky.
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Every biological structure is a quantum mechanical structure. Quantum cooperative phenomena allow DNA to maintain its stable information structure over billions of years in the constant presence of chaos and noise. And biological structures contain astronomical numbers of particles, allowing them to average over the random noise of individual quantum events, becoming "adequately determined."
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The stable information content of a human being survives many changes in the material content of the body during a person’s lifetime. Only with death does the mental information (spirit, soul) dissipate - unless it is saved somewhere. The total mental information in a living human is orders of magnitude less than the information content and information processing rate of the body. But the cultural information structures created by humans outside the body, in the form of external knowledge like this book, and the enormous collection of human artifacts, now rival the total biological information content.
The Shannon Principle - No Information Without Possibilities
In his development of the mathematical theory of the communication of information, Claude Shannon showed that there can be no new information in a message unless there are multiple possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no information in that message.
We can simplify this to define the Shannon Principle. No new information can be created in the universe unless there are multiple possibilities, only one of which can become actual. An alternative statement of the Shannon principle is that in a deterministic system, information is conserved, unchanging with time. Classical mechanics is a conservative system that conserves not only energy and momentum but also conserves the total information. Information is a "constant of the motion" in a determinist world. Quantum mechanics, by contrast, is indeterministic. It involves irreducible ontological chance. An isolated quantum system is described by a wave function ψ which evolves - deterministically - according to the unitary time evolution of the linear Schrödinger equation.
(ih/2π) ∂ψ/∂t = Hψ
The possibilities of many different outcomes evolve deterministically, but the individual actual outcomes are indeterministic. This sounds a bit contradictory, but it is not. It is the essence of the highly non-intuitive quantum theory, which combines a deterministic "wave" aspect with an indeterministic "particle" aspect. In his 1932 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann explained that two fundamentally different processes are going on in quantum mechanics (in a temporal sequence for a given particle - not at the same time).
Von Neumann claimed there is another major difference between these two processes. Process 1 is thermodynamically irreversible. Process 2 is in principle reversible. This confirms the fundamental connection between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics that is explainable by information physics. Information physics establishes that process 1 may create information. It is always involved when information is created. Process 2 is deterministic and information preserving. The first of these processes has come to be called the collapse of the wave function. It gave rise to the so-called problem of measurement, because its randomness prevents it from being a part of the deterministic mathematics of process 2. But isolation is an ideal that can only be approximately realized. Because the Schrödinger equation is linear, a wave function | ψ > can be a linear combination (a superposition) of another set of wave functions | φn >,
| ψ > = ∑ cn | φn >,
where the cn coefficients squared are the probabilities of finding the system in the possible state | φn > as the result of an interaction with another quantum system.
cn2 = < ψ | φn >2.
Quantum mechanics introduces real possibilities, each with a calculable probability of becoming an actuality, as a consequence of one quantum system interacting (for example colliding) with another quantum system. It is quantum interactions that lead to new information in the universe - both new information structures and information processing systems. But that new information cannot subsist unless a compensating amount of entropy is transferred away from the new information. Even more important, it is only in cases where information persists long enough for a human being to observe it that we can properly describe the observation as a "measurement" and the human being as an "observer." So, following von Neumann's "process" terminology, we can complete his admittedly unsuccessful attempt at a theory of the measuring process by adding an anthropomorphic Process 3 - a conscious observer recording new information in a mind. This is only possible if the local reductions in the entropy (the first in the measurement apparatus, the second in the mind) are both balanced by even greater increases in positive entropy that must be transported away from the apparatus and the mind, so the overall change in entropy can satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.
An Information Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Our emphasis on the importance of information suggests an "information interpretation" of quantum mechanics that eliminates the need for a conscious observer as in the "standard orthodox" Copenhagen Interpretation. An information interpretation dispenses also with the need for a separate "classical" measuring apparatus.
There is only one world, the quantum world.
Information physics claims there is only one world, the quantum world, and the "quantum to classical transition" occurs for any large macroscopic object with mass m that contains a large number of atoms. In this case, independent quantum events are "averaged over," the uncertainty in position and momentum of the object becomes less than the observational accuracy as We can say it is ontologically indeterministic, but epistemically deterministic, because of human ignorance Δv Δx > h / m and as h / m goes to zero. The classical laws of motion, with their implicit determinism and strict causality emerge when microscopic events can be ignored. Information philosophy interprets the wave function ψ as a "possibilities" function. With this simple change in terminology, the mysterious process of a wave function "collapsing" becomes a much more intuitive discussion of possibilities, with mathematically calculable probabilities, turning into a single actuality, faster than the speed of light. Information physics is standard quantum physics. It accepts the Schrödinger equation of motion, the principle of superposition, the axiom of measurement (now including the actual information "bits" measured), and - most important - the projection postulate of standard quantum mechanics (the "collapse" so many interpretations deny). But a conscious observer is not required for a projection, for the wave-function "collapse", for one of the possibilities to become an actuality. What it does require is an interaction between (quantum) systems that creates irreversible information.
In less than two decades of the mid-twentieth century, the word information was transformed from a synonym for knowledge into a mathematical, physical, and biological quantity that can be measured and studied scientifically. In 1929, Leo Szilard connected an increase in thermodynamic (Boltzmann) entropy with any increase in information that results from a measurement, solving the problem of "Maxwell's Demon," a thought experiment suggested by James Clerk Maxwell, in which a local reduction in entropy is possible when an intelligent being interacts with a thermodynamic system. In the early 1940s, digital computers were invented by von Neumann, Shannon, Alan Turing, and others. Their machines could run a stored program to manipulate stored data, processing information, as biological organisms had been doing for billions of years. Then in the late 1940s, the problem of communicating digital data signals in the presence of noise was first explored by Shannon, who developed the modern mathematical theory of the communication of information. Norbert Wiener wrote in his 1948 book Cybernetics that "information is the negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy," and in 1949 Leon Brillouin coined the term "negentropy." Finally, in the early 1950s, inheritable characteristics were shown by Francis Crick, James Watson, and George Gamow to be transmitted from generation to generation in a digital code.
Information is Immaterial
Information is neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.
A living being is a form through which passes a flow of matter and energy (with low or negative entropy). Genetic information is used to build the information-rich matter into an information-processing structure that contains a very large number of hierarchically organized information structures. All biological systems are cognitive, using their internal information structure to guide their actions. Even some of the simplest organisms may learn from experience. The most primitive minds are experience recorders and reproducers. In humans, the information-processing structures create new actionable information (knowledge) by consciously and unconsciously reworking and reusing the experiences stored in the mind. Emergent higher levels exert downward causation on the contents of the lower levels, ultimately supporting mental causation and free will. When a ribosome assembles 330 amino acids in four symmetric polypeptide chains (globins), each globin traps an iron atom in a heme group at the center to form the hemoglobin protein. This is downward causal control of the amino acids, the heme groups, and the iron atoms by the ribosome. The ribosome is an example of Erwin Schrödinger's emergent "order out of order," life "feeding on the negative entropy" of digested food.
Notice the absurdity of the idea that the random motions of the transfer RNA molecules (green in the video above), each holding a single amino acid (red), are carrying pre-determined information of where they belong in the protein being built. Determinism is an emergent property and an ideal philosophical concept, unrealizable except approximately in the kind of adequate determinism that we experience in the macroscopic world, where the determining information is part of the higher-level control system. The total information in multi-cellular living beings can develop to be many orders of magnitude more than the information present in the original cell. The creation of this new information would be impossible for a deterministic universe, in which information is constant. Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical or biological scientist can get to the idea of a soul or spirit that departs the body at death. When a living being dies, it is the maintenance of biological information that ceases. The matter remains. Biological systems are different from purely physical systems primarily because they create, store, and communicate information. Living things store information in a memory of the past that they use to shape their future. Fundamental physical objects like atoms have no history. And when human beings export some of their personal information to make it a part of human culture, that information moves closer to becoming immortal. Human beings differ from other animals in their extraordinary ability to communicate information and store it in external artifacts. In the last decade the amount of external information per person may have grown to exceed an individual's purely biological information. Since the 1950's, the science of human behavior has changed dramatically from a "black box" model of a mind that started out as a "blank slate" conditioned by environmental stimuli. Today's mind model contains many "functions" implemented with stored programs, all of them information structures in the brain. The new "computational model" of cognitive science likens the brain to a computer, with some programs and data inherited and others developed as appropriate reactions to experience.
The Experience Recorder and Reproducer
The brain is not a digital computer doing symbolic logic, with one or more central processing units addressing multiple data storage systems. It is more like a multi-channel and multi-track experience recorder and reproducer with an extremely high data rate. Information about an experience - the sights, sounds, smells, touch, and taste - is recorded along with the emotions - feelings of pleasure, pain, hopes, and fears - that accompany the experience. When confronted with similar experiences later, the brain can reproduce or re-present information about the original experience (an instant replay) that helps to guide current actions.
The ERR model stands in contrast to the popular cognitive science or “computational” model of a mind as a digital computer. No algorithms, data addressing schemes, or stored programs are needed for the ERR model. The physical metaphor is a non-linear random-access data recorder, where data is stored using content-addressable memory (the memory address is the data content itself). Simpler than a computer with stored algorithms, a better technological metaphor might be a video and sound recorder, enhanced with the ability to record - and replay - smells, tastes, touches, and critically essential, feelings. The biological model is neurons that wire together during an organism’s experiences, in multiple sensory and limbic systems, such that later firing of even a part of the wired neurons can stimulate firing of all or part of the original complex. A conscious being is constantly recording information about its perceptions of the external world, and most importantly for ERR, it is simultaneously recording its feelings. Sensory data such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations are recorded in a sequence along with pleasure and pain states, fear and comfort levels, etc. All these experiential and emotional data are recorded in association with one another. This means that when the experiences are reproduced (played back in a temporal sequence), the accompanying emotions are once again felt, in synchronization. The ability to reproduce an experience is critical to learning from past experiences, so as to make them guides for action in future experiences. The ERR model is the minimal mind model that provides for such learning by living organisms. The ERR model does not need computer search, retrieval, and decision algorithms to reproduce past experiences. All that is required is that relevant past experiences “play back” whenever they are stimulated by present experiences that resemble the past experiences in one or more ways. All or most of these relevant past experiences appear before the mind as alternative possibilities for evaluation as thoughts and actions. Decisions can be made based on the relative values of past outcomes. Neuroscientist Donald Hebb's insight that "neurons that fire together wire together" is widely accepted today. The ERR model of information philosophy is built on the simple consequence of Hebb's work that "neurons that have been wired together will fire together." Neuroscientists and philosophers of mind have long asked how diverse signals from multiple locations in the brain over multiple pathways appear so unified in the brain. The ERR model offers a simple solution to this “binding” problem. Experiences are bound at their initial recording. They do not have to be re-associated by some central processing unit looking up where experiences may have been distributed among the various memory or sensory motor areas of the brain. The ERR model may also throw some light on the problem of "qualia" and of "what it's like to be" a particular organism.
Information Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
Modern philosophy is a story about the discovery of timeless truths, laws of nature, a block universe in which the future is a logical and physical extension of the past. A primordial moment of creation is assumed to start a causal chain in which the entire future can be foreknown by an omniscient being.
Modern philosophy seeks knowledge in logical reasoning with clear and unchanging concepts. Its guiding lights are thinkers like Parmenides, Plato, and Kant, who sought unity and identity, being and universals.
Tradition, Modern, and Postmodern
In a traditional society, authoritative knowledge is that which has been handed down. Moderns are those who think that all knowledge must be based on reason. Postmoderns recognize that much knowledge has been invented, arbitrarily created
In modern philosophy, the total amount of information in the conceptually closed universe is static, a physical constant of nature. The laws of nature allow no exceptions, they are perfectly causal. Everything that happens is said to have a physical cause. This is called "causal closure". Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are said to be illusions. If every event has a predetermined cause, or reason, even free will is an illusion.
Information philosophy, by contrast, is a story about invention, about novelty, about biological emergence and new beginnings unseen and unseeable beforehand, a past that is fixed but an ambiguous future that can be shaped by teleonomic changes in the present. Its model thinkers are Heraclitus, Protagoras, Aristotle, and Hegel, for whom time, place, and particular situations mattered. Information philosophy is built on probabilistic laws of nature. The fundamental challenge for information philosophy is to explain the emergence of stable information structures from primordial and ever-present chaos, to account for the phenomenal success of deterministic laws when the material substrate of the universe is irreducibly chaotic, noisy, and random, and to understand the concepts of truth, necessity, and certainty in a universe of chance, contingency, and indeterminacy. Determinism and the exceptionless causal and deterministic laws of classical physics are the real illusions. Determinism is information-preserving. In an ideal deterministic Laplacian universe, the present state of the universe is implicitly contained in its earliest moments. There is "nothing new under the sun." This ideal determinism does not exist. The "adequate determinism" behind the laws of nature emerged from the early years of the universe when there was only the indeterministic chaos of "thermodynamic equilibrium" and its maximal entropy or disorder. In a random noisy environment, how can anything be regular and appear determined? It is because the macroscopic consequences of the law of large numbers average out microscopic quantum fluctuations to provide us with a very adequate determinism for large objects. Information Philosophy is an account of continuous information creation, a story about the origin and evolution of the universe, of life, and of intelligence from an original quantal chaos that is still present in the microcosmos. More than anything else, it is the creation and maintenance of stable information structures, despite the destructive entropic requirements of the second law of thermodynamics. Creation of living information structures distinguishes biology from physics and chemistry. Living things store useful information in a memory of the past that they can use to shape the future. The "meaning" in the information is their use of it. Some get their information "built-in" via heredity. Some learn it from experience. Others invent it! Ancient Philosophy, before the advent of Modern Theology with John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, and Medieval Philosophy, before the beginning of Modern Philosophy with René Descartes, covered the same wide range of questions now addressable by Information Philosophy.
The Development of Information Philosophy
Our earliest work on information philosophy dates from the 1950's, based on suggestions made thirty years earlier by Arthur Stanley Eddington. In his 1928 Nature of the Physical World, Eddington argued that quantum indeterminacy had "opened the door of human freedom," and that the second law of thermodynamics might have some bearing on the question of objective good.
In the 1950's, we studied the then leading philosophies of positivism and existentialism. Bertrand Russell, with the help of G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, proposed logic and language as the proper foundational basis, not only of philosophy, but also of mathematics and science. Wittgenstein's Tractatus imagined that a set of all true propositions could capture all the knowledge of modern science.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science
(or the whole corpus of the natural sciences) Their logical positivism and the variation called logical empiricism developed by Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle proved to be failures in grounding philosophy, mathematics, or science. On the continent, existentialism was the rage. We read Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The existentialist continentals argued that freedom exists, but there are no objective values. The utilitarian English argued that values exist, but human freedom does not. We wrote that "Values without freedom are useless. Freedom without values is absurd." This was a chiasmos like the great figure of Immanuel Kant, rephrased by Charles Sanders Peirce as "Idealism without Materialism is Empty. Materialism without Idealism is Blind." In the 1960's, we formulated arguments that cited "pockets of low entropy," in apparent violation of the second law, as the possible basis for anything with objective value. We puzzled over the origin of "negative entropy," since the universe was believed to have started in thermodynamic equilibrium and the second law of thermodynamics says that (positive) entropy can only increase. In the late 1960's, we developed a two-stage model of free will and called it Cogito, a term often associated with the mind and with thought. With deference to Descartes, the first modern philosopher, we called "negative entropy" Ergo. While thermodynamics calls it "negative," information philosophy sees it as the ultimate "positive" and deserving of a better name. We thought that Ergo etymologically suggests a fundamental kind of energy ("erg" zero), e.g., the "Gibbs free energy," G0, that is available to do work because it has low entropy. In the early 70's, we decided to call the sum of human knowledge the Sum, to complete the triple wordplay on Descartes' proof of his existence. We saw a great battle going on in the universe - between originary chaos and emergent cosmos. The struggle is between destructive chaotic processes that drive a microscopic underworld of random events versus constructive cosmic processes that create information structures with extraordinary emergent properties that include adequately determined scientific laws - despite, and in many cases making use of, the microscopic chaos. Since the destructive chaos is entropic, we repurposed a term from statistical mechanics and called the anti-entropic processes creating information structures ergodic. The embedded Ergod resonated. Created information structures range from galaxies, stars, and planets, to molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. They are the structures of terrestrial life from viruses and bacteria to sentient and intelligent beings. And they are the constructed ideal world of thought, of intellect, of spirit, including the laws of nature, in which we humans play a role as co-creator. Information is constant in a deterministic universe. There is "nothing new under the sun." The creation of new information is not possible without the random chance and uncertainty of quantum mechanics, plus the extraordinary temporal stability of quantum mechanical structures. It is of the deepest philosophical significance that information is based on the mathematics of probability. If all outcomes were certain, there would be no "surprises" in the universe. Information would be conserved and a universal constant, as some mathematicians and physicists mistakenly believe. Information philosophy requires the ontological uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes of modern quantum physics to produce new information. But at the same time, without the extraordinary stability of quantized information structures over cosmological time scales, life and the universe we know would not be possible. That stability is the consequence of an underlying digital nature. Quantum mechanics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog. Digital information transfers are essentially perfect. All analog transfers are "lossy." Moreover, the "correspondence principle" of quantum mechanics and the "law of large numbers" of statistics ensures that macroscopic objects can normally average out microscopic uncertainties and probabilities to provide the "adequate determinism" that shows up in all our "Laws of Nature." Information philosophy explores some classical problems in philosophy with deeper and more fundamental insights than is possible with the logic and language approach of modern analytic philosophy.
By exploring the origins and evolution of structure in the universe, information philosophy transcends humanity and even life itself, though it is not a mystical metaphysical transcendence.
Information philosophy uncovers the creative process working in the universe Information philosophy locates the fundamental source of all values not in humanity ("man the measure"), not in bioethics ("life the ultimate good"), but in the origin and evolution of information in the cosmos. Information philosophy is an idealistic philosophy, a process philosophy, and a systematic philosophy, the first in many decades. It provides important new insights into the Kantian transcendental problems of epistemology, ethics, freedom of the will, god, and immortality, as well as the mind-body problem, consciousness, and the problem of evil. In physics, information philosophy (or information physics) provides new insights into the problem of measurement, the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, the two paradoxes of microscopic reversibility and macroscopic recurrence that Josef Loschmidt and Ernst Zermelo used to criticize Ludwig Boltzmann's explanation of the entropy increase required by the second law of thermodynamics, and finally information provides a better understanding of the entanglement and nonlocality phenomena that are the basis for modern quantum cryptography and quantum computing. Recently, we are developing an explanation for the puzzling phenomenon of entanglement. Finally, a new philosophy of biology should be based on the deep understanding of organisms as information users, information creators, information communicators, and at the higher levels, information processors, including humans who have learned to store information externally and transfer it between the generations culturally. Except for organisms that can extract information by photosynthesis of the negative entropy (free or available energy) streaming from the sun, most living things destroy other cells to extract the information needed to maintain their own low entropy state of organization. Most life feeds on other life. And most life communicates with other life. Even single cells, before the emergence of multicellular organisms, developed communication systems between the cells that are still visible in slime molds and social amoebae today. In a multicellular organism, every cell has some level of communication with all the others. Most higher level organisms share communal information that makes them stronger as a social group than as independent individuals. The sum of human knowledge has amplified the power of humanity, for better or worse, to a level that can control the environmental conditions on all of planet Earth. Information biology is the hypothesis that all biological evolution should be viewed primarily as the development of more and more powerful users, creators, and communicators of information. Seen though the lens of information, humans are the current end product of information processing systems. With the emergence of life and mind, purpose (telos) appeared in the universe. The teleonomic goal of each cell is to become two cells, which replicates its information content. The purpose of each species is to improve its reproductive success relative to other populations. The purpose of human populations then is to use, to add to, and to communicate human knowledge in order to maximize the human capital per person. Like love, the information that is shared by educating others is not used up. Information is not a scarce economic good. The more that information is communicated, the more of it there is, in human minds (not brains), and in the external stores of human knowledge. These include books of course, but in the future they will be the interconnected knowledge bases of the world wide web, including www.informationphilosopher.com, since books are expensive and inaccessible for many. The first thing we must do for the young is to teach them how to teach themselves by accessing these knowledge systems with handheld devices that will some day be available for all the world's children, beyond one laptop per child to one smartphone per child. Based on insights into the discovery of the cosmic creation process, the Information Philosopher proposes three primary ideas that are new approaches to perennial problems in philosophy. They are likely to change some well-established philosophical positions. Even more important, they may reconcile idealism and materialism and provide a new view of how humanity fits into the universe.
The three ideas are
All three ideas depend on understanding modern cosmology, physics, biology, and neuroscience, but especially the intimate connection between quantum mechanics and the second law of thermodynamics that allows for the creation of new information structures. All three are based on the theory of information, which alone can establish the existential status of ideas, not just the ideas of knowledge, value, and freedom, but other-worldly speculations in natural religion like God and immortality. All three have been anticipated by earlier thinkers, but can now be defended on strong empirical grounds. Our goal is less to innovate than to reach the best possible consensus among philosophers living and dead, an intersubjective agreement between philosophers that is the surest sign of a knowledge advance. This Information Philosopher website aims to be an open resource for the best thinking of philosophers and scientists on these three key ideas and a number of lesser ideas that remain challenging problems in philosophy - on which information philosophy can shed some light. Among these are the mind-body problem (the mind can be seen as the realm of information in its free thoughts, the body an adequately determined biological system creating and maintaining information); the common sense intuition of a cosmic creative process often anthropomorphized as a God or divine Providence; the problem of evil (chaotic entropic forces are the devil incarnate); and the "hard problem" of consciousness (agents responding to their environment, and originating new causal chains, based on information processing). Philosophy is the love of knowledge or wisdom. Information philosophy (I-Phi or ΙΦ) qualifies and quantifies knowledge as meaningful actionable information. Information philosophy reifies information as an immaterial entity that has causal power over the material world! What is information that merits its use as the foundation of a new method of inquiry? Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and available usable energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine. It is the stuff of thought, the immaterial substance of philosophy. Information is a powerful diagnostic tool. It is a better abstract basis for philosophy, and for science as well, especially physics, biology, and neuroscience. It is capable of answering questions about metaphysics (the ontology of things themselves), epistemology (the existential status of ideas and how we know them), and idealism itself. Information philosophy is now more than the solution to three fundamental problems we identified in the 1960's and '70's. I-Phi is a new philosophical method, capable of solving multiple problems in both philosophy and physics. It needs young practitioners, presently tackling some problem, who might investigate the problem using this new methodology. Note that, just as the philosophy of language is not linguistic philosophy, Information philosophy is not the philosophy of information, which is mostly about computers and cognitive science, the computational theory of mind. Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein labeled many of our problems “philosophical puzzles.” Bertrand Russell called them “pseudo-problems.” Analytic language philosophers thought many of these problems could be “dis-solved,” revealing them to be conceptual errors caused by the misuse of language. Information philosophy takes us past logical puzzles and language games, not by diminishing philosophy and replacing it with science. Russell insisted that “questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.”Information philosophy aims to show that problems in philosophy should not be reduced to “Russell’s Residue.” The language philosophers of the twentieth century thought that they could solve (or at least dis-solve) the classical problems of philosophy. They did not succeed. Information philosophy, by comparison, now has cast a great deal of light on some of those problems. It needs more information philosophers to join us to make more progress.
To recap, when information is stored in any structure, two fundamental physical processes occur. First is a "collapse" of a quantum mechanical wave function, reducing multiple possibilities to a single actuality. Second is a local decrease in the entropy corresponding to the increase in information. Entropy greater than that must be transferred away from the new information structure to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. These quantum level processes are susceptible to noise. Information stored may have errors. When information is retrieved, it is again susceptible to noise. This may garble the information content. In information science, noise is generally the enemy of information. But some noise is the friend of freedom, since it is the source of novelty, of creativity and invention, and of variation in the biological gene pool. Biological systems have maintained and increased their invariant information content over billions of generations, coming as close to immortality as living things can. Philosophers and scientists have increased our knowledge of the external world, despite logical, mathematical, and physical uncertainty. They have created and externalized information (knowledge) that can in principle become immortal. Both life and mind create information in the face of noise. Both do it with sophisticated error detection and correction schemes. The scheme we use to correct human knowledge is science, a two-stage combination of freely invented theories and adequately determined experiments. Information philosophy follows that example.
If you have read this far, you already know that the Information Philosopher website itself is an exercise in information sharing. It has ten parts, each with multiple chapters, that include nearly 3,000 web pages.
Teacher and Scholar links display additional material on some pages, and reveal hidden footnotes on some pages. The footnotes themselves are often in the Scholar section. Our goal is for the website to contain all the great philosophical discussions of the three original problem areas we identified in the 1970's - COGITO (freedom), ERGO (value), and SUM (knowledge) - plus potential solutions for several classic problems in philosophy and physics, many of which had been designated "pseudo-problems" or relegated to "metaphysics." We have now shown that information philosophy is a powerful diagnostic tool for addressing metaphysical problems. See The Metaphysicist. In the left-hand column of all I-Phi pages are links to over five hundred philosophers and scientists who have made contributions to these great problems. Their I-Phi web pages may include original contributions of each thinker, with examples of their thought, usually in their own words rather than a paraphrase, and where possible in their original languages.
All original content on Information Philosopher is available for your use, without requesting Copyrights for all excerpted and quoted works remain with their authors and publishers.
For Teachers
A web page may contain two extra levels of material. The Normal page is material for newcomers and students of the Information Philosophy. Two hidden levels contain material for teachers (e.g., secondary sources) and for scholars (e.g., footnotes, and original language quotations).
Teacher materials on a page will typically include references to secondary sources and more extended explanations of the concepts and arguments. Secondary sources will include books, articles, and online resources. Extended explanations should be more suitable for teaching others about the core philosophical ideas, as seen from an information perspective.
For Scholars
Scholarly materials will generally include more primary sources, more in-depth technical and scientific discussions where appropriate, original language versions of quotations, and references to all sources.
Footnotes for a page appear in the Scholar materials. The footnote indicators themselves are only visible in Scholar mode.
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