Foreword
The Information Philosopher is primarily a defense of three ideas, based on two principles and a corollary.
The two principles are
- increasing information - in structures that encode information, from galaxies and stars, to biological life and brain cells.
- "soft" causality - a causality that does not involve strict determinism.
The corollary is
- we can know the world and ourselves and we are free, within obvious limits, to create our own future.
All three depend on understanding modern physics, cosmology, biology, and neuroscience.
All three have strong connections to information science. They are contributions to a new information philosophy.
If these ideas are accepted, they could change some well-established philosophical positions. Even more important, they provide a new view of how humanity fits into the universe.
Information philosophy also proposes solutions for a number of philosophical and scientific puzzles, such as the
problem of evil, the existential status of
universals, and the paradox of
Schrödinger's Cat. It also throws considerable light on deriving
ought from is, the problem of
induction, the idea of
progress, and the problem of
quantum measurement.
Information philosophy offers a mind model that transcends flawed "brain as computer" models. The brain is not a digital electronic computer, though it has information circuits. It is not a Turing machine of deterministic states. The brain is not a mechanism in the seventeenth-century sense of a time-reversible system obeying Newtonian laws of physics. Time is of the essence in the mind. The
arrow of time traces the irreversible development of unique biological individuals with increasing
consciousness of self,
others, and a
nurturing environment.
Information philosophy sees the brain as a magnificent information processing and decision system. It is orders of magnitude more capable than the whole of today's internetworked system of computers and multimedia communications channels at accumulating actionable knowledge, which is the brain's natural purpose, or telos.
Information philosophy is a world-historical moment in
Hegel's sense of Absolute Spirit, a peak of the meditation in the
Nietzsche/
Heidegger metaphor, a process philosophy in the
Whitehead sense of a return to temporality, and a natural noosphere in
Teilhard's image, when the mind realizes and recognizes itself as part of the
cosmic ergodic process of information accumulation, as co-creator of the universe.
Information philosophy is a systematic philosophy, with a triadic architectonic that would have pleased
Kant and
Peirce. It is an idealist philosophy, but its information super-structures are properly constructed on a material base, as
Marx saw clearly. It is worldly, not other-worldly. "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," said
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The world is everything that is the case." And the case is what has been cast, by chance.
Information philosophy begins with the case (der Fall) and journeys upward, following the creative ergodic processes as they generate emergent phenomena that contain all we need to examine not only Kant's God, Freedom, and Immortality, but also his Platonic dreams of Truth and Goodness.
Information philosophy identifies and establishes the existence of the Cosmic Good as constructed information structures. Kant's search for a categorical imperative, for a universal duty, becomes "Be good. Preserve the Good. Do good unto others. Life is Good."
Evil is not merely the absence of
Good, but the destruction of
ergodic information structures, always fragile in the presence of
entropic forces.
Information philosophy explains how humans are free to do good. Just as an individual character becomes good through good works (Karma in the Atman), the
Sum of all human good works is seen as the manifestation of a "world soul" or matrix of information (Brahman) which can encode the immortality of each individual.
Man is free. God is Good. And you can Know it.
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