The Information Philosopher
The Information Philosopher, as do all who would make an advance in knowledge, stands on the shoulders of giant philosophers and scientists of the past and present as it tries to make modest advances in the great philosophical problems of freedom, value, and knowledge.
Traditional philosophy is a story about discovery of timeless truths, laws of nature, a block universe in which the future is a logical extension of the past, a primal moment of creation that starts a causal chain in which everything can be foreknown by an omniscient being. Traditional 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.

In traditional 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. Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are illusions.

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 teleological 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 challenge for information philosophy is to explain the emergence of order from chaos, to account for the phenomenal success of deterministic laws when the material substrate of the universe is irreducibly chaotic and random, and to understand the concepts of truth, necessity, and certainty in a universe of chance, contingency, and uncertainty.

Determinism and the very exceptionless causal and deterministic laws of physics are the real illusions. Macroscopic consequences of the law of large numbers only average out microscopic quantum fluctuations to provide us with a very "adequate determinism."

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 chaos that is still present in the microcosmos. More than anything else, it is the creation and maintenance of information that distinguishes biology from physics and chemistry.

Living things store information in a memory of the past that they use to shape the future.

Information Philosophy is a story about freedom and determinism, about good and evil, about knowledge and ignorance.

There is a great battle going on - 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.

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 sensible 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.

Based on insights into these cosmic creation processes, the Information Philosopher proposes refinements of three ideas about 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 freedom, value, and knowledge, 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 in natural science.

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 a 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 based on information processing).

Philosophy is the love of knowledge or wisdom. Information philosophy (I-Phi or ΙΦ) quantifies knowledge as actionable information.

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 energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine.

Over 100 years ago, 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.

Information is a better abstract basis for philosophy, and for science as well, 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.

When information is stored in any structure, two fundamental physical processes occur. First is a collapse of a quantum mechanical wave function. Second is a local decrease in the entropy corresponding to the increase in information. Entropy greater than that must be transferred away to satisfy the second law.

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. Humans increase our knowledge of the external world, despite logical, mathematical, and physical uncertainty. Both do it 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 combination of freely invented theories and adequately determined experiments.


This website version of Information Philosopher has seven parts, each with multiple chapters. Navigation at the bottom of each page will take you to the next or previous part or chapter.

Teacher and Scholar links display additional material on some pages, and reveal hidden footnotes on some pages. The footnotes themselves are in the Scholar section.

Our goal is for the website to contain all the great philosophical discussions of our three ideas, with primary source materials (in the original languages) where possible.

All original content on Information Philosopher is available for your use, without requesting
permission, under a Creative Commons Attribution License.     cc by

Copyrights for all excerpted and quoted works remain with their authors and publishers.


Introduction Freedom Value Knowledge Problems Solutions Afterword

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.