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

• A scientific model for free will and creativity informed by the complementary roles of microscopic randomness and adequate macroscopic determinism in a temporal sequence that generates information.

  Briefly, we separate "free" and "will" in a two-stage process - first the free generation of alternative possibilities for action, then an adequately determined decision by the will. See our Cogito model.

• A basis for objective value beyond humanism and bioethics, grounded in the fundamental information creation processes behind the structure and evolution of the universe

  Briefly, we find positive value in information structures. We see negative value in disorder and entropy tearing down such structures. An ethical rule then becomes "act in a way as to create, maintain, and preserve information against avoidable destructive entropic processes." We call energy with low entropy "Ergo" and anti-entropic processes "ergodic."

• An explanation or epistemological model of knowledge formation and communication. Knowledge and information are neither matter nor energy, but they require matter for expression and energy for communication. They seem to be metaphysical.

  Briefly, we identify knowledge with actionable information in the brain-mind. We justify knowledge by behavioral studies that demonstrate the existence of information structures in the brain. We find language philosophy ambiguous and inadequate for the problem of knowledge. Information philosophy is a new foundation for philosophy that can resolve some ambiguities of language philosophy.

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.

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.     

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