The Information Philosopher - dedicated to the new information philosophy

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The fundamental question of information philosophy is cosmological and ultimately metaphysical. What is the process that creates information structures in the universe?

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 equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago, how can it be that living beings are creating and communicating new information every day? Why are we not still in that state of equilibrium?

The question may be cosmological and metaphysical, but the answer is eminently practical and physical. It is found in the interaction between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.

When information is stored in any structure, two physical processes must occur.

The first is the mysterious collapse of a quantum-mechanical wave function, which happens in any measurement process. 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 of most information structures.

The second is a local decrease in the entropy (which appears to violate the second law) corresponding to the increase in information. Entropy greater than the information increase must be transferred away, ultimately to the cosmic background, to satisfy the second law.

The discovery of a two-part cosmic creation process casts light on a some classical problems in philosophy and physics , because it is the same process that creates new biological species and it 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 nothing to do the knowing.

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 1939, 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," the thought experiment suggested by James Clerk Maxwell, in which a reduction in entropy is possible when an intelligent being interacts with a thermodynamic system..

In the early 1940s, digital computers were invented, by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and others, that could run a stored program to manipulate stored data.

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 neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.

Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical 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 has 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, one that started out as a "blank slate" conditioned by environmental stimuli. The new mind model contains many "functions" implemented with stored programs, all of them information structures in the brain. The new cognitive science likens the brain to a computer, with some programs and data inherited and others developed as appropriate reactions to experience.

But the brain may be regarded less as an algorithmic computer than as a primitive experience recorder and reproducer. 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 information about the original experience (an instant replay) to guide current actions.

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 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. Quantum mechanics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog.

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 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 providential creative process working in the universe
to which we owe our existence, and therefore perhaps our reverence.

It 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 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 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.

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 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 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 uncertainty.

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.

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."

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 stable information structures that distinguishes biology from physics and chemistry.

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

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

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 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

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 implementing functions in the brain. And we verify knowledge scientifically.
A basis for objective value beyond humanism and bioethics, grounded in the fundamental information creation processes behind the structure and evolution of the universe and the emergence of life.
Briefly, we find positive value (or good) in information structures. We see negative value (or evil) in disorder and entropy tearing down such structures. We call energy with low entropy "Ergo" and call anti-entropic processes "ergodic."
Our first categorical imperative is then "act in such a way as to create, maintain, and preserve information as much as possible against destructive entropic processes."
Our second ethical imperative is "share knowledge/information to the maximum extent." Like love, our own information is not diminished when we share it with others
Our third moral imperative is "educate (share the knowledge of what is right) rather than punish." Knowledge is virtue. Punishment wastes human capital and provokes revenge.
Watch a 10-minute animated tutorial on the Two-Stage Solution to
the Free Will Problem
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. We call this two-stage view our Cogito model and trace the idea of a two-stage model in the work of a dozen thinkers back to William James in 1884.
This model is a synthesis of adequate determinism and limited indeterminism, a coherent and complete compatibilism that reconciles
free will with both determinism and indeterminism.
David Hume reconciled freedom with determinism. We reconcile free will with indeterminism.
Because it makes free will compatible with both a form of determinism (really determination) and with an indeterminism that is limited and controlled by the mind, the leading libertarian philosopher Bob Kane suggested we call this model "Comprehensive Compatibilism."
The problem of free will cannot be solved by logic, language, or even by physics. Man is not a machine and the mind is not a computer.
Free will is a biophysical information problem.

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 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, and originating new causal chains, 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, coming as close to immortality as living things can. Humans increase our knowledge of the external world, despite logical, mathematical, and physical uncertainty, external information that can in principle be immortal. 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.