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 original 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 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. 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.
Following von Neumann, we call this information stabilization 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 "adequately" deterministically evolve according to von Neumann's Process 2, the unitary time evolution described by the Schrödinger equation.
These three processes are parts of the information solution to the "problem of measurement," to which must be added the role of the "observer."
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 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.
the order out of chaos when the matter in the universe forms information structures.
This was not possible before the first atoms formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. So information structures like the stars and galaxies did not exist before about 400 million years.
At that time, convection and turbulent cells probably first formed in far-from-equilibrium clouds of dust and gas, as discovered by Ilya Prigogine. They are still forming today. But this is a purely physical/material kind of order. It is information, but does not process information.
Order out of chaos can explain the emergence in complex systems that exert downward causation on their atomic and molecular components. But this is a gross kind of downward causal control. Explaining life and mind as "complex adaptive systems" has not been successful. We need to go beyond "chaos and complexity" theories.
the order out of order when the material information structures form self-replicating biological information structures. These are information processing systems.
In his famous essay, "What Is Life?," Erwin Schrödinger noted that life "feeds on negative entropy" (or information). He called this "order out of order."
This kind of biological processing of information first emerged about 4 billion years ago on the earth. It continues today on multiple emergent biological levels, e.g., single-cells, multi-cellular systems, organs, etc., each level creating new information structures not reducible to lower levels and exerting downward causation on the lower levels.
And this downward causal control is extremely fine, managing the motions and arrangements of individual atoms and molecules, though not quantum probabilities.
Biological systems are cognitive systems, using internal "subjective" knowledge to recognize and interact with their "objective" external environment, taking actions to maintain themselves and expand their populations by learning from experience.
the pure information out of order when organisms with minds generate, internalize, and then externalize non-biological information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment. Communication can be by hereditary transmission or by an advanced organism capable of learning and then teaching their contemporaries directly, or indirectly by publishing their knowledge for future generations.
This kind of information can be highly abstract mind-stuff, pure Platonic ideas, the stock in trade of philosophers. It is neither matter nor energy, a kind of pure spirit, the ghost in the machine, and a candidate for the dualist "substance" of René Descartes.
The Shannon Principle
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 according to the unitary time evolution of the linear Schrödinger equation,
i ℏ d | ψ > / dt = H | ψ >.
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.
And 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." Following von Neumann's "process" terminology, we might complete his admittedly unsuccessful attempt at a theory of the measuring process with the anthropomorphic Process 3 - a conscious observer recording new information (knowledge) in a human mind.
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," 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 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 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 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 can 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 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 at right), 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 should be regarded less as an algorithmic computer with one or more central processing units than as 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 information about the original experience (an instant replay) that helps 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.
Information Philosophers, as do all who would make an advance in knowledge, stand on the shoulders of giant philosophers and scientists of the past and present as we try to make modest advances in the great philosophical problems of knowledge, value, and freedom.
In the left-hand column of all pages are links to nearly three hundred philosophers and scientists who have made contributions to these great problems. Their web pages include the original contributions of each thinker, with examples of their thought, usually in their own words, and where possible in their original languages as well.
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. 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.
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.
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 indeterministic chaos.
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 quantal 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. Some get it via heredity. Some learn it from experience. Others invent it!
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.
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 completecompatibilism 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 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) 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. It is the stuff of thought, the immaterial substance of philosophy.
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. Their logical positivism and the variation called logical empiricism developed by Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle have proved to be failures in grounding philosophy, mathematics, or science.
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 not a solution to specific problems in philosophy. 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 that problem using this new methodology. Note that, just as the philosophy of language is not linguistic philosophy, I-Phi is not the philosophy of information, which is mostly about computers and cognitive science.
The language philosophers of the twentieth century thought that they could solve (or at least dissolve) 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 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 probably already know that the Information Philosopher website is an exercise in information sharing. It 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 main ideas, plus preliminary solutions for several classic problems in philosophy and physics, with primary source materials (in the original languages) where possible.
Philosophers who would like to develop their expertise in information philosophy should inquire into support possibilities by writing Bob Doyle, the founder of information philosophy.
Support options include online training sessions by Skype and Google Hangouts published to YouTube, as well as fellowships at the Program for Information Philosophy [ Π Φ ] in Cambridge, MA
(including accommodations and partial travel expenses).
Preferences will be given to current graduate students in philosophy or science - physics, biology, psychology, especially - and current post-docs.
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