What is information? How is it created? Why is it a better tool for examining philosophical problems than traditional logic or linguistic analysis? Has information philosophy actually solved any problems?

What is information?

A common definition of information is the act of informing - the communication of knowledge from a sender to a receiver that informs (literally shapes) the receiver. As a synonym for knowledge, information traditionally implies that the sender and receiver are human beings, but many animals clearly communicate. Information theory studies the communication of information.

Information philosophy extends that study to the information content in material objects, including how it is changed by interactions with the rest of the universe.

We call a material object with information content an information structure.

The sender of information need not be a person, an animal, or even a living thing. It might be a purely material object, a rainbow, for example, sending color information to your eye.

The receiver, too, might be merely physical, a molecule of water in that rainbow that receives too few photons and cools to join the formation of a crystal snowflake, increasing its information content.

Information theory, the mathematical theory of the communication of information, says little about meaning in a message, which is roughly the use to which the information received is put. Information philosophy extends the information flows in human communications systems and digital computers to the natural information carried in the energy and material flows between all the information structures in the observable universe.

A message that is certain to tell you something you already know contains no new information. It does not increase your knowledge, or reduce the uncertainty in what you know, as information theorists put it.

If everything that happens was certain to happen, as determinist philosophers claim, no new information would ever enter the universe. Information would be a universal constant. There would be "nothing new under the sun." Every past and future event could in principle be known by a god-like super-intelligence with access to such a fixed totality of information (Laplace's Demon).

Physics tells us that the total amount of mass and energy in the universe is a constant. The conservation of mass and energy is a fundamental law of nature. Some mathematical physicists erroneously think that information should also be a conserved quantity, a constant of nature.

But information is neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. Information can be created and destroyed. The material universe creates it. The biological world creates it and utilizes it. Above all, human minds create, process, and preserve information, the sum of human knowledge that distinguishes humanity from all other biological species and that provides the extraordinary power humans have over our planet.

Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine, the mind in the body. It is the soul, and when we die, it is our information that perishes. The matter remains. We will claim that information is a potential objective value, the ultimate sine qua non.

Information philosophy claims that man is not a machine and the brain is not a computer. Living things process information in ways far more complex, if not faster, than the most powerful information processing machines.

Machines are assembled. Living things assemble themselves. Biological evolution began when the first molecule replicated itself, that is, duplicated the information it contained. Cultural evolution is the creation and communication of new information that adds to the sum of human knowledge. The creation and evolution of information processing systems in the universe has culminated in minds that can understand and reflect on what we call the cosmic creation process.

How is information created?

Ex nihilo, nihil fit, said the ancients, Nothing comes from nothing. But information is no (material) thing. Information is physical, but it is not material. Information is a property of material. It is the form that matter can take. We can thus create something (immaterial) from nothing! But we shall find that it takes a special kind of energy (free or available energy, with negative entropy) to do so, because it involves the rearrangement of matter.

Energy transfer to or from an object increases or decreases the heat in the object. Entropy transfer does not change the heat content, it represents only a different organization or distribution of the matter in the body. Increasing entropy represents a loss of organization or order, or, more precisely, information. Maximum entropy is maximum disorder.

As you read this sentence, new information is (we hope) being encoded/embodied in your mind/brain. Permanent changes in the synapses between your neurons store the new information. New synapses are made possible by free energy and material flows in your metabolic system, a tiny part of the negative entropy flows that are coursing throughout the universe. Information philosophy will show you how these tiny mental flows allow you to comprehend and some day control at least part of the cosmic information flows in the universe.

Cosmologists know that information is being created because the universe began some thirteen billion years ago in a state of minimal information. The "Big Bang" was formless radiation, pure energy. There were no stable material particles in the first fractions of a second. How matter formed into information structures like the galaxies, stars, and planets is the beginning of a story that will end with understanding how human minds emerged to understand our place in the astrophysical universe.

The relation between matter and information is straightforward. The embodied information is the organization or arrangement of the matter plus the laws of nature that describe the motions of matter in terms of the fundamental forces that act between all material particles.

The relation between information and energy is more complex, and has led to confusion about how to apply mathematical information theory to the physical and biological sciences. Material systems in an equilibrium state are maximally disordered, have maximum entropy, no negative entropy, and no information other than the bulk parameters of the system. In the case of the universe, the initial parameters were just two, the amount of radiant energy per unit volume (the temperature) and the total volume (infinite). Later the numbers of fundamental particles become parameters, but the numbers per unit volume (as a function of time, as the temperature falls) are all the information needed to describe a statistically uniform, isotropic universe.

Information philosophy will explain the process of information creation in three fundamental realms - the purely material, the biological, and the mental. The first was a kind of "order out of chaos," when matter formed from radiation and the expansion of the early universe opened up spaces that led to the gravitational attraction of randomly distributed matter into highly organized galaxies, stars, and planets. The expansion - the increased space between material objects - drove the universe away from thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy) and created the negative entropy, a quantitative measure of the order that is the basis for all information.

Purely material objects react to one another following laws of nature, but they do not in an important sense create or process the information that they contain.

A qualitatively different kind of information creation was when the first molecule on earth to replicate itself went on to duplicate its information exponentially. Accidental errors in the duplication provided variations in replicative success. Most important, besides creating information structures, biological systems are also information processors. Living things use information to guide their actions.

The third process of information creation, and the most important to philosophy, is human creativity. Almost every philosopher since philosophy began has considered the mind as something distinct from the body. Information philosophy can now explain that distinction. The mind can be considered the immaterial information in the brain. The brain, part of the material body, is a biological information processor. The stuff of mind is the information being processed and the new information being created. As some philosophers have speculated,
mind is the software in the brain hardware.

It may come as a surprise to many thinkers to learn that the physics involved in the creation of all three types of information - material, biological, and mental - include the same two-step sequence of quantum physics and thermodynamics at the core of the cosmic creation process.

The most important information created in a mind is a recording of an individual's experiences (sensations). Recordings are played back (automatically and perhaps mostly unconsciously) as a guide to evaluate future actions (volitions) in similar situations. The particular past experiences reproduced are those stored in the brain located near elements of the current experience (association of ideas).
Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that have been wired together will later fire together.

Sensations are recorded as the mental effects of physical causes.
Sensations are stored as retrievable information in the mind of an individual self. Recordings include not only the five afferent senses but also the internal emotions - feelings of pleasure, pain, hopes, and fears - that accompany an experience. They constitute "what it's like" for a particular being to have an experience.

Volitions are the mental causes of physical effects. Volitions begin with 1) the reproduction of past experiences that are similar to the current experience. These become thoughts about possible actions and the (partly random) generation of other alternative possibilities for action. They continue with 2) the evaluation of those freely generated thoughts followed by a willful selection (sometimes habitual) of one of those actions.

Volitions are followed by 3) new sensations coming back to the mind indicating that the self has caused the action to happen (or not). This feedback is recorded as further retrievable information, reinforcing the knowledge stored in the mind that the individual self can cause this kind of action (or sometimes not).

Why is information better than logic and language for solving philosophical problems?

The theory of communication of information is the foundation of our "information age." To understand how we know things is to understand how knowledge represents the material world of embodied "information structures" in the mental world of immaterial ideas.

All knowledge starts with the recording of experiences. The experiences of thinking, perceiving, knowing, feeling, desiring, deciding, and acting may be bracketed by philosophers as "mental" phenomena, but they are no less real than other "physical" phenomena. They are themselves physical phenomena.
They are just not material things.

All science begins with information gathered from experimental observations, which are mental phenomena. So all knowledge of the physical world rests on the mental. All scientific knowledge is shared information and as such science is immaterial and mental, some might say fundamental. Recall Descartes' argument that the experience of thinking is that which for him is the most certain.

Information philosophy is not the philosophy of information (the intersection of computer science, information science, information technology, and philosophy), just as linguistic philosophy - the idea that linguistic analysis can solve (or dis-solve) philosophical problems - is not the philosophy of language. Compare the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of biology, etc.

The analysis of language, particularly the analysis of philosophical concepts, which dominated philosophy in the twentieth century, has failed to solve the most ancient philosophical problems. At best, it claims to "dis-solve" some of them as conceptual puzzles. The "problem of knowledge" itself, traditionally framed as "justifying true belief," is recast by informaton philosophy as the degree of isomorphism between the information in the physical world and the information in our minds. Information psychology can be defined as the study of this isomorphism.

We shall see how information processes in the natural world use arbitrary symbols (e.g., nucleotide sequences) to refer to something, to communicate messages about it, and to give the symbol meaning in the form of instructions for another process to do something (e.g., create a protein). These examples provide support for both theories of meaning as reference and meaning as use.

Note that just as language philosophy is not the philosophy of language, so information philosophy is not the philosophy of information. It is rather the use of information as a tool to study philosophical problems, some of which are today yielding tentative solutions. It is time for philosophy to move beyond logical puzzles and language games.

What problems has information philosophy solved?

Why has philosophy made so little progress? Is it because philosophers prefer problems, while scientists seek solutions? Must a philosophical problem solved become science and leave philosophy? The information philosopher thinks not.

But in order to remain philosophy, interested philosophers must themselves examine the proposed information-based solutions and consider them as part of the critical philosophical dialogue.

The full story of cosmic, biological, and mental information creation involves learning some basic physics, particularly quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, along with some information theory. The information philosopher website provides animated visualizations of the most basic concepts that you will need to become an information philosopher.

When you are ready to consider them, among the proposed solutions are:

• The Problem of Free Will
• The Mind-Body Problem
• The Problem of Knowledge
• The Problem of Value
• The Problem of Consciousness
• The Problem of Mental Causation
• The Problem of Other Minds
• The Problem of Universals
  (The Ontological Status of Ideas)

It turns out that the methodology of information philosophy can be productively applied to some outstanding problems in physics. Philosophers of science might take an interest in the proposed information-based solutions to these problems in the "foundations" of physics.

• The Arrow of Time
• The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
• The Problem of Measurement
• The Problem of Microscopic Reversibility
• The Problem of Macroscopic Recurrence
• The Universe Horizon and Flatness Problems
  (Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?)
• The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox
• Schrödinger's Cat
• The Role of the Observer in Quantum Mechanics

Our fundamental philosophical question is cosmological and ultimately metaphysical.

What are the processes that create emergent 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 thermodynamic equilibrium some 13.75 billion years ago, how can it be that living beings are creating and communicating vast amounts of new information every day?

Why are we not still in that original state of equilibrium?

Broadly speaking, there are four major phenomena or processes that can reduce the entropy locally, while of course increasing it globally to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. Three of these do it "blindly," the fourth does it with a built-in "purpose," or telos."

1. Universal Gravitation
2. Quantum Cooperative Phenomena (e.g., crystallization, the formation of atoms and molecules)
3. "Dissipative" Chaos (Non-linear Dynamics)
4. Life

None of these processes can work unless they have a way to get rid of the positive entropy (disorder) and leave behind a pocket of negative entropy (order or information). The positive entropy is either conducted, convected, or radiated away as waste matter and energy, as heat, or as pure radiation. At the quantum level, it is always the result of interactions between matter and radiation (photons). Whenever photons interact with material particles, the outcomes are inherently unpredictable. As Albert Einstein discovered ten years before the founding of quantum mechanics, these interactions involve irreducible ontological chance.

Negative entropy is an abstract thermodynamic concept that describes energy with the ability to do work, to make something happen. This kind of energy is often called free energy or available energy.

In a maximally disordered state (called thermodynamic equilibrium) there can be matter in motion, the motion we call heat. But the average properties - density, pressure, temperature - are the same everywhere. Equilibrium is formless. Departures from equilibrium are when the physical situation shows differences from place to place. These differences are information.

The second law of thermodynamics then simply means that isolated systems will eliminate differences from place to place until all properties are uniformly distributed. Natural processes spontaneously destroy information. Consider the classic case of what happens when we open a perfume bottle.

Ludwig Boltzmann derived a mathematical formula for entropy as a summation of the probabilities of finding a system in all the possible states of a system. When every state is equally probable, entropy is at a maximum, and no differences (information) are visible. The formula for negative entropy is just the maximum possible entropy minus the actual entropy (when there are differences from place to place).

Claude Shannon derived the mathematical formula for information and found it to be identical to the formula for negative entropy - a summation of the probabilities of all the possible messages that can be communicated.

Because "negative" entropy (order or information) is such a positive quantity, we chose in the 1970's to give it a new name - "Ergo," and to call the four phenomena or processes that create it "ergodic," for reasons that will become clear. But today, the positive name "information" is all that we need to do information philosophy.

How exactly has the universe escaped from the total disorder of thermodynamic equilibrium and produced a world full of information?

It begins with the expansion of the universe. If the universe had not expanded, it would have remained in the original state of thermodynamic equilibrium. We would not be here.

To visualize the departure from equilibrium that made us possible, remember that equilibrium is when particles are distributed evenly in all possible locations in space, and with their velocities distributed by a normal law - the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. (The combination of position space and velocity or momentum space is called phase space). When we open the perfume bottle, the molecules now have a much larger phase space to distribute into. There are a much larger number of phase space "cells" in which molecules could be located. It of course takes them time to spread out and come to a new equilibrium state (the Boltzmann "relaxation time.")

When the universe expands, say grows to ten times its volume, it is just like the perfume bottle opening. The matter particles must redistribute themselves to get back to equilibrium. But suppose the universe expansion rate is much faster than the equilibration or relaxation time. The universe is out of equilibrium, and in a flat, ever-expanding, universe it will never get back!

In the earliest moments of the universe, material particles were not yet stable. Pure radiation energy was in equilibrium at extraordinarily high temperatures. When material particles appeared, they were blasted back into radiation by photon collisions. As the universe expanded, the temperature cooled, the space per photon increased and the mean free time between photon collisions increased, giving particles a better chance to survive. The expansion red-shifted the photons. decreasing the average energy per photon, and eventually reducing the number of high energy photons that destroyed matter. Quarks and electrons became more common. The mean free path of photons was very short. They were being scattered by collisions with electrons.

When temperatures continued to decline, quarks combined into nuclear particles, protons and neutrons. When temperature declined further, to 5000 degrees, about 400,000 years after the "Big Bang," the electrons and protons combined to make hydrogen atoms.

At this time, a major event occurred that we can still see today, the farthest and earliest event visible. When the electrons combined into atoms, the electrons could no longer scatter the photons so easily. The universe became transparent for the photons. Some of those photons are still arriving at the earth today. They are now the red-shifted and cooled down cosmic microwave background radiation. While this radiation is almost perfectly uniform, it shows very small fluctuations that may be caused by random difference in the local density of the original radiation or even in random quantum fluctuations.

These fluctuations mean that there were slight differences in density of the newly formed hydrogen gas clouds. The force of universal gravitation then worked to pull relatively formless matter into spherically symmetric stars and planets. Thus is the original order out of chaos, although this phrase is now most associated with the work on deterministic chaos theory and complexity theory, as we shall see.

In our open and rapidly expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy (if the particles were "relaxed" into a uniform distribution among the new phase-space cells) is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy. There is an intimate connection between the physical quantity negative entropy and abstract immaterial information, first established by Leo Szilard in 1929.

As pointed out by Harvard cosmologist David Layzer, the Arrow of Time points not only to increasing disorder but also to increasing information.

Two of our "ergodic" phenomena - gravity and quantum cooperative phenomena - pull matter together that was previously separated. Galaxies, stars, and planets form out of inchoate clouds of dust and gas. Gravity binds the matter together. Subatomic particles combine to form atoms. Atoms combine to form molecules. They are held together by quantum mechanics. In all these cases, a new visible information structure appears.

In order for these structures to stay together, the motion (kinetic) energy of their parts must be radiated away. This is why the stars shine. When atoms join to become molecules, they give off photons. The new structure is now in a (negative) bound energy state. It is the radiation that carries away the positive entropy (disorder) needed to balance the new order (information) in the visible structure.

In the cases of chaotic dissipative structures and life, the ergodic phenomena are more complex, but the result is similar, the emergence of visible information. (More commonly it is simply the maintenance of high-information, low-entropy structures.) These cases appear in far-from-equilibrium situations where there is a flow of matter and energy with negative entropy through the information structure. The flow comes in with low entropy but leaves with high entropy. Matter and energy are conserved in the flow, but information in the structure can increase (information is not a conserved quantity).

Information is neither matter nor energy, though it uses matter when it is embodied and energy when it is communicated. Information is immaterial.

This vision of life as a visible form through which matter and energy flow was first seen by Ludwig van Bertlanffy in 1939, though it was made more famous by Erwin Schrödinger's landmark essay What Is Life? in 1945, where he claimed that "life feeds on negative entropy."

Both Bertalanffy and Schrödinger knew that the source of negative entropy was our Sun. Neither knew that the ultimate cosmological source of negative entropy is the expansion of the universe, which allowed ergodic gravitation forces to form the Sun. Note that the positive entropy leaving the Sun becomes diluted as it expands, creating a difference between its energy temperature and energy density. This difference is information (negative entropy) that planet Earth uses to generate and maintain biological life.

Note that the 273K (the average earth temperature) photons are dissipated into the dark night sky, on their way to the cosmic microwave background. The Sun-Earth-night sky is a heat engine, with a hot energy source and cold energy sink, that converts the temperature difference not into mechanical energy (work) but into biological energy (life).

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When information is embodied in a physical 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. A measurement produces one or more bits of information. 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.

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 deterministically evolve according to von Neumann's Process 2, the unitary time evolution described by the Schrödinger equation.

The first two physical processes (1 and 1b) are parts of the information solution to the "problem of measurement," to which must be added the role of the "observer." We shall see that the observer involves a mental Process 3.

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 two-step 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. Information itself is the ultimate sine qua non.

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Note there are three distinct kinds of emergence:

1. the order out of chaos when the randomly distributed matter in the early universe first gets organized into information structures.

   This was not possible before the first atoms formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Information structures like the stars and galaxies did not exist before about 400 million years. As we saw, gravitation was the principal driver creating information structures.

   Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine discovered another ergodic process that he described as the "self-organization" of "dissipative structures." He popularized the slogan "order out of chaos" in an important book. Unfortunately, the "self" in self-organization led to some unrealizable hopes in cognitive psychology. There is no self, in the sense of a person or agent, in these physical phenomena.

   Both gravitation and Prigogine's dissipative systems produce a purely physical/material kind of order. The resulting structures contain information. There is a "steady state" flow of information-rich matter and energy through them. But they do not process information. They have no purpose, no "telos."

   Order out of chaos can explain the emergence of 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 to teleonomic theories.

2. the order out of order when the material information structures form self-replicating biological information structures. Some become 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 3.5 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 and information processing systems not reducible to (caused by) 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.

   Biological systems are cognitive systems, using internal "subjective" knowledge to recognize and interact with their "objective" external environment, communicating meaningful messages to their internal components and to other individuals of their species with a language of arbitrary symbols, taking actions to maintain themselves and to expand their populations by learning from experience.

   With the emergence of life, "purpose" also entered the universe. It is not the pre-existent "teleology" of many idealistic philosophies (the idea of "essence" before "existence"), but it is the "entelechy" of Aristotle, who saw that living things have within them a purpose, an end, a "telos." To distinguish this evolved telos in living systems from teleology, modern biologists use the term "teleonomy."

3. the pure information out of order when organisms with minds generate, store (in the brain), replicate, utilize, and then externalize some non-biological information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment. Communication can be by hereditary genetic transmission or by an advanced organism capable of learning and then teaching its contemporaries directly by signaling, by speaking, or indirectly by writing and publishing the 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 (though embodied in the material brain), a kind of pure spirit or ghost in the machine. It is a candidate for the immaterial dualist "substance" of René Descartes, though it is probably better thought of as a "property dualism," since information is an immaterial property of all matter.

   The information stored in the mind is not only abstract ideas. It contains a recording of the experiences of the individual. In principle every experience may be recorded, though not all may be reproducible/recallable.

The negative entropy (order, or potential information) generated by the universe expansion is a tiny amount compared to the increase in positive entropy (disorder). Sadly, this is always the case when we try to get "order out of order," as can be seen by studying entropy flows at different levels of emergent phenomena.

In any process, the positive entropy increase is always at least equal to, and generally orders of magnitude larger than, the negative entropy in any created information structures, to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. The positive entropy is named for Boltzmann, since it was his "H-Theorem" that proved entropy can only increase overall - the second law of thermodynamics. And negative entropy is called Shannon, since his theory of information communication has exactly the same mathematical formula as Boltzmann's famous principle;

where S is the entropy, k is Boltzmann's constant, and W is the probability of the given state of the system.

Material particles are the first information structures to form in the universe.. They are quarks, baryons, and atomic nuclei, which eventually combine with electrons to form atoms and eventually molecules, when the falling temperature becomes low enough. These material particles are attracted by the force of universal gravitation to form the gigantic information structures of the galaxies, stars, and planets.

Microscopic quantum mechanical particles and huge self-gravitating systems are stable and have extremely long lifetimes, thanks in large part to quantum stability. Stars are another source of radiation, after the original Big Bang cosmic source, which has cooled down to 3 degrees Kelvin (3°K) and shines as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Our solar radiation has a high color temperature (5000K) and a low energy-content temperature (273K). It is out of equilibrium and it is the source of all the information-generating negative entropy that drives biological evolution on the Earth. Note that the fraction of the light falling on Earth is less than a billionth of that which passes by and is lost in space.

A tiny fraction of the solar energy falling on the earth gets converted into the information structures of plants and animals. Most of it gets converted to heat and is radiated away as waste energy to the night sky.

Every biological structure is a quantum mechanical structure. Quantum cooperative phenomena allow DNA to maintain its stable information structure over billions of years in the constant presence of chaos and noise. And biological structures contain astronomical numbers of particles, allowing them to average over the random noise of individual quantum events, becoming "adequately determined."

The stable information content of a human being survives many changes in the material content of the body during a person’s lifetime. Only with death does the mental information (spirit, soul) dissipate - unless it is saved somewhere.

The total mental information in a living human is orders of magnitude less than the information content and information processing rate of the body. But the cultural information structures created by humans outside the body, in the form of external knowledge like this book, and the enormous collection of human artifacts, now rival the total biological information content.

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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 - deterministically - according to the unitary time evolution of the linear Schrödinger equation.

The possibilities of many different outcomes evolve deterministically, but the individual actual outcomes are indeterministic.

This sounds a bit contradictory, but it is not. It is the essence of the highly non-intuitive quantum theory, which combines a deterministic "wave" aspect with an indeterministic "particle" aspect.

In his 1932 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann explained that two fundamentally different processes are going on in quantum mechanics (in a temporal sequence for a given particle - not at the same time).

1. Process 1. A non-causal process, in which the measured electron winds up randomly in one of the possible physical states (eigenstates) of the measuring apparatus plus electron.

   The probability for each eigenstate is given by the square of the coefficients c_n of the expansion of the original system state (wave function ψ) in an infinite set of wave functions φ that represent the eigenfunctions of the measuring apparatus plus electron.

   c_n = < φ_n | ψ >

   This is as close as we get to a description of the motion of the "particle" aspect of a quantum system. According to von Neumann, the particle simply shows up somewhere as a result of a measurement.

   Information physics says that the particle shows up whenever a new stable information structure is created, information that can be observed.

2. Process 2. A causal process, in which the electron wave function ψ evolves deterministically according to Schrödinger's equation of motion for the "wave"aspect. This evolution describes the motion of the probability amplitude wave ψ between measurements. The wave function exhibits interference effects. But interference is destroyed if the particle has a definite position or momentum. The particle path itself can never be observed.

Von Neumann claimed there is another major difference between these two processes. Process 1 is thermodynamically irreversible. Process 2 is in principle reversible. This confirms the fundamental connection between quantum mechanics and thermodynamics that is explainable by information physics.

Information physics establishes that process 1 may create information. It is always involved when information is created.

Process 2 is deterministic and information preserving.

The first of these processes has come to be called the collapse of the wave function.

It gave rise to the so-called problem of measurement, because its randomness prevents it from being a part of the deterministic mathematics of process 2.

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 | φ_n >,

where the c_n coefficients squared are the probabilities of finding the system in the possible state | φ_n > as the result of an interaction with another quantum system.

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.

Even more important, 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." So, following von Neumann's "process" terminology, we can complete his admittedly unsuccessful attempt at a theory of the measuring process by adding an anthropomorphic

Process 3 - a conscious observer recording new information in a mind.

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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 1929, 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 von Neumann, Shannon, Alan Turing, and others. Their machines could run a stored program to manipulate stored data, processing information, as biological organisms had been doing for billions of years.

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.

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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 brain should be regarded less as an algorithmic computer, with one or more central processing units addressing multiple data storage systems, 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.

The ERR model stands in contrast to the popular cognitive science or “computational” model of a mind as a digital computer. No algorithms, data addressing schemes, or stored programs are needed for the ERR model.

The physical metaphor is a non-linear random-access data recorder, where data is stored using content-addressable memory (the memory address is the data content itself). Simpler than a computer with stored algorithms, a better technological metaphor might be a video and sound recorder, enhanced with the ability to record - and replay - smells, tastes, touches, and critically essential, feelings.

The biological model is neurons that wire together during an organism’s experiences, in multiple sensory and limbic systems, such that later firing of even a part of the wired neurons can stimulate firing of all or part of the original complex.

A conscious being is constantly recording information about its perceptions of the external world, and most importantly for ERR, it is simultaneously recording its feelings. Sensory data such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations are recorded in a sequence along with pleasure and pain states, fear and comfort levels, etc.

All these experiential and emotional data are recorded in association with one another. This means that when the experiences are reproduced (played back in a temporal sequence), the accompanying emotions are once again felt, in synchronization.

The ability to reproduce an experience is critical to learning from past experiences, so as to make them guides for action in future experiences. The ERR model is the minimal mind model that provides for such learning by living organisms.

The ERR model does not need computer-like decision algorithms to reproduce past experiences. All that is required is that past experiences “play back” whenever they are stimulated by present experiences that resemble the past experiences in one or more ways.

Where neuroscientists have shown "neurons that fire together wire together," the ERR model of information philosophy simply is "neurons that have been wired together will fire together."

Neuroscientists and philosophers of mind have long asked how diverse signals from multiple locations in the brain over multiple pathways appear so unified in the brain. The ERR model offers a simple solution to this “binding” problem. Experiences are bound at their initial recording. They do not have to be re-associated by some central processing unit looking up where experiences may have been distributed among the various sensory or memory areas.

The ERR model may also throw some light on the problem of "qualia" and of "what it's like to be" a particular organism.

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Based on insights into these cosmic creation processes, at the beginning of the 21st century the Information Philosopher proposed 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 processing 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.

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) qualifies and quantifies knowledge as meaningful 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.

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.

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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 itself 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 the three original problem areas we identified in the 1970's - COGITO (freedom), ERGO (value), and SUM (knowledge) - plus potential solutions for several classic problems in philosophy and physics, many of which have been designated "pseudo-problems" or relegated to "metaphysics."

In the left-hand column of all I-Phi 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.

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.