The Information Philosopher - dedicated to the new information philosophy

Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. Why should it become the preferred basis for all philosophy?

As most all of us know, matter and energy are conserved. This means that there is just the same total amount of matter and energy today as there was at the universe origin.

But then what accounts for all the change that we see, the new things under the sun?
It is information, which is not conserved and has been increasing since the beginning of time, despite the second law of thermodynamics, with its increasing entropy, which destroys order.

What is changing is the arrangement of the matter into what we can call information structures. What is emerging is new information. What idealists and holists see is that emergence of immaterial information.

Living things, you and I, are dynamic growing information structures,
forms through which matter and energy continuously flow.
And it is information processing that controls those flows!

At the lowest levels, living information structures blindly replicate their information. At higher levels, natural selection adapts them to their environments. At the highest levels, they develop behaviors, intentions, goals, and agency, introducing purpose into the universe.

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, unless the future preserves it. The matter remains.

Information can explain the fundamental metaphysical connection
between materialism and idealism. Information philosophy
replaces the determinism and metaphysical necessity of eliminative materialism and reductionist naturalism with metaphysical possibility.

Information is the form in all concrete objects as well as the content in non-existent, merely possible, thoughts and other abstract entities.
It is the disembodied, de-materialized essence of anything.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about information philosophy is its discovery that abstract and immaterial information can exert an influence over concrete matter, explaining how mind can move body, how our thoughts can control our actions, deeply related to the way the quantum wave function controls the probabilities of locating quantum particles.

Information philosophy goes beyond a priori logic and its puzzles, beyond analytic language and its paradoxes, beyond philosophical claims of necessary truths, to a contingent physical world that is best represented as made of dynamic, interacting information structures.

Knowledge can be defined as information in minds that is a partial isomorphism (mapping) of the information structures in the external world. Information philosophy is a correspondence theory.

Sadly, there is no isomorphism, no information in common, between words and objects. This accounts for much of the failing of analytic language philosophy in the past century.

The extraordinarily sophisticated connection between words and objects is made in human minds, mediated by the brain's experience recorder and reproducer (ERR). Words stimulate neurons to start firing and to play back those experiences that include relevant objects.

Neurons that were wired together in our earliest experiences fire together at later times, contextualizing our new experiences, giving them meaning. And by replaying emotional reactions to similar earlier experiences, it makes then "subjective experiences," giving us the feeling of "what it's like to be me" and solving the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Beyond words, a dynamic information model of an information structure in the world is presented immediately to the mind as a simulation of reality experienced for itself.

Without words and related experiences previously recorded in your mental experience recorder, we could not comprehend words. They would be mere noise, with no meaning.

By comparison, a diagram, a photograph, an animation, or a moving picture can be seen and mostly understood by human beings, independent of their native tongue. The basic elements of information philosophy are dynamical models of information structures. They go far beyond logic and language as a representation of the fundamental, metaphysical, nature of reality.
Visual and interactive models "write" directly into our mental experience recorders.

Computer animated models must incorporate all the laws of nature, from the differential equations of quantum physics to the myriad information processes of biology. Simulations are not only our most accurate knowledge of the physical world, they are among the best teaching tools ever devised. We can transfer knowledge non-verbally to coming generations in most of the world's population via the Internet and nearly ubiquitous smartphones.

Consider the dense information in Drew Berry's real-time animations of molecular biology. These are the kinds of dynamic models of information structures that we believe can best explain the fundamental nature of reality - "beyond logic and language."

If you think about it, everything you know is pure abstract information. Everything you are is an information structure, a combination of matter and energy that embodies, communicates, and most important, processes your information. Everything that you value contains information.

And while the atoms, molecules, and cells of your body are important, many only last a few minutes and most are completely replaced in just a few years. But your immaterial information, from your original DNA to your latest experiences, will be with you for your lifetime.

Anyone with a serious interest in philosophy should understand how information is created and destroyed, because information is much more fundamental than the logic and language tools philosophers use today. Information philosophy goes "beyond logic and language."

Information is the sine qua non of meaning. This I-Phi website aims to provide a deep understanding of information that should be in every philosopher's toolbox.

We will show why information should actually be the preferred basis for the critical analysis of current problems in a wide range of disciplines - from information creation in cosmology to information in quantum physics, from information in biology (especially evolution) to psychology, where it offers a solution to the classic mind-body problem and the problem of consciousness. And of course in philosophy, where failed language analysis can be replaced or augmented by immaterial information analysis as a basis for justified knowledge, objective values, human free will, and a surprisingly large number of problems in metaphysics.

Above all, information philosophy hopes to replace beliefs with knowledge. Instead of the primitive idea of an other-worldly creator, we propose a comprehensive explanation of the creation of this world that has evolved into the human creativity that invents such ideas.
The "miracle of creation" is happening now, in the universe and in you and by you.

But what is information? How is it created? Why is it a better tool for examining philosophical problems than traditional logic or linguistic analysis? And what are some examples of classic problems in philosophy, in physics, and in metaphysics with information philosophy solutions?

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

Among the metaphysical problems with suggested information philosophy solutions are:

It also 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.

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

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.

In the late nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann revolutionized thermodynamics with his kinetic theory of gases, based on the ancient assumption that matter is made up of collections of atoms. He derived a mathematical formula for entropy S as a function of the probabilities of finding a system in all the possible microstates of a system. When the actual macrostate is one with the largest number W of microstates, entropy is at a maximum, and no differences (information) are visible.

Boltzmann could not prove his "H-Theorem" about entropy increase. His contemporaries challenged a "statistical" entropy increase on grounds of microscopic reversibility and macroscopic recurrence (both problems solved by information philosophy). He could not prove the existence of atoms.

In the early twentieth century, Just before Boltzmann died, Albert Einstein formulated a statistical mechanics that put Boltzmann's law of increasing entropy on a firmer mathematical basis. Einstein's work predicted the size of miniscule fluctuations around equilibrium, which Boltzmann had expected. Einstein showed that entropy does not, in fact, continually increase. It can decrease randomly in short bursts of local higher densities or organized motions. Though quickly extinguished, Einstein showed that the occasionally correlated motions of invisible atoms explains the visible "Brownian motion" of tiny particles like seed pollen.

Einstein's calculations led to predictions that were confirmed quickly, proving the existence of discrete atoms that had been hypothesized for centuries. Sadly, Boltzmann may not have known of Einstein's proofs for his work. Later Einstein saw the same fluctuation in radiation, proving his revolutionary hypothesis of light quanta, now called photons. Although this is rarely appreciated, it was Einstein who showed that both matter and energy are discrete, discontinuous particles. His most famous equation shows they are convertible into one another, E = mc². He also showed that the interaction of matter and radiation, of atoms and photons, always involves ontological chance. This bothered Einstein greatly, because he thought his God should not "play dice."

Late in life, Einstein said that if matter and energy cannot be described with the local continuous analytical functions in space and time needed for his field theories, that all his work would be "castles in the air." But the loss of classical deterministic ideas - which have ossified much of philosophy, crippling philosophical progress - is more than offset by the indeterministic of an open future and Einstein's belief in the "free creation of new ideas."

In the middle twentieth century, Claude Shannon derived the mathematical formula for the communication of information. John von Neumann found it to be identical to Boltzmann's formula for entropy, though with a minus sign (negative entropy). Where Boltzmann entropy is the number of possible microstates, Shannon entropy is the number of possible messages that can be communicated.

Shannon found that new information cannot be created unless there are multiple possible messages. This in turn depends on the ontological chance discovered by Einstein. In a deterministic universe, the total information at all times would be a constant. Information would be a conserved quantity, like matter and energy. "Nothing new under the Sun." But it is not constant, though many philosophers, mathematical physicists, and theologians (God's foreknowledge) still think so. Information is being created constantly in our universe. And we are co-creators of the information, including Einstein's "new ideas."

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 negative entropy "ergodic," for reasons that will become clear. But today, the positive name "information" is all that we need to do information philosophy.

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 in equilibrium with radiation at extraordinarily high temperatures. When quarks formed neutrons and protons, they were short-lived, blasted back into quarks 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 larger 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 disassociate matter. The mean free path of photons was very short. They were being scattered by collisions with electrons.

When temperature declined further, to 5000 degrees, about 400,000 years after the "Big Bang," the electrons and protons combined to make hydrogen and (with neutrons) helium atoms.

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.

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 free 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."

Note that the 300K (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).

When information is embodied in a physical structure, two physical processes must occur.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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

The classical laws of motion, with their implicit determinism and strict causality emerge when microscopic events can be ignored.

Information philosophy interprets the wave function ψ as a "possibilities" function. With this simple change in terminology, the mysterious process of a wave function "collapsing" becomes a much more intuitive discussion of possibilities, with mathematically calculable probabilities, turning into a single actuality, faster than the speed of light.

But a conscious observer is not required for a projection, for the wave-function "collapse", for one of the possibilities to become an actuality. What it does require is an interaction between (quantum) systems that creates irreversible information.

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.

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.

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 above), 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 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.

Modern 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. Modern 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.

Tradition, Modern, and Postmodern In a traditional society, authoritative knowledge is that which has been handed down. Moderns are those who think that all knowledge must be based on reason. Postmoderns recognize that much knowledge has been invented, arbitrarily created

In modern 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. Every event must have a cause, a reason.

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, despite the destructive entropic requirements of the second law of thermodynamics, 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. The "meaning" in the information is their use of it. Some get their information "built-in" via heredity. Some learn it from experience. Others invent it!

Ancient Philosophy, before the advent of Modern Theology with John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, and Medieval Philosophy, before the beginning of Modern Philosophy with René Descartes, covered the same wide range of questions now addressable by Information Philosophy.

The Development of Information Philosophy

Our earliest work on information philosophy dates from the 1950's, based on suggestions made thirty years earlier by Arthur Stanley Eddington. In his 1928 Nature of the Physical World, Eddington argued that quantum indeterminacy had "opened the door of human freedom," and that the second law of thermodynamics might have some bearing on the question of objective good.

In the 1950's, we studied the then leading philosophies of positivism and existentialism.

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. Wittgenstein's Tractatus imagined that a set of all true propositions could capture all the knowledge of modern science.

4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science
(or the whole corpus of the natural sciences)

Their logical positivism and the variation called logical empiricism developed by Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle proved to be failures in grounding philosophy, mathematics, or science.

On the continent, existentialism was the rage. We read Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The existentialist continentals argued that freedom exists, but there are no objective values. The utilitarian English argued that values exist, but human freedom does not.

We wrote that "Values without freedom are useless. Freedom without values is absurd."

This was a chiasmos like the great figure of Immanuel Kant, rephrased by Charles Sanders Peirce as "Idealism without Materialism is Empty. Materialism without Idealism is Blind."

In the 1960's, we formulated arguments that cited "pockets of low entropy," in apparent violation of the second law, as the possible basis for anything with objective value. We puzzled over the origin of "negative entropy," since the universe was believed to have started in thermodynamic equilibrium and the second law of thermodynamics says that (positive) entropy can only increase.

In the late 1960's, we developed a two-stage model of free will and called it Cogito, a term often associated with the mind and with thought. With deference to Descartes, the first modern philosopher, we called "negative entropy" Ergo. While thermodynamics calls it "negative," information philosophy sees it as the ultimate "positive" and deserving of a better name. We thought that Ergo etymologically suggests a fundamental kind of energy ("erg" zero), e.g., the "Gibbs free energy," G₀, that is available to do work because it has low entropy.

In the early 70's, we decided to call the sum of human knowledge the Sum, to complete the triple wordplay on Descartes' proof of his existence.

We saw a great battle going on in the universe - 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.

Since the destructive chaos is entropic, we repurposed a term from statistical mechanics and called the anti-entropic processes creating information structures ergodic. The embedded Ergod resonated.

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 sentient 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.

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. That stability is the consequence of an underlying digital nature. Quantum mechanics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog. Digital information transfers are essentially perfect. All analog transfers are "lossy."

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 and evolution 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 creative process working in the universe
to which we owe our existence, and therefore perhaps our reverence for its "providence".

Information philosophy 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 information in 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 (or information physics) 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.

Finally, a new philosophy of biology should be based on the deep understanding of organisms as information users, information creators, information communicators, and at the higher levels, information processors, including humans who have learned to store information externally and transfer it between the generations culturally. Except for organisms that can extract information by photosynthesis of the negative entropy (free or available energy) streaming from the sun, most living things destroy other cells to extract the information needed to maintain their own low entropy state of organization. Most life feeds on other life.

And most life communicates with other life. Even single cells, before the emergence of multicellular organisms, developed communication systems between the cells that are still visible in slime molds and social amoebae today. In a multicellular organism, every cell has some level of communication with all the others. Most higher level organisms share communal information that makes them stronger as a social group than as independent individuals. The sum of human knowledge has amplified the power of humanity, for better or worse, to a level that can control the environmental conditions on all of planet Earth.

Information biology is the hypothesis that all biological evolution should be viewed primarily as the development of more and more powerful users, creators, and communicators of information. Seen though the lens of information, humans are the current end product of information processing systems. With the emergence of life and mind, purpose (telos) appeared in the universe. The teleonomic goal of each cell is to become two cells, which replicates its information content. The purpose of each species is to improve its reproductive success relative to other populations. The purpose of human populations then is to use, to add to, and to communicate human knowledge in order to maximize the human capital per person.

Like love, the information that is shared by educating others is not used up. Information is not a scarce economic good. The more that information is communicated, the more of it there is, in human minds (not brains), and in the external stores of human knowledge. These include books of course, but in the future they will be the interconnected knowledge bases of the world wide web, including www.informationphilosopher.com, since books are expensive and inaccessible for many.

The first thing we must do for the young is to teach them how to teach themselves by accessing these knowledge systems with handheld devices that will some day be available for all the world's children, beyond one laptop per child to one smartphone per child.

Based on insights into the discovery of the cosmic creation process, 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.

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. Information philosophy reifies information as an immaterial entity that has causal power over the material world!

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 now more than the solution to three fundamental problems we identified in the 1960's and '70's. 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 the problem using this new methodology.

Note that, just as the philosophy of language is not linguistic philosophy, Information philosophy is not the philosophy of information, which is mostly about computers and cognitive science, the computational theory of mind.

Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein labeled many of our problems “philosophical puzzles.” Bertrand Russell called them “pseudo-problems.” Analytic language philosophers thought many of these problems could be “dis-solved,” revealing them to be conceptual errors caused by the misuse of language.

Information philosophy takes us past logical puzzles and language games, not by diminishing philosophy and replacing it with science.

The language philosophers of the twentieth century thought that they could solve (or at least dis-solve) 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 join us 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.