The Information Philosopher
The Information Philosopher is an account of creation, a story about the origins of the universe, of life, of intelligence. It is also a story about good and evil, about freedom and determinism, about knowledge and ignorance.
There is a battle going on. It is a struggle between destructive chaotic processes that drive a microscopic underworld of random events and constructive cosmic processes that create macrocosmic information structures.
The created information structures range from galaxies, stars, and planets, to molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. They are the structures of terrestrial life from viruses and bacteria to sensible and intelligent beings. And they are the structured ideal world of thought, of intellect, of spirit, including the laws of nature, in which we humans play a role as co-creator.
Based on insights into these cosmic creation processes, the Information Philosopher presents three ideas about some perennial problems in philosophy that have a significant chance of being testable hypotheses.
If these ideas are verifiable empirically, they are likely to change some well-established philosophical positions. Even more important, they provide a new view of how humanity fits into the universe.
The three ideas are
- A scientific model for free will and creativity
- A value system grounded on the fundamental creative processes in the universe
- An explanation or epistemological model of knowledge formation and communication
All three depend on understanding modern physics, cosmology, biology, and neuroscience.
All three have strong connections to the science of information.
All three have been anticipated by earlier philosophers.
Philosophy is the love of knowledge or wisdom. Information philosophy (or I-PHI) quantififies knowledge as actionable information. These three actionable ideas are major contributions to I-PHI. They are all built on the work of earlier thinkers.
What is
information that merits its use as the foundation of a new philosophical method of inquiry? Please see our
introduction to the principles of
increasing information and
"soft" causality.
This website version of Information Philosopher 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 footnotes.
For Teachers
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A web page may contain two extra levels of material. The Normal page is material for newcomers and students of the Information Philosophy. Two hidden levels contain material for teachers (e.g., secondary sources) and for scholars (e.g., footnotes, and original language quotations).
Teacher materials on a page will typically include references to secondary sources and more extended explanations of the concepts and arguments. Secondary sources will include books, articles, and online resources. Extended explanations should be more suitable for teaching others about the core philosophical ideas, as seen from an information perspective.
For Scholars
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Scholarly materials will generally include more primary sources, more in-depth technical and scientific discussions where appropriate, original language versions of quotations, and references to all sources.
Footnotes for a page appear in the Scholar materials. The footnote indicators themselves are only visible in Scholar mode.