The Information Philosopher
The Information Philosopher, as do all who would make an advance in knowledge, stands on the shoulders of giant philosophers and scientists of the past - and present
Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Diodorus Cronus
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouillée
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Carl Ginet
H.Paul Grice
Nicholas St. John Green
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
Michael Levin
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
James Martineau
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Paul E. Meehl
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
H.A.Prichard
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
L. Susan Stebbing
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists
Information Philosophy is an account of creation, a story about the origin and evolution of the universe, of life, and of intelligence. It is also a story about freedom and determinism, about good and evil, 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 versus constructive cosmic processes that create information structures with extraordinary emergent properties.
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 constructed ideal world of thought, of intellect, of spirit, including the laws of nature, in which we humans play a role as co-creator.
Based on insights into these cosmic creation processes, the Information Philosopher proposes refinements of three ideas about 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 reconcile idealism and materialism and provide a new view of how humanity fits into the universe.

The three ideas are
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.
All three are based on the theory of information, which alone can establish the existential status of ideas, not just the ideas of freedom, values, and knowledge, 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 empirical grounds. Our goal is less to innovate than to reach the best possible consensus among philosophers living and dead, an intersubjective agreement between philosophers that is the surest sign of a knowledge advance in natural science.

Philosophy is the love of knowledge or wisdom. Information philosophy (I-Phi or ΙΦ) quantifies knowledge as actionable information.
What is information that merits its use as the foundation of a new philosophical method of inquiry?
Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine.
Over 100 years ago, Bertrand Russell, with the help of G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, proposed logic and language as the proper foundational basis, not only of philosophy, but also of mathematics and science.
Information is a better abstract basis for philosophy, and for science as well, capable of answering questions about metaphysics (the ontology of things themselves), epistemology (the existential status of ideas and how we know them), and idealism itself.
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 hidden footnotes on some pages. The footnotes themselves are in the Scholar section.

Our goal is for the website to contain all the great philosophical discussions of our three ideas, with primary source materials (in the original languages) where possible.


Introduction Freedom Value Knowledge Problems Solutions Afterword

For Teachers
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
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.