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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Jeremy Butterfield
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
August Compte
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
Curt Ducasse
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
Niels Henrik Gregersen
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
James Ladyman
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Ernest Nagel
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
U.T.Place
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
John Duns Scotus
Albert Schweitzer
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
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
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf
Xenophon

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Jacob Barandes
Julian Barbour
Horace Barlow
Gregory Bateson
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
John Tyler Bonner
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Daniel Brooks
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
William Calvin
Donald Campbell
John O. Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Simon Conway-Morris
Peter Corning
George Cowan
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Paul Davies
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
David Depew
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Hans Driesch
John Dupré
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Walter Elsasser
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
George Fox
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Karl Friston
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Ernst Haeckel
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Hermann von Helmholtz
Grete Hermann
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
Ray Jackendoff
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
William Stanley Jevons
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Bernd-Olaf Küppers
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Michael Levin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Lynn Margulis
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
John Maynard Smith
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Barabara McClintock
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Travis Norsen
Howard T. Odum
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Robert Rosen
Frank Rosenblatt
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Stanley Salthe
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Herbert Spencer
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Kenneth Stanley
Henry Stapp
Ian Stewart
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leonard Susskind
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Robert Ulanowicz
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Nico van Kampen
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Clément Vidal
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
Sara Imari Walker
James D. Watson
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
August Weismann
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wiley
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Carl Woese
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
CCS25 Talk
Evo Devo September 12
Evo Devo October 2
 
Evo Devo Universe and Information Philosopher, October 2, 2025

In my Self-Organization in Complex Systems talk in Siena for Georgi's CCS25 meeting September 4 and in the September 12 Evo Devo Scholar's Talk, I described Laplace's intelligent demon and Seth Lloyd's universe as a computer. They both view the information in the universe as a conserved constant.

We also discussed Lord Kelvin and Herman Helmholtz's prediction of a universe heat death.

Then I described my work following Arthur Stanley Eddington and David Layzer.

I showed how the expansion of the universe avoids the second law of thermodynamics and creates information structures from elementary particles to stars like our Sun and planet Earth with its biosphere.

I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s 1989 book Cosmogenesis to create this picture of his growth of information in the universe.

Between the actual entropy and the maximum possible entropy you can see there's plenty of room for galaxies, stars, and planets to form.

The expansion of space creates new possible locations in phase-space, producing pockets of negative entropy. When an actual information structure forms locally, it will not be stable unless it radiates away positive entropy to satisfy the second law globally.

I call these two steps, first possibilities, then one actuality, the cosmic creation process.

These two steps or two stages are first indeterministic (random) possibilities, second an adequately determined (not pre-determined!) choice or selection.

This is exactly how Claude Shannon's theory of the communication of information works, showing the intimate connection between negative entropy and information!

Information philosophy proposes four such processes, all driven by random possibilities.

  1. For Shannon, there must be multiple possible messages. If there is only one possible message, no information is communicated.
  2. For the universe, without newly created phase-space possibilities, the universe would be closed and suffer a "heat death"!
  3. Ernst Mayr called Darwinian evolution a two-step process. Without chance variations, there would be no new species.
  4. For the two-stage model of human free will, without the mind producing random new thoughts, there would be no free actions.

The universe began with primeval quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons. In the first few minutes after the origin, the cosmic creation process produced the earliest information structures, protons and neutrons. 380,000 years later, the ionized plasma cooled to the surface temperature of the Sun and allowed those protons and electrons to form atoms, making the universe transparent. That allowed us today to see back in time to the cosmic microwave background.

Galaxies, stars, and planets began to form about 400 million years after the origin.

The Sun, a population I star, formed only about 4.5 billion years ago, along with its planets, and life emerged rather quickly about a half-billion years later.

We discussed how Erwin Schrödinger famously argued that life “feeds on negative entropy.”

Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.

But Schrödinger didn't know how the Sun (and all the stars) came to be such a source of negative entropy. Following Eddington and Layzer, I have explained that with the cosmic creation process.

Paul Davies and David Layzer
Davies' first book The Physics of Time Asymmetry, in 1974, explored the "arrow of time." In the 1977 second edition Davies cited David Layzer's 1975 article The Arrow of Time in Scientific American. That article and Layzer's 1989 book Cosmogenesis: The Growth of Order in the Universe are critical for understanding Davies' latest thinking on the origin of life.

Twenty years later, Davies and two colleagues edited the 1994 volume Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry.

Davies contributed the article, "Stirring up Trouble." Without mentioning David Layzer's 1975 "Arrow of Time" article or Layzer's 1989 book on the Growth of Order, Davies coined the term "entropy gap" to describe Layzer's insight that the maximum possible entropy goes up faster than the actual entropy.

Does this transition from equilibrium to disequilibrium not constitute a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? No. What has happened is depicted in Fig. 3. At some time around one second, the material content of the universe was in a state of equilibrium, having the maximum possible entropy for the constraints at that time. As the universe expanded, however, the maximum possible entropy rose. The actual entropy also rose, but less fast. In particular, the relaxation time for nuclear processes to allow the cosmological material to keep pace with the changing constraints (due to the expansion) was much longer than the expansion time, so the material began to lag further and further behind equilibrium conditions ( equilibrium meaning in the nuclear case that this material is in the form of the, most stable element - iron). Hence an 'entropy gap' opened up. The continuing expansion of the universe serves to try and widen that gap slightly (though now through other processes than nucleosynthesis), while physical processes such as starlight production serves to try and narrow it.

It is important to realise that the crucial effect of the expansion was in the early universe - hence the sudden widening of the gap early on. Today it seems likely (though I haven't checked) that the gap is narrowing: the universe produces copious quantities of entropy at a rate which I imagine is faster than the (now rather feeble) expansion raises the maximum possible entropy. The actual entropy will presumably asymptote toward the maximum possible entropy in the very far future.

It's surprising that Davies suggests (though he hasn't checked!) that the entropy gap will close, leading to the 19th-century Kelvin-Helmholtz "heat death of the universe." David Layzer had no such pessimism.

Davies closing of the "entropy gap" suggests that the expansion stopping will make the universe a closed thermodynamic system!.

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