Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


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
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
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
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
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
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
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
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

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
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
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
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
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
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
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
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
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
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Kenneth Sayre
Kenneth Sayre is a philosopher at Notre Dame whose 1976 book Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind proposed that information might be a "neutral" category in which concepts of mind and concepts of body can be defined. Information then would provide a kind of interaction between mind and body and thus be a potential solution to the mind-body problem. Sayre's work is perhaps the most abstract version of "neutral monism," which was the basis of William James's Radical Empiricism and "pure experience," in some middle ground between mind and matter. James greatly influenced Bertrand Russell, who developed versions of neutral monism over the years.

Berkeley's reduction to a mentalist idealism was not a solution nor was reduction to the materialism of contemporary scientific realism, Sayre says.

The basic error of materialism, as I have characterized it (others may view it differently), is to have taken sides prematurely on a speculative issue before the alternatives are clearly defined. The materialist rejects dualism, according to which mind and body cannot be understood within a common conceptual framework, in favor of the thesis that both mind and body are ultimately accountable in a framework based upon the categories of physics. Another alternative, however, is that both can be understood within a framework accommodating physics but in which physics is not basic to all other science. Since the current isolation of physics from other sciences in fact is part of the mind-body problem, it is reasonable to pursue this latter alternative in search of another set of basic categories not dependent upon physics. To provide the foundations for such an alternative is the primary goal of this present study.

In this respect, the present approach is like the second traditional form of attack on the mind-body problem, that of creating a set of 'neutral' categories in terms of which concepts in either field can be defined, and through which accordingly they can be interrelated. A classic example is Russell's theory of sensibilia, or 'neutral monism.'

Sayre proposes a "Cybernetic Approach" that begins with the concept of information as technically defined in communication theory.
philosophers may be concerned with the ontological significance of the cybernetic framework, in which the concept of information plays the basic role.
Sayre's project seems very similar to the basic goals of information philosophy.

Sayre is correct that information is prior. Information structures were created first in the universe. The physics of information creation is the same two-step process in the cosmos and in the mind.

If the project of this book is successful, it will have been shown not only that the concept of information provides a primitive for the analysis of both the physical and the mental, but also that states of information (yet to be explicated) existed previously to states of mind. Since information in this sense is prior to mentality, but also is implicated in all mental states, it follows that information is prior also in the ontological sense. For if instances of A are prior to all instances of B, then A can exist without B but not vice versa. And this presumably is what is meant by 'ontological priority'. Success of the present project thus will show that an ontology of informational states is adequate for an explanation of the phenomena of mind, as distinct from an ontology of physical events...It is a reasonable conjecture that an ontology of information is similarly basic to the physical sciences...

This approach to the mind-body problem shares the advantages of both reductionism and monism, without being penalized by the attendant weaknesses.

Sayre speculates that since information is not really material, it might make a connection to the old idea that the mind (or spirit) is immaterial. We agree. Information is neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is indeed the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine.
Spirit may be defined as that portion of selfhood that is capable of immaterial existence. But what portion this might be is not easily determined.

[Norbert] Wiener finds amusing and instructive the possibility of encoding all the information contained in the structure of the human body by some extremely subtle reading mechanism and then transmitting this information to a receiving station at which point some extremely sophisticated receiving mechanism would reconstitute the body in its original form (Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954, p. 96). If all goes well at either end, the person will have been moved at the speed of electromagnetic transmission without existing bodily during the intervening period.

Many problems emerge in considering this possibility, of an ethical and social as well as a technical nature. Its value for present purposes, however, lies merely in the illustration it provides of one way in which information contained in the composite human being can be constituted in structures other than those of the conventional human body. The human person in this case, his capacity for consciousness included, exists for a moment in a nonbodily state.

...following Wiener's lead, I think there is an intelligible sense in which information structures constituting a person might exist in a form not to be counted material by our present criterion. That is to say, I think it is possible for human consciousness to exist in a form that is neither spatial nor temporal.

If the cybernetic account of man I have been developing is basically sound, then the procedures by which the human organism operates may be understood as a set of statistical structures.

In our mind-body model, the brain is an information processor and the mind is the information itself - neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication
Consciousness in particular is a mode of information processing, and as such is describable in terms of communication theory. However formidable the task might be in practice, the informational structures of consciousness might be exhibited as equations on paper, as functions across a transmitting line, or in any other fashion available for the representation of mathematical relationships. There is no necessity that this means of representation itself be dependent upon material structures.

Let us conceive a universe comprising only a field of elements, each existing in one of only two states. The elements have no properties beyond these states of existence, and hence are not related either spatially or temporally. Conceive now as an added factor that these elements are indicated in serial order (by some unimaginable act of creation; 'in the beginning was the logos' ('logos' being Greek for 'due relation'). Thus each element becomes identifiable by its place in the series, and characterized with reference to its binary state. But since the ordering relation by itself is neither spatial nor temporal, the elements have no existence in a spatiotemporal matrix. Thus this universe does not admit characterization according to the principles of physical science. In short, what we have conceived is not a material system. Imagine now that this series of elements is divided in some particular fashion, each subseries characterizable with reference to its own constituents. Each series then may be conceived as a binary information source, emitting elements in the atemporal sequence of its serial ordering. Any two series of this sort, moreover, can be conceived as constituting an information channel. characterized by a specific set of conditional probabilities. And any group of more than two is a cascade of channels. But it is just cascades of this sort which, in sufficient detail, constitute the information-processing functions of human consciousness. Thus, by an appropriate selection of ordered series. the spirit of a given human being could in principle be constituted on an immaterial basis.

Fantastic as this may be to conceive, it is no more fantastic than the concept of the universe before the initial formation of hydrogen atoms, which themselves are informational structures accumulating substance out of insubstantial probabilities. But both beginnings and endings prove too much for our conceptual powers. This, of course, is what should be expected, since reason has been adapted for understanding what comes in between.

For Teachers
For Scholars
Notes

1.

Bibliography

Chapter 1.4 - The Philosophy Chapter 1.6 - The Scientists
Home Part Two - Knowledge
Normal | Teacher | Scholar