In the early 1940s, digital computers were invented that could run a stored program to manipulate stored data. In the late 1940s, the problem of communicating digital data signals in the presence of noise was first explored. And in the early 1950s, inheritable characteristics were shown to be transmitted from generation to generation in a digital code.

Information is neither matter nor energy, but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.

Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical 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 information to become 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 has 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, one that started out as a "blank slate" conditioned by environmental stimuli. The new mind model contains many "functions" implemented with stored programs, all of them information structures in the brain. The new cognitive science likens the brain to a computer, with some programs and data inherited and others developed as appropriate reactions to experience.

But the brain may be regarded less as an algorithmic computer than as a primitive experience recorder and reproducer. Information about an experience - the sights, sounds, smells, touch, and taste - is recorded along with the emotions - feelings of pleasure, pain, hopes, and fears - that accompany the experience. When confronted with similar experiences later, the brain can reproduce information about the original experience (an instant replay) to guide current actions.

Information is constant in a deterministic universe. There is "nothing new under the sun." The creation of new information is not possible without random chance and uncertainty.

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 philosophy requires the ontological uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes of modern quantum physics.

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. Moreover, the "law of large numbers" insures that macroscopic objects can average out microscopic probabilities and provide the "adequate determinism" that shows up in all or "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 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 providential creative process working in the universe
to which we owe our existence, and therefore perhaps our reverence.

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 the left-hand column of all pages are links to over a hundred philosophers and dozens of scientists who have made contributions to these great problems. Their web pages include the original contributions of each thinker, with examples of their thought, usually in their own words, and where possible in their original languages as well.

Its guiding lights are thinkers like Parmenides, Plato, and Kant, who sought unity and identity, being and universals.

In traditional 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. Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are illusions.

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 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 uncertainty.

Determinism and the exceptionless causal and deterministic laws of classical physics are the real illusions. Determinism is information-preserving. In an ideal deterministic Laplacean universe, the present state of the universe is implicitly contained in its earliest moments.

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 chaos that is still present in the microcosmos. More than anything else, it is the creation and maintenance of stable information structures 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.

Information Philosophy is a story about knowledge and ignorance, about good and evil, about freedom and determinism.

There is a great battle going on - 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.

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 three 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.

The three ideas are

• An explanation or epistemological model of knowledge formation and communication. Knowledge and information are neither matter nor energy, but they require matter for expression and energy for communication. They seem to be metaphysical.

  Briefly, we identify knowledge with actionable information in the brain-mind. We justify knowledge by behavioral studies that demonstrate the existence of information structures implementing functions in the brain. And we verify knowledge scientifically.

• A basis for objective value beyond humanism and bioethics, grounded in the fundamental information creation processes behind the structure and evolution of the universe and the emergence of life.

  Briefly, we find positive value (or good) in information structures. We see negative value (or evil) in disorder and entropy tearing down such structures. We call energy with low entropy "Ergo" and call anti-entropic processes "ergodic."

  Our first categorical imperative is then "act in such a way as to create, maintain, and preserve information as much as possible against destructive entropic processes."

  Our second ethical imperative is "share knowledge/information to the maximum extent." Like love, our own information is not diminished when we share it with others

  Our third moral imperative is "educate (share the knowledge of what is right) rather than punish." Knowledge is virtue. Punishment wastes human capital and provokes revenge.

• A scientific model for free will and creativity informed by the complementary roles of microscopic randomness and adequate macroscopic determinism in a temporal sequence that generates information.

  Briefly, we separate "free" and "will" in a two-stage process - first the free generation of alternative possibilities for action, then an adequately determined decision by the will. We call this modest libertarian view our Cogito model.

  This model is a synthesis of adequate determinism and modest libertarianism, a coherent and complete compatibilism that reconciles
  free will with both determinism and indeterminism.

  Because it makes free will compatible with both a form of determinism (really determination) and with an indeterminism that is limited and controlled by the mind, the leading Libertarian philosopher Bob Kane suggests we call this model "Comprehensive Compatibilism."

  The problem of free will cannot be solved by logic, language, or even by physics. Man is not a machine and the mind is not a computer.
  Free will is a biophysical information problem.

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 in natural science.

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 a 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 based on information processing).

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 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.

When information is stored in any structure, two fundamental physical processes occur. First is a collapse of a quantum mechanical wave function. Second is a local decrease in the entropy corresponding to the increase in information. Entropy greater than that must be transferred away to satisfy the second law.

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. Humans increase our knowledge of the external world, despite logical, mathematical, and physical uncertainty, external information that can in principle be immortal. Both do it 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 combination of freely invented theories and adequately determined experiments.

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.

All original content on Information Philosopher is available for your use, without requesting
permission, under a Creative Commons Attribution License.     

Copyrights for all excerpted and quoted works remain with their authors and publishers.