Part Five - Problems of Philosophy
Here we review the great questions of philosophy for which modern physical science and an information philosophy now provides us with the possibility of fuller understanding.
These are several of the problems that 20th-century philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein labelled "philosophical puzzles" or Bertrand Russell called "psuedo-problems." Analytic language philosophers thought many of these problems could be "dissolved" by revealing them to be caused by the misuse of language. They are now back under consideration as genuinely important problems, analyzable in terms of information and with some aspects subject to experimental testing.
The Problem of Free Will - Solved by our Cogito model.
The Mind-Body Problem - Solved in part by our Sum model, which explains how abstract information, an idea, or knowledge is incorporated into a human mind, and how pure ideas act on the physical world.
Consciousness - Neuroscience is homing in on this least tractable problem in philosophy and psychology. We can attempt a definition based on selective awareness, private access to stored information, and the focus of attention to external and internal communication of new information.
The Problem of Other Minds - Solved by understanding information transmission (communication) between minds, the intersubjective agreement of a community of inquirers, and the relationship between communal ideas and objects in the physical world.
You Can't Get Ought from Is - Descriptions cannot lead to prescriptions. Science can have no bearing on ethics. Man is the measure of all things. Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so. The information philosphy moves the source of ultimate value beyond man and his created gods, beyond life and the Earth, to its origins in a cosmic Providence.
The Problem of Evil - If God is Good he is not God. If God is God he is not Good. The question is not "Does God exist?" The question is "Does Goodness exist?" The solution lies in a dualist world with both bad and good.
Epistemology - More correctly the problem of certain knowledge when our means of perception is limited and fallible.
The Problem of Induction - We now understand why Hume is right that induction does not lead to certain truth, but like experiments, induction can count as evidence for and against our hypotheses and theories.
Metaphysics - Are there unavoidable a priori first principles of philosophy and thus of science? There are definitely axioms or starting assumptions for all thought and reasoning. We will see they are exercises in information minimalism - the least that can be said about things.
The Problem of Universals - Porphyry's fateful question, "Do the categories exist?" is seen to be a question of informational isomorphism between our ideas and things in the world.
One or Many - Is the world a unity? We will see this is part of the great dualism between ideal and material, being and becoming,

Part Four - Knowledge Part Six - Solutions
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