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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
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
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
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
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
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
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
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
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
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
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
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
 
Information
The simple definition of information is the act of informing - the communication of knowledge from a sender to a receiver that informs (literally shapes) the receiver.

By information we mean a quantity that can be understood mathematically and physically. It corresponds to the common-sense meaning of information, in the sense of communicating or informing. It is like the information stored in books and computers. But it also measures the information in any physical object, like a snow crystal or a star like our sun, as well as the information in biological systems, including the genetic code, the cell structure, the messaging inside and between the cells, and the developmental learning of the phenotype.

Although some commentators would like to limit the term "information" to messages sent with an intended purpose, physical scientists have long considered the structure in physical objects as something that can be quantitatively measured by an observer. In our digital "information age," those measurements are reported in digital "bits".

Now information is neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter to be embodied, and energy to be communicated.

Information philosophy considers a material object as an "information structure," from which the immaterial information can be abstracted as meaningful knowledge. In addition to structure, much of the information in living things consists of messages that are sent to invoke processes running in biological machines. Biological structures are often digital (DNA, RNA, proteins) and biological messaging greatly resembles a language, with arbitrary symbols, much like human language.

It was the dream of great logicians, from Gottfried Leibniz and Gottlob Frege to Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to represent the physical world by "logical atoms." The later Wittgenstein and twentieth-century language philosophers thought that "what there is" could be described with analytically true statements or "propositions." For Wittgenstein, every true proposition corresponds to a real fact in the world. They were failures, but information philosophy builds on their dreams.

Information philosophy identifies the total information in a material object with the yes/no answers to all the questions that can be asked or with the true/false statements that can be said about the object. In modern information theory terms, information philosophy "digitizes" the object. From each answer or truth value we can, in principle, derive a "bit" of information.

While "total" information is hopelessly impractical to measure precisely, whatever information we can "abstract" from a "concrete" object gives us a remarkably simple answer to one of the deepest problems in metaphysics, the existential status of ideas, of Platonic "Forms," including the entities of logic and mathematics.

Rather than simply ask "Do abstract entities like numbers and properties exist," a metaphysicist prefers to ask in what way they might exist that is different from the way in which "concrete" objects exist.

Concrete objects can be seen and touched by our senses. They are purely material, with causal relations that obey the physical, though statistical, laws of nature.

Abstract entities are immaterial, but some of them can still play a causal role, for example when agents use them to decide on their actions, or when chance events (particularly at the quantum level) go this way instead of that.

Information philosophy restores so-called "non-existent objects" to our ontology. They consist of the same kind of abstract information that provides the structure and process information of a concrete object. What we call a "concept" about an object is some subset of the information in the object, accurate to the extent that the concept is isomorphic to that subset. By "picking out" different subsets, we can categorize and sort objects into classes or sets according to different concepts.

Information philosophy hope to settle somewhere deep philosophical issues about absolute and relative identity, first posed by Leibniz. All material objects are self-identical, despite concerns about vague boundaries. All objects have relations with other objects that can be interpreted as relative identities. All objects are relatively identical to other objects in some respects and different qua other respects.

Two numerically distinct objects can be perfectly identical (x = x) internally, if their intrinsic information content is identical. Relational (extrinsic) information with other objects and positions in space and time is ignored. The Greeks called intrinsic information pros heauto or idios poion. Aristotle and the Stoics called this the peculiar qualities of an individual.

They distinguished peculiar properties from the material substrate, which they called hupokeimenon, the "underlying. Extrinsic information is found in an object's relations with other objects and space and time. The Greek terms were pros ta alla, toward others, and
pros ti pos echon, relatively disposed.

Just as the mind is like software in the brain hardware, the abstract information in a material object is the same kind of immaterial stuff as the information in an abstract entity, a concept or a "non-existent object." Some philosophers say that such immaterial things "subsist," rather than exist.

Broadly speaking, the distinction between concrete and abstract objects corresponds to the distinction between the material and the ideal. Ideas in minds are immaterial. They need the matter of the brain to be embodied and some kind of energy to be communicated to other minds. But they are not themselves matter or energy. Those "eliminativists" who believe the natural world contains only material things deny the existence of ideas and immaterial information.

Bits of information are close to the logical atoms of Russell and Wittgenstein.

And information philosophy is a "correspondence theory." The information we can actually measure in an information structure is a subset, a partial isomorphism, of the total information in the structure.

In 1929, Leo Szilard calculated the mean value of the quantity of entropy produced by a 1-bit ("yes/no") measurement as

S = k log 2,

where k is Boltzmann's constant.

Following Szilard, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Erwin Schrödinger, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, John von Neumann, Leon Brillouin, C.F. von Weizsäcker, and of course John Wheeler, with his "It from Bit." They all had similar views of the connection between the physical entropy of matter and the abstract "bits" of information that can be used to describe the physical arrangement of discrete elementary particles.

For Schrödinger, a living organism is "feeding on negative entropy" from the sun. Wiener said "The quantity we define as amount of information is the negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy in similar situations." Brillouin created the term "negentropy" because he said, "One of the most interesting parts in Wiener's Cybernetics is the discussion on "Time series, information, and communication," in which he specifies that a certain "amount of information is the negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy in similar situations."

Shannon, with a nudge from von Neumann, used the term entropy to describe his estimate of the amount of information that can be communicated over a channel, because his mathematical theory of the communication of information produced a mathematical formula identical to Boltzmann's equation for entropy, except for a minus sign (the negative in negative entropy).

Boltzmann entropy: S = k ∑ pi ln pi.        Shannon information: I = - ∑ pi ln pi.

Entropy is energy divided by temperature (joules/°K) and information is measured in dimensionless bits. Entropy is a physical property of a material object. Information is an immaterial property of many things, material and ideal.

Shannon's communications theory brings us back to information as that found in a message between a sender and a receiver. He showed that a message that is certain to tell you something you already know contains no new information.

If everything that happens was certain to happen, as determinist philosophers claim, no new information would ever enter the universe. Information would be a universal constant. There would be "nothing new under the sun." Every past and future event can in principle be known (as Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested) by a super-intelligence with access to such a fixed totality of information.

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 would be conserved and a universal constant, as some mathematicians mistakenly believe. Information philosophy requires the ontological chance and probabilistic outcomes of modern quantum physics to produce new information.

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. Quantum mechanics reveals the architecture of the universe to be discrete rather than continuous, to be digital rather than analog.

Creation of information structures means that in parts of the universe the local entropy is actually going down. Creation of a low-entropy system is always accompanied by radiation of energy and entropy away from the local structure to distant parts of the universe, to the night sky and the cosmic background.

From Newton’s time to the start of the 19th century, the Laplacian view coincided with the notion of the divine foreknowledge of an omniscient God. On this view, complete, perfect and constant information exists at all times that describes the designed evolution of the universe and of the creatures inhabiting the world.

From Newton’s time to the start of the 19th century, the Laplacian view coincided with the notion of the divine foreknowledge of an omniscient God. On this view, complete, perfect and constant information exists at all times that describes the designed evolution of the universe and of the creatures inhabiting the world.

In this God’s-eye view, information is a constant of nature. Some mathematicians argue that information must be a conserved quantity, like matter and energy. They are wrong. In Laplace's view, information would be a constant straight line over all time, as shown in the figure.

If information were a universal constant, there would be “nothing new under the sun.” Every past and future event can in principle be known by Laplace's super-intelligent demon , with its access to such a fixed totality of information.

Midway through the 19th century, Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) realized that the newly discovered second law of thermodynamics required that information could not be constant, but would be destroyed as the entropy (disorder) increased. Hermann Helmholtz described this as the “heat death” of the universe.

Mathematicians who are convinced that information is always conserved argue that macroscopic order is disappearing into microscopic order, but the information could in principle be recovered, if time could only be reversed.

This raises the possibility of some connection between the increasing entropy and what Arthur Stanley Eddington called “Time’s Arrow.”

Kelvin’s claim that information must be destroyed when entropy increases would be correct if the universe were a closed system. But in our open and expanding universe, my Harvard colleague David Layzer showed that the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy, opening the possibility for complex and stable information structures to develop.

We can see from the figure that it is not only entropy that increases in the direction of the arrow of time, but also the information content of the universe. We can describe the new information as "emerging."

Despite the second law of thermodynamics, stable and lawlike information structures evolved out of the initial chaos. First, quantum processes formed microscopic particulate matter – quarks, baryons, nuclei, and electrons. Eventually these became atoms,. Later, under the influence of gravitation – macroscopic galaxies, stars, and planets form.

Every new information structure reduces the entropy locally, so the second law requires an equal (or generally much greater) amount of entropy to be carried away. Without the expansion of the universe, this would be impossible.

The positive entropy carried away (the big dark arrow on the left) is always greater than and generally orders of magnitude larger than the negative entropy in the created information structure (the smaller light arrow on the right).

See the cosmic creation process for the negative entropy flows that lead to human life.

Information is emergent, because the universe began in a state of minimal information (thermodynamic equilibrium, maximum disorder - or "entropy").

And there are three distinct kinds of information emergence:

  1. the "order out of chaos" when the matter in the universe forms information structures
    (this is Prigogine's chaos and complexity theory)
  2. the "order out of order" when the material information structures form self-replicating biological information structures
    (this is Schrödinger's definition of life as "feeding on negative entropy"
  3. the pure "information out of order" when organisms with minds process and externalize information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment
    (this is our information theory of mind)

Information philosophy explains how new information is constantly being created, by nature and by humanity. We are co-creators of our universe.

Information theory is the mathematical quantification of communication to describe how information is transmitted and received, in human language, for example.

Information science is the study of the categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, and retrieval of information.

Cognitive science is the study of the mental acquisition, retention, and utilization of knowledge, which we can describe as actionable information.

Information philosophy is an attempt to examine some classic problems in philosophy from the standpoint of 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 immaterial.
It is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine.

Immaterial information is perhaps as close as a physical or biological 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 personal information to make it 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 may have grown to exceed an individual's purely biological information.

Information is an excellent 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), idealism (pure information), the mind-body problem, the problem of free will, and the "hard" problem of consciousness.


Actionable information has pragmatic value.
In our information philosophy, knowledge is the sum of all the information created and preserved by humanity. It is all the information in human minds and in artifacts of every kind - from books and internetworked computers to our dwellings and managed environment.

We shall see that all information in the universe is created by a single two-part process, the only one capable of generating and maintaining information in spite of the dread second law of thermodynamics, which describes the irresistible increase in disorder or entropy. We call this anti-entropic process ergodic. It should be appreciated as the creative source of everything we can possibly value, and of everything distinguishable from chaos and therefore interesting.

Enabled by the general relativistic expansion of the universe, the cosmic creative process has formed the macrocosmos of galaxies, stars, and planets. It has also generated the particular forms of microscopic matter - atoms, molecules, and the complex macromolecules that support biological organisms. It includes all quantum cooperative phenomena.

Quantum phenomena control the evolution of life and human knowledge. They help bring new information into the universe in a fundamentally unpredictable way. They drive biological speciation. They facilitate human creativity and free will.

Although information philosophy looks at the universe, life, and intelligence through the single lens of information, it is far from mechanical and reducible to a deterministic physics. The growth of information over time - our principle of increasing information - is the essential reason why time matters and individuals are distinguishable.

Information is the principal reason that biology is not reducible to chemistry and physics. Increasing information (a combination of perfect replication with occasional copying errors) explains all emergent phenomena, including many "laws of nature."

In information philosophy, the future is unpredictable for two basic reasons. First, quantum mechanics shows that some events are not predictable. The world is causal, but not pre-determined. Second, the early universe does not contain the information of later times, just as early primates do not contain the information structures for intelligence and verbal communication, and infants do not contain the knowledge and remembered experience they will have as adults.

In the naive world of Laplace's demon and strict determinism, all the information in the universe is constant at all times. But "determinism" itself is an emergent idea, realized only when large numbers of particles assemble into bodies that can average over the irreducible microscopic indeterminacy of their component atoms.

Information and Entropy
In our open and expanding universe, the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the actual entropy. The difference between maximum possible entropy and the current entropy is called negative entropy. There is an intimate connection between the physical quantity negative entropy and information.

To give this very positive quantity of "negative" entropy a positive name, we call it "Ergo" and describe processes capable of generating negative entropy "ergodic."

Ergodic processes provide room to increase the information structures in the universe. As pointed out by David Layzer, the Arrow of Time points not only to increasing disorder but also to increasing information.

The increase of biological information is primarily by perfect replication of prior existing information, but it is critically important that replication errors occur from time to time. They are the source of new species and creative new ideas.

The universe is creative. Information structures and processes are emergent. Some laws of nature are emergent. Adequately deterministic phenomena are emergent. The very idea of determinism is emergent. Knowledge of the present did not all exist in the past. We have only a rough idea of the exact future.

The creative process continues. Life and humanity are a part of the process. What gets created is in part our responsibility. We can choose to help create and preserve information. Or we can choose to destroy it.

We are free to create our own future.

Is Everything Information?
Some recent scientists, especially mathematical physicists, think that the fundamental essence of the universe is information. Like the earliest monists who say All is One, theists who say everything is simply thoughts in the mind of God, or panpsychists for whom our minds are part of a single cosmic consciousness, these arguments that explain everything as one thing, really explain nothing.

Explanations need details about a large number of particular things for us to generalize and think we know something about all things.

Some specific physicists who have looked to information as the basis for physics include John Wheeler ("it from bit"), Seth Lloyd ("the universe is a computer"), Vlatko Vedral ("the universe is quantum information"), and Erik Verlinde ("matter is made of bits of information").

References

Is Information Fundamental?


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