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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
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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
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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
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Roderick Chisholm
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Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
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Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
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Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
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Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
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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
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Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
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William James
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Robert Kane
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Jaegwon Kim
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Keith Lehrer
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Joseph Levine
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C. Lloyd Morgan
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Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
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Storrs McCall
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Timothy O'Connor
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Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
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Paul Russell
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J.J.C.Smart
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Michael Smith
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L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
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W.G.Ward
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Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
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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
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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
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Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
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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
 
Libb Thims
Libb Thims is an American electrochemical engineer who is building the extraordinary web-based Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics at EoHT.info. This valuable knowledge base on the work of hundreds of scientists, engineers, and philosophers he calls the "Hmolpedia" (a human molecule encyclopedia).

He is a prolific writer and has published several books exploring his hypothesis that chemical thermodynamics can be used to explain many aspects of human life. His two-volume Human Chemistry explores the relationship between chemical bonding and sexual bonding, a scientific look at the popular idea that "love is a chemical reaction."

His slim and highly readable 2008 volume The Human Molecule contains a valuable history of the idea that a human being can be reduced to its chemical contents. He tells us of many great thinkers who explicitly describe humans as molecules, including Hippolyte Taine, Vilfredo Pareto, Henry Adams, Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Galton Darwin.

In 2010 Anthony Cashmore, a plant biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, described animals, including human beings, as a "bag of chemicals" entirely determined by the laws of physics and chemistry. He says, "we live in an era when few biologists would question the idea that biological systems are totally based on the laws of physics and chemistry." Like Thims, Cashmore sees the biological basis of human behavior as chemistry.

Back in 2002, Thims began using tables of the amounts of various chemical elements in a typical adult human to write the chemical formula for his "human molecule." He came up with this formula with 26 elements. The subscripts are read as e27, etc.

Thims hopes to describe relationships between humans in terms of chemical thermodynamics, particularly the sexual relation in which a man and woman produce a child. He writes...

AB + CD → A≡C + BD

"where A is the man, C is the woman, B and D are germ cells (sperm and egg, respectively), A≡C is the man and women chemically “bonded” in a relationship or marriage, and BD is the new child or sperm and egg chemically fused."

He says that as of 2006,he was forced

"to write a basic treatise on (a) human chemical reaction theory and (b) human chemical bond theory, as reaction models and bond are basic components in the starting point inf the science of chemical thermodynamics."

"before anyone can even attempt to write a basic book on “human chemical thermodynamics”, as I am attempting now to do (see: pdf), reaction models and bond models have to be established first, not to mention one has to establish what a human is, from the chemical thermodynamic viewpoint (hence the 2008 Human Molecule booklet)."

Thims is a strong determinist who denies the existence of ontological chance. As a consequence, he also denies human free will. He is an exponent of what he calls "smart atheism." He wrote this extensive web page on himself.

Trained as a chemical engineer, Thims is greatly bothered by scientists and others who make a connection between thermodynamics and "information theory" beginning with Claude Shannon, who called his formula for information "entropy" at the suggestion of John von Neumann, because the formula for Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical mechanical entropy had the same mathematical form, and both were summations over the probabilities of various states of a system.

Thims and Shannon's "Bandwagon"
Thims says there is nothing in information theory that is thermodynamics. Shannon himself was embarrassed by the many thinkers who jumped on what he called the "bandwagon" of information theory.

Thims has researched hundreds of examples of writers who assert the lack of connections between classical phenomenological thermodynamics, with laws that are relations between macroscopic variables, pressure, volume, temperature, chemical potentials, etc., and information theory, which is the mathematical theory of communications.

Thims says: "The equations used in [Shannon's] communication theory have absolutely nothing to do with the equations used in thermodynamics." That is true. Classical chemical thermodynamics HAS NOTHING TO DO with information theory. He is right.

Thims sometimes add that statistical mechanics has nothing to do with information theory. That is not true.

To make sense of this, we should not be comparing information to Carnot-Clausius classical thermodynamics, which has no concept of multiple possibilities with different probabilities, and the "logarithm of probabilities" that became entropy in the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann and Gibbs. Statistical mechanics has a LOT TO DO with information theory.

Boltzmann entropy and Shannon entropy have different dimensions (S = joules/degree, I = dimensionless "bits"), but they share the "mathematical isomorphism" of a logarithm of probabilities.

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

They both depend on the reality of "chance" and indeterminism that Albert Einstein showed is part of quantum mechanics ten years before Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty."

Boltzmann entropy and Shannon entropy are both based on ontological chance, which Albert Einstein discovered 1916. He seriously disliked it, but showed that quantum mechanics could not do without it.

As Thims claims in a lengthy (120-page) article Thermodynamics ≠ Information Theory, Sadi Carnot's phenomenological entropy has nothing to do with Shannon's information communication entropy.

Thermodynamic entropy involves matter and energy, Shannon entropy is entirely mathematical, on one level purely immaterial information, though information cannot exist without "negative" thermodynamic entropy.

It is true that information is neither matter nor energy, which are conserved constants of nature (the first law of thermodynamics). But information needs matter to be embodied in an "information structure." And it needs ("free") energy to be communicated over Shannon's information channels.

Boltzmann entropy is intrinsically related to "negative entropy." Without pockets of negative entropy in the universe (and out-of-equilibrium free-energy flows), there would no "information structures" anywhere.

Pockets of negative entropy are involved in the creation of everything interesting in the universe. It is a cosmic creation process without a creator.

Annotated version of Thims' Thermodynamics ≠ Information Theory

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