About Information Philosopher
Information Philosophy (I-Phi) is a philosophical method grounded in science, especially modern physics, biology, neuroscience, and the science of information. It offers novel solutions to classical problems in philosophy, notably freedom of the will, the objective foundation of values, and the problem of knowledge (epistemology). Insights into human freedom and cosmic values form the basis for a new system of belief and a guide to moral conduct.
Bob Doyle is the Information Philosopher.
Bob earned a Ph.D in Astrophysics from Harvard and is now an Associate in the Harvard Astronomy Department.
He holds several patents and is the inventor of a number of computer games, including Parker Brothers Merlin (1978).
Bob wrote the first desktop publishing program, MacPublisher,
in 1984 for the then new Macintosh computer.
He helped Christopher Lydon and Dave Winer create the very first Podcast in 2003. He edits several websites on blog audio and video, content management, taxonomy, structured writing, the memetic web, and globalization.
Bob spent much of his life building tools to "put the means of production in the hands of the people," not as Karl Marx imagined by nationalizing them, but by making them affordable, even free." He blogs at www.bobdoyleblog.com and blog.i-phi.org and is a contributor to the Garden of Forking Paths blog on free will.
His goal for the I-Phi website is to provide web pages on all the major philosophers and scientists who have worked on the problems of freedom, value, and knowledge. Each page will have excerpts from the thinker's work and a critical analysis. The three major sections of the website will have a history of the problem, the relevant physics, biology, cosmology, etc, and pages on the core concepts in the problem.
Bob's email is bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com.
His address and phone number are:
Astronomy Department
Harvard University
77 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, Mass 02138
617-876-5678
Bob's philosophical publications
Robert O. Doyle, "Free Will: it’s a normal biological property, not a gift or a mystery," Nature, 459, June 2009, p.1052.
Bob Doyle, "Jamesian Free Will: The Two-Stage Model of William James," William James Studies, April 2010
Bob Doyle, "The Two-Stage Model of Free Will: How biological freedom in lower animals evolved to become free will in higher animals and humans," submitted to Social Trends Institute for an Experts Meeting on the question "Is Science Compatible with the Desire for Human Freedom?", Barcelona, Spain, May 2010
Bob on his philosophical background
My life-long love of philosophy began over fifty years ago with undergraduate courses at Brown University which were required for my degree in Physics. A course in Ethics made the biggest impression, especially its conclusion that science has absolutely nothing to contribute to the subject. Ethical values must be found in traditional sources like religion and secular humanism. This struck me as odd. As Bertrand Russell had written, "What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”
So I took a course in philosophy of religion taught by Curt Ducasse, who had been a graduate student at Harvard during William James tenure. I learned that moral values are relative to different religious traditions, apart from a few axioms like "thou shalt not kill" and some form of the golden rule.
My third course was Existentialism, then the most exciting new philosophy, since analytical philosophy was bogged down in nit-picking arguments over the truth of linguistic statements. I read Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw values as created by human beings. They turn them into truths and moral laws to acquire power over others. They invent gods as enforcers. After the "death of God," Jean-Paul Sartre saw us as free agents, but in the absurd situation of choosing with no moral guides.
In my ethics course, I studied various attempts to get values based on reason or human nature or on feelings. The English philosophers found us to have decent value systems (e.g., utilitarianism), but no freedom of action. For them, determinism was obviously true. Causality required every action to have a cause, back to Aristotle's first cause. As long as our own determined mind was involved as a cause of our actions, this was freedom enough and allowed us to accept responsibility for our decisions. I was not so sure.
Freedom without values is absurd. But values without freedom are useless.
At Harvard to get my Ph.D. in the 1960's, I started reading the philosophy literature on my own and building the Information Philosopher library.
I also learned a great deal about statistical physics (thermodynamics) and quantum mechanics. My thesis was on the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen quasi-molecule (two atoms in collision).