Information analysis also provides insight into several problems in modern physics, including a new interpretation of quantum mechanics and the quantum irreversibility that underlies the second law of thermodynamics. Perhaps most importantly, it explains how life, mind, purpose, and consciousness entered the material universe.

Bob Doyle is the Information Philosopher. He has possibly read more works of philosophers and scientists than any other modern thinker, and has critically analyzed and written about the key ideas of hundreds of them on these
I-Phi web pages, as seen in the left navigation.

Bob is now an Associate in the Harvard Astronomy Department. He and his wife Holly, earned Ph.D's in Astrophysics from Harvard University in 1968. Anti-nepotism rules prevented them from getting academic positions in the same university (long since eliminated by the rise of feminism). Bob decided to become an entrepreneur in the hopes of earning an independent income so he and Holly could remain in Cambridge near Harvard. There Bob could pursue his lifelong interest in some great problems in philosophy, using the resources of Harvard's excellent libraries.

Bob's Ph.D. thesis was on the quantum mechanics of the hydrogen quasi-molecule (two atoms in collision) and the interaction of matter with radiation that he saw makes atomic collisions ontologically indeterministic and irreversible.

Bob was the secretary of NASA's Astronomy Missions Board from 1968 to 1972 and he edited A Long-Range Program in Space Astronomy, which NASA submitted to Congress, leading to the launch of the High Energy Astronomical Observatory HEAO-1 satellite and subsequently the Einstein (HEAO-2) and Chandra observatory-class X-Ray missions.

From the Johnson Spacecraft Center in Houston, Bob coordinated the Collaborative Observing Program for the Skylab astronauts from 1973 to 1974, which allowed 250 astronomical observatories around the world to synchronize their ground-based solar observations with X-Ray images made by the Skylab astronauts using the Apollo Telescope Mount on board Skylab.

From 1973 to 1978, Bob was the CEO of Super8 Sound, where he pioneered double-system synchronous-sound recording and editing for Super8 professional filmmakers.

As a full member of the sound engineering committee of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Bob helped specify standards for digital synchronization signals between Super-8 film cameras, cassette tape recorders, and the Super8 Sound fullcoat magnetic film recorder.

The Super8 Sound Catalog became the definitive equipment reference for Super8 filmmakers. It went through three editions with an average circulation of 15,000 copies.

Hollywood's American Cinematographer magazine devoted the November 1975 issue to Professional Super 8 tools and techniques developed by Super8 Sound.

The legacy of Super8 Sound continues with worldwide support for the Super8 medium at Phil and Rhonda Vigeant's Pro8mm in California. Phil is called "the man who saved Super8." He was one of Super8 Sound's first employees.

Bob holds several patents and is the co-inventor, with his wife Holly Thomis Doyle and brother in law Wendl Thomis, of a number of handheld computer games, including Parker Brothers Merlin (1978), Wildfire (1979), and Stop Thief (1979).

Merlin sold 5.5 million copies in 13 languages and was the most popular game or toy in the US in 1980, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America. Merlin was on the October 1978 cover of Boston Magazine and the December 1978 cover of Newsweek magazine.

In 1979, Bob founded iXO and developed a handheld personal computer terminal he called a "telecomputer" to access airline reservations, banking, stock trading, and many future online services.

It was featured on the cover of BYTE magazine in April 1982 and in an INC magazine article on our electronic games and telecomputer in September 1982.

In 1984, Bob wrote the first desktop publishing program for a personal computer, MacPublisher, for the then new Apple Macintosh computer. Bob was the eleventh certified software developer for the Macintosh. He had previously met with Steve Jobs to discuss licensing of iXO telecomputer technology as a potential Apple "Blueberry."

In 1988, Bob helped Matt and Patrice York launch Videomaker Magazine. Matt had been a Super8 Sound customer and noted that when Super8 Filmaker magazine was launched there were already a few hundred thousand Super8 film cameras, but there was as yet no magazine for videomakers, despite over a million video cameras sold that year.

In the late 1990's Bob was invited to become the "digital video guru" for NewMedia magazine.

In 2003, Bob helped Christopher Lydon and Dave Winer create the first "podcasts." at Harvard's Berkman Center. Winer recently posted an archive of those early podcasts.

Bob spent much of his life building tools to "help communities communicate." He says he "puts 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 and "open source."

He provided technical, logistic, and financial support to many individuals and media groups in the Boston area, including the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Boston Film/Video Foundation, Cambridge Community Television, Quad Sound Studios, Harvard Radcliffe Television, and Massachusetts College of Art.

The iTV-Studio is a research and development project by Bob, who has been adapting consumer devices to reduce the cost of film and video tools for nearly fifty years to "help communities communicate."

Open the image below in a new tab to see an ITV-Studio full panorama. The three rolling pedestal cameras at left are being installed at a news webcasting studio for the Harvard Crimson.

This iTV-Studio is a one-man operation. While lecturing, Bob switches between 7 Sony PTZ cameras and three media sources (two PCs and two Surface Pros that show his web pages, including YouTube videos, and online Skype guests), using the Black Magic Design ATEM switcher app on an iPad Pro.

Behind these are four DisplayLink screens extending his desktops. To his left on a pull-out drawer are the Sony PTZ camera controller, a laptop PC running his teleprompter software, an audio mixer, and the ATEM multiview screen on the table. The PTZ controller has multiple presets for the seven cameras. To his right on a pull-out drawer are three iPads running the Teradek VidiU app and Teradek Core streaming to YouTube and to CCTV cable television in Cambridge.

Also featured were philosophers and scientists Dan Dennett, Michael Gazzinaga, Bob Kane, Alfred Mele, Galen Strawson, Barry Schwartz, and Max Tegmark.

Bob's 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 has excerpts from the thinker's work and a critical analysis. The original three major sections of the website each have a history of the problem, the relevant physics, biology, cosmology, etc, and pages on the core concepts of the problem. In recent years, sections have been added on the mind, chance, and the quantum.

In 2016, Bob launched Metaphysicist.com to show how information philosophy can solve many problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in metaphysics. As opposed to metaphysicians, who are today mostly analytic language philosophers, a metaphysicist can show that information is physical, but immaterial. Thoughts in minds are immaterial, yet they causally influence the actions of the material brain and body.

Bob had the great privilege of working with some of the world's leading philosophers of the free will problem starting in 2009, when his first published philosophy appeared in Nature.

A paper in William James Studies on the two-stage free-will model of William James got Bob an invitation to the William James Symposium at Harvard in August, 2010 to present a 90-minute seminar (available on YouTube) on his ideas on free will, along with the similar ideas of a dozen scientists and philosophers since James. Since 2010, another dozen thinkers have been discovered who support Bob's two-stage model of free will.

The compatibilist philosopher Daniel Dennett invited Bob to take part in his graduate seminar on free will at Tufts in the Fall of 2010. He submitted many short papers to the seminar on his positions relative to Dennett's.

Bob was invited to present his two-stage model of free will at an "Experts Meeting" on Free Will at the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, Spain in October, 2010, along with Robert Kane, editor of the Oxford Handbook on Free Will, Alfred Mele, who directed a program at Florida State University that studied free will with a $4.4 million grant from the Templeton Foundation, and Martin Heisenberg (a son of Werner Heisenberg), who claimed in Nature that even the lowest animals have a kind of "behavioral freedom." They are not biological machines reacting predictably to stimuli with programmed responses. They originate actions, stochastically.

In February, 2011, Bob Kane encouraged Bob to turn the Freedom section of this website into a book, which he did amazingly quickly, thanks to Adobe InDesign and a print-on-demand service at the Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square that produced 14 revisions in as many weeks.

Bob's first philosophy book - Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy - was published on June 19, 2011, his 75th birthday. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, along with eBook versions for the Kindle and Nook.

His second book - Great Problems in Philosophy and Physics Solved? - was published on September 15, 2016. HIs third - Metaphysics Problems , Puzzles, and Paradoxes Solved? - appeared in December 2016. They are both available on Amazon.

His fourth book - My God, He Plays Dice! - How Albert Einstein Invented Most of Quantum Mechanics was published in 2019.

All Bob's books are available as free PDF downloads on the I-Phi website.

In addition to his extensive websites (this one and metaphysicist.com) and his printed books, Bob produced fifty lectures on his YouTube channel and Facebook page.

Bob's email is bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com.

His address and phone number are:
77 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, Mass 02138
617-876-5678
Skype handle:bobdoyle
YouTube channel: infophilosopher
Twitter username: infophilosopher
Facebook page: infophilosopher
I-Phi Blog: i-phi.org

Bob is an Associate in the Astronomy Department, Harvard University
His faculty email is rodoyle@fas.harvard.edu

A ten-minute animated tutorial on the Two-Stage Model for Free Will

Robert O. Doyle, "Jamesian Free Will: The Two-Stage Model of William James," William James Studies, June, 2010

Powerpoint presentation at the William James Symposium, August 28, 2010.

Videos of the presentation at William James Symposium:

"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, October, 2010

Is Science Compatible with Free Will?: Exploring Free Will and Consciousness in the Light of Quantum Physics and Neuroscience (on Amazon)

Powerpoint presentation at the STI Experts Meeting.

Video of presentation at the STI Experts Meeting

Two Steps to Free Will, Harvard Magazine, July-August 2012.

Mente e Libertà? (Mind and Freedom?), Interview, Avvenire, June 4, 2013.

Quantum Physics and the Problem of Mental Causation, presented in Milan, June 6, 2013, at a conference on "Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Mind." (Slides)

Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy was published in June 2011.

480 pages, 40 figures, 15 sidebars, bibliography, glossary, index.

Philosophers who want to review it can download a PDF or an eBook.

PDFs of the individual chapters are here.

Great Problems in Philosophy (and Physics) Solved? was published in September 2016

472 pages, 45 figures, bibliography, index.

Philosophers who want to review it can download a PDF or an eBook.

PDFs of the individual chapters are here.

Metaphysics: Problems, Paradoxes, and Puzzles Solved? was published in December 2016

428 pages, 13 figures, bibliography, index.

Philosophers who want to review it can download a PDF or an eBook.

PDFs of the individual chapters are here.

My God, He Plays Dice! How Albert Einstein Invented Most of Quantum Mechanics, was published in March, 2019

452 pages, 71 figures, bibliography, index.

PDFs of the draft chapters are here.

His fifth book Bob did not write. He was an editor for David Layzer's book on free will. He did co-write a preface and afterword with Anthony Aguirre. In this book Bob's Harvard colleague and mentor Layzer answers Bob's fundamental question of information philosophy",

Why We are Free was published in March, 2021

168 pages pages, 4 figures, bibliography, index.

An interactive PDF of the book is here.

Paperback and Kindle versions are here

So I took a course in the 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 that seem to be universals. All ethical and moral values appeared to be relative to particular human cultures.

My third course was Existentialism taught by Vincent Tomas. Existentialism was 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 virtual 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, no objective values.

In my ethics course, I studied various attempts to get values based on reason or human nature or even just on emotions. The English philosophers found us to have decent value systems (e.g., utilitarianism), but no freedom of will. 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 and we were not coerced or constrained, this freedom of action was enough for them. They thought it 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 large Information Philosopher Institute library, which is the foundation for this I-Phi website.