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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
 
Mind
Of all the problems that information philosophy may help to solve, few are more important than the question of Mind. There is little in philosophy that is more dehumanizing than the logic chopping and sophistic word juggling that denies the existence of Mind, Consciousness, and the human spirit or soul, free from the deterministic Laws of Nature governing Matter.

Some of the earliest philosophers saw an immaterial Mind as the source of eternal Truths about Reality that could not be based on mere physical phenomena - unreliable sensations emanating from Matter.

Plato's abstract Forms and Ideas were thought to precede the concrete objects of the physical and phenomenal world.

Aristotle dramatically reversed the roles of Mind and Matter. He saw his master's Ideal Forms, like the perfect circle, as simply abstractions of a shared common feature found in nature; Plato's perfect circle simply the abstraction from so many concrete circular objects.

But Aristotle saw the Mind, the entity dealing with immaterial abstractions as itself immaterial.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassible, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Thought must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible...

Thus that in the soul which is called thought (by thought I mean that whereby soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body: if so, it would acquire some quality, e.g. warmth or cold, or even have an organ like the sensitive faculty: as it is, it has none. It was a good idea to call the soul 'the place of forms', though this description holds only of the thinking soul, and even this is the forms only potentially, not actually.

René Descartes' dualism reduced the bodies of all animals to deterministic living machines, but he left room for a non-­mechanistic, immaterial, and indeterministic Mind above and beyond the deterministic limits set by the laws of material nature.

Immanuel Kant renamed the ancient division of sensible and intelligible worlds, locating God, freedom, and immortality in his noumenal world, while pure sensation exists in his completely deterministic phenomenal world. But like Descartes, Kant could never explain the connections between these mental and physical worlds.

Many modern philosophers and psychologists believe that all matter includes a psychic or mental aspect. Pan-psychism is the belief that all material particles have a mental capacity and some elemental consciousness.

These pan-psychists do not believe that immaterial minds could have emerged from matter. They simply assume that even the most elementary particles of matter must contain a mind-like element and, moreover, all elementary particles share in a kind of "cosmic consciousness" that is connecting (entangling?) everything in the universe.

Information philosophy hopes to show that information is itself that immaterial “substance” above and beyond matter and energy that the ancients, Descartes, and Kant were all looking for. And although passive information structures appeared and evolved in the billions of years before life appeared, it was living things that put immaterial information to active use. This was "mind over matter."

And that long sought for connection between noumenal and phenomenal, between mental and physical, is simply that ideas in minds have causal power, through their effects on the decisions and actions of living agents. With the appearance of living things, agency and purpose entered the universe.

Mind as Immaterial Information in a Biological Information Processor
Information philosophy views the mind as the immaterial information in the material brain. The brain is seen as a biological information processor. Mind is "software" in the brain’s "hardware," although the hardware is altogether different from the logic gates, bit storage, algorithms, computations, and input/output systems of the type of digital computer used as a "computational model of mind" by today's cognitive scientists.

The “stuff” of thought is pure information, neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the soul in the body, the "ghost in the machine."

In ancient philosophy, mind/soul versus body was one of the classic dualisms, such as idealism versus materialism, the problem of the one (monism) or the many (pluralism), the distinction between essence and existence, between universals and particulars, between necessity and contingency, between eternal and ephemeral, but most important, the difference between the intelligible world of the noumena and the ​sensible world of mere appearances or phenomena.

When mind and body are viewed today as a dualism, it is because the mind is considered to be fundamentally different from the material brain, though perhaps not another “substance.” We propose an easily understandable and critically important physical difference between matter and immaterial information. Whereas the total amount of matter/energy is conserved, the universe is continuously creating new information - by rearranging existing matter into new information structures. The total amount of information (a kind of order) in the universe is increasing, despite the second law of thermodynamics, which - counterintuitively - says that the total amount of disorder (entropy) is also increasing.

Matter, along with energy (mc2), cannot increase. It is conserved, a constant of the universe. Information is not conserved, despite the claims of some modern scientists. As information grows, it is the source of genuine novelty in the universe. The future is not determined by the past and present, because the future contains unpredictable new information. New information is continuously created in the physical and the biological universe.

If mind and matter then are to be considered part of a dualism, it will not be a "material substance" dualism, but it can still be a "physical substance" dualism, since mind and matter are both physical and "substantial," in the sense of having real causal power. We recognize that something immaterial with causal power also fits the description of metaphysical.

The Evolution of Information Structures to Become Minds
How did material substances come to be able to think? Ancient philosophers assumed that mind and thought must be primordial, perhaps even prior to the creation of matter. But we can now outline the creation and evolution of information from an initial state of the universe (with minimal, essentially zero information and perhaps even no material at all, only energy) to the “information age” of today. We call it the cosmic creation process

Information philosophy makes the straightforward claim that human beings, especially their minds, are the most highly evolved form of information generation and processing system in the known universe. Recognizing this simple fact provides a radically new perspective on the central problems of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.

In a very deep sense, we are information.

The story of evolution from the universe origin to the information-processing brain/mind can be told in three major emergences:

  1. Nine billion years in the evolution of matter, some of it organized into passive information structures by external forces. Their components are arranged by quantum, chemical, or gravitational processes.
  2. Four billion years in the evolution of life, active information structures that create and transmit information by natural selection, variation, and heredity. They use information to control the flow of matter and energy through their bodies. Every component, from molecules to cells and their interconnections is arranged by biological information stored in the cell and its DNA.
  3. A few hundred thousand years in the evolution of human minds, which create, store, and transmit vast amounts of information external to their bodies, the basis for human knowledge and cultural/social organization.
With the appearance of life, purpose entered the universe. The fundamental purpose of all life is to survive, at least long enough to replicate. For most species, all of the information needed to survive is transmitted in the genes and the biological machinery of the cell. To benefit from the experiences of an ancestor, those experiences must somehow be encoded genetically, so they show up as a priori, built-in capabilities of the offspring. Konrad Lorenz said that what is a priori for an individual (ontogeny) was a posteriori for its ancestors (phylogeny).

The appearance of human minds marks the beginning of significant amounts of knowledge stored extra-biologically. Externally stored information (our "Sum") needed for human survival can be transmitted culturally between the generations. The development of the highest forms of philosophical and scientific thought would have been impossible without the externally stored information we call the Sum. Arguably, even language itself could not have developed. A child deprived of its senses for access to human culture would never speak. According to Merlin Donald, human culture did not develop because humans had acquired language to communicate. We developed language to improve on the primitive communication capabilities (miming, pointing, signing) of pre-linguistic humans.

Humans are conscious of our experiences because they are recorded in (and reproduced on demand from) the information structures in our brains. We call it the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR). Mental information houses the content of an individual character - the fabric of values, desires, and reasons used to evaluate alternatives for action and thus to make choices. The information in a human brain vastly exceeds our genetic information. And because human information can be stored and retrieved externally, the Sum of human knowledge has allowed human beings to dominate the planet, for better or worse. Animals may exceed us in strength and speed, but we have experience, memory, wisdom, and skill (Anaxagoras DK B 21b) that has accumulated over tens of thousands of generations.

Mind-body as a dualism coincides with Plato’s “Ideas” or “Forms” as pure form, with an ontology different from that of matter. The immaterial Forms, seen by the intellect (nous), allow us to understand the world. On the other hand, mind-body as a monism can picture both sides of the mind-body distinction as pure physicalism, since information embodied in matter corresponds simply to a reorganization of the matter. This was Aristotle’s more practical view. For him, Plato’s Ideas were mere abstractions generalized from many existent particulars. Form without matter is empty, matter without form is inconceivable, unimaginable. Kant rewrote this pre-Socratic observation somewhat obscurely as “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

But there are other characteristic differences between the mental and the physical that modern science, even neuroscience, may never fully explain. The most important is the internal and private first-person point of view, the essential subjectivity of the self, the “I” and the “eye” of the mind, its capability of introspection and reflection, its intentionality, its purposiveness, its consciousness.

The mind records an individual’s experiences as internal information structures and then can play back these recordings to compare them to new perceptions, new external events. The recordings include an individual’s emotional reactions to past experiences, our feelings of pleasure/pain, of hopes and fears, of good and evil. The reproduction of recorded personal experiences, stimulated by similarities in a new experience, provides the core of “what it’s like to be” an individual. Without the context provided by past similar experiences, the new experience would lack all meaning and significance, though it would be duly recorded to provide meaning for future experiences.

The external and public physical world, by contrast, is studied from the third-person point of view. Although putatively “objective,” science in fact is the composite “intersubjective” view of the “community of inquirers,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it. Although this shared subjectivity can never directly experience what goes on in the mind of an individual member of the community, science is in some sense the collective mind of the physical world. It is a pale record of the world’s experiences, because it lacks the emotional aspect of personal experience. The physical world itself has no sense of its history. It does not introspect or reflect. It lacks consciousness, that problem in philosophy of mind second only to the basic mind-body problem itself. We see consciousness as based on a highly evolved Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR) that even the lowest organisms may have in the form of experiences recorded in their DNA .

Aristotle, in his Book III, Parts IV and V, of De Anima (On the Soul), perhaps the most controversial and confusing part of his entire corpus, says that the soul (psyche) or mind is immaterial. He was right. For Aristotle, Intellect (nous) is that part of the soul whose active thinking gives it a causal (aition) power (dynamis) over the material (hyle) body (soma). This claim appears to anticipate the mind-body problem of René Descartes - how exactly does an immaterial thing (substance) or property exert a causal force on the material body? [We shall see a similar puzzle in quantum mechanics where the immaterial wave function influences the motion of material particles, albeit statistically.]

It is important to note that Descartes made the mind the locus of undetermined freedom. For him, the body is a deterministic mechanical system of tiny fibres causing movements in the brain (the afferent sensations), which then can pull on other fibres to activate the muscles (the efferent nerve impulses). This is the basis of stimulus and response theory in modern physiology (reflexology). It is also the basis behind connectionist theories of mind. An appropriate network need only connect the afferent to the efferent signals. No thinking mind is needed for animals (or computers where inputs completely determine outputs).

The popular idea of animals as machines included the notion that man too is in part a machine - the human body obeys strictly deterministic causal laws. But for Descartes man also has a soul or spirit that is exempt from determinism and thus from what is known today as “causal closure.” But how, we must ask, can the mind both cause something physical to happen and yet itself be acausal, exempt from causal chains? This is the problem of mental causation.

Since Immanuel Kant, this problem has become even more severe. The freedom in Kant’s noumenal world - outside space and time - has no apparent connection with the deterministic phenomenal world. For Kant, causality is a category of understanding applicable only to the phenomenal world. In the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle called the concept of Mind a “category mistake.”

Information philosophy hopes to solve the mind/body problem, the problem of mental causation, the “hard problem” of consciousness, and the problem of other minds, not by postulating a non-physical world, but instead a world that answers to the ancient description of metaphysical, because it is non-material. This world is the locus of everything Aristotle included in his first philosophy, the laws of thought and today the laws of physics.

The world of information is abstract, not concrete, intangible, yet with causal power as Aristotle thought. The material world is made up in part of information structures. (We shall see that most of the matter in the universe is chaotic and contains little or no information.) Material information structures can be perceived and their abstract information content represented as information structures in the mind/brain. To the extent that the information in the mind is isomorphic with the information in the object, we can say that the subject has knowledge of the external world. Information philosophy is a correspondence theory. To the extent that information in other minds is isomorphic to that in our minds, we have intersubjective shared knowledge, something impossible to show with words or logic alone.

Information philosophy goes “beyond logic and language.”

For Teachers
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Part Four - Freedom Part Six - Chance
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