Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


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
 
A Book of Scandals
The Information Philosopher has for years claimed to have plausible solutions for many great problems in philosophy and physics. We have called it a scandal that the world's educators have been teaching seriously outmoded ideas to young minds around the world.

The main scandal is academic philosophers and scientists teaching that the world is nothing but material and that physical events are completely determined by "laws" of nature, that our bodies are machines and our brains are computers that deny our free will and our creativity.

Information philosophy and science explains how information structures are created in the universe despite the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder or entropy can only increase in a closed thermodynamic system.


Click for the story of information creation
But the universe is not closed, it is an open thermodynamic system, in which the total positive entropy or disorder is increasing, but regions of "negative entropy" are also increasing, so information structures like our Sun and life on Earth are increasing the information content of the universe (the Ergo), especially that part of information that is all of human knowledge (the Sum).

Why do academic philosophers and scientists cling to failed ideas?

Philosophers prefer problems they have been taught to teach.

Scientists seek solutions that discover all-powerful new "laws of Nature."

Leading scientists have interpreted quantum physics and statistical thermodynamics, expressing their own doubts, so it is understandable that those less familiar with these complex subjects have fallen back on their traditional beliefs.

Philosophers of science have been quick to exploit those doubts and to promote alternative theories that are not supported by evidence, but that appeal to our conventional beliefs.

Science journalists also find that speculative articles and books promoting these alternatives are far more popular than serious attempts to teach these difficult subjects to the public.

The Two Things You Need to Know to End the Scandals

1. The standard theory of quantum mechanics is correct. The many attempts to alter it or reinterpret it to restore determinism have failed.

The ontological chance discovered by Albert Einstein in 1916, long before the epistemological "uncertainty" principle of Werner Heisenberg, is real.

Chance drives the variation in living things that natural and intelligent selection choose between to give us life, human beings, and our knowledge of the universe.

Chance gives us the alternative possibilities for acting that make us free and creative.

Einstein's Insight
In 1916 Albert Einstein found that when a photon is emitted by an atom, it must go off in a random direction. He called it "chance." Because he was a determinist, he called it a "weakness in the theory." If the photon went in any preferred direction, the radiation field would depart from equilibrium, even permitting a perpetual motion machine, which he thought impossible.

2. The universe is open and expanding and new information is emerging at every moment.

Our futures are also open.

If we have the will, we can create new information structures that make life more productive as well as more sustainable to protect our planet.

The origin of the universe was not "fine-tuned" to produce human life. Life (biology) cannot be reduced to chemistry, which cannot be reduced to a deterministic physics.

Boltzmann's Entropy, Eddington's Arrow, Layzer's Order
In 1872 Ludwig Boltzmann theorized that atoms or molecules of a gas would distribute themselves randomly throughout a closed container. If they all started in a corner, or were let out of a bottle, information about those initial positions would be lost. They would never return to those initial positions. The change is irreversible. A few years later he modified his theory, saying particles would only statistically never return. In infinite time, a finite number of particles could return, even more than once.

Boltzmann's theory allows us to calculate the entropy increase when the volume available increases, and to calculate the loss in information.

In 1927 Arthur Stanley Eddington called the direction of entropy increase the "arrow of time." A few years later the expansion of the universe was discovered, and in 1935 Eddington suggested that if the expansion was faster than particles can redistribute themselves, particles could never return to their original distribution. Information was permanently lost.

In the 1970's David Layzer said if the expansion is faster than particles can reach an equilibrium distribution, stable information structures can appear.

The mistaken idea in statistical physics that any particular distribution or arrangement of material particles has exactly the same information content as any other distribution is an anachronism from nineteenth-century statistical physics.

Hemoglobin Diffusing Completely Mixed Gas

If we measure the positions in phase space of all the atoms in a hemoglobin protein, we get a certain number of bits of data (the x, y, z, vx, vy, vz values). If the chemical bonds are all broken allowing atoms to diffuse, or the atoms are completely randomized into an equilibrium gas with maximum entropy, we get different values, but the same amount of data. Does this mean that any particular distribution has exactly the same information?

This led many statistical physicists to claim that information is the same wherever the particles are, Macroscopic information is not lost, it just becomes microscopic information that can be completely recovered if the motions of every particle could be reversed. Reversibility allows all the gas particles to go back inside the bottle.

But the information in the hemoglobin is much higher and the disorder (entropy) near zero. A human being is not just a "bag of chemicals," despite plant biologist Anthony Cashmore. Each atom in hemoglobin is not merely in some volume limited by the uncertainty principle ℏ3, it is in a specific quantum cooperative relationship with its neighbors that support its biological function. These precise positional relationships make a passive linear protein into a properly folded active enzyme. Breaking all these quantum chemical bonds destroys life.

Boltzmann's formula for the entropy is the logarithm of the number W of possible distributions that produce the same macroscopic properties.

S = k ln W

When gas particles can go anywhere in a container, the number of possible distributions is enormous and entropy is maximal. When atoms are bound to others in the hemoglobin structure, the number of possible distributions is essentially 1, and the logarithm of 1 is 0!

Even more important, the parts of every living thing are communicating information - signaling - to other parts, near and far, as well as to other living things. Information communication allows each living thing to maintain itself in a state of homeostasis, balancing all matter and energy entering and leaving, maintaining all vital functions. Statistical physics and chemical thermodynamics know nothing of this biological information.

One Book and Many

In our initial "book of scandals" we present brief summaries of the major scandals/problems and their solutions in terms of the creation of information structures, their processes, functions, and, most important, their communications with one another.

Each scandal will become its own book, if the author lives long enough in the current age of the coronavirus (he will be 84 in June 2020). Many are already sections, or at least pages, in this I-Phi website, which has been a work in progress for over two decades.

Deep insight into the informational nature of reality will can show thinkers young and old why they are creators of our open future as human beings.

Normal | Teacher | Scholar