The Informaton Philosopher

In the last post I discovered the website for The Information Philosopher. From their Introduction:

"The Information Philosopher has established that quantum mechanics and thermodynamics play a central role in the creation of all things. This finding has enormous implications for philosophy.

Instead of a closed universe that is winding down deterministically from an initial state of high information, we find the universe is open and increasing information indeterministically.

An open indeterministic universe with increasing information suggests three testable philosophical ideas:

• a model for free will and creativity that may satisfy determinists and libertarians
• a value system based on fundamental creative processes in the universe
• an epistemological explanation of knowledge formation and communication.

All three ideas depend on understanding modern physics, cosmology, biology, and neuroscience.

All three have strong connections to information science. They are contributions to a new information philosophy.

If these ideas are accepted, they could change some well-established philosophical positions. Even more important, they provide a new view of how humanity fits into the universe. 

Information philosophy offers a mind model that transcends flawed "brain as computer" models. The brain is not a digital electronic computer, though it has information circuits. It is not a Turing machine of deterministic states. The brain is not a mechanism in the seventeenth-century sense of a time-reversible system obeying

Newtonian laws of physics. Time is of the essence in the mind. The arrow of time traces the irreversible development of unique biological individuals with increasing consciousness of self, others, and a nurturing environment.

Information philosophy sees the brain as a magnificent information processing and decision system. It is orders of magnitude more capable than the whole of today's internetworked system of computers and multimedia communications channels - at accumulating actionable knowledge, which is the brain's natural purpose, or telos.

Information philosophy is a systematic philosophy, with a triadic architectonic that would have pleased Kant and Peirce. It is an idealist philosophy, but it is worldly, not other-worldly. Its information super-structures are properly constructed on a material base."

And from this page:

" 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."