Watch Einstein And Eddington Streaming
- Revisit "Inside Einstein's Mind," fresh from the archives and just nominated for an Emmy Award. On November 25th, 1915, Einstein published his greatest work: general.
- Drama about the development of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and Einstein's relationship with British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, the first.
The Information Philosopher - dedicated to the new information philosophy. Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. Why should it become the preferred basis for all philosophy? As most all of us know, matter and energy are conserved. This means that there is just the same total amount of matter and energy today as there was at the universe origin. But then what accounts for all the change that we see, the new things under the sun? It is information, which is not conserved and has been increasing since the beginning of time.
What is changing is the arrangement of the matter into what we can call information structures. What is emerging is new information.
Read a National Geographic magazine article about general relativity and get information, facts, and more about dark matter. People seem to come in all shapes and sizes. Do any other animals display the same amount of variation in size as humans among healthy adults?
What idealists and holists see is that emergence of immaterial information. Living things, you and I, are dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it is information processing that controls those flows! Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine, the mind in the body.
It is the soul, and when we die, it is our information that perishes, unless the future preserves it. The matter remains. If we don't remember the past, we don't deserve to be remembered by the future.
This is especially true for the custodians of knowledge. Information can explain the fundamental metaphysical connection between materialism and idealism. Information philosophy replaces the determinism and metaphysical necessity of eliminative materialism and reductionist naturalism with metaphysical possibility. Information is the form in all concrete objects as well as the content in non- existent, merely possible, thoughts and other abstract entities.
It is the disembodied, de- materialized essence of anything. Perhaps the most amazing thing about information philosophy is its discovery that abstract and immaterial information can exert an influence over concrete matter, explaining how mind can move body, how our thoughts can control our actions, just as the quantum wave function controls the probabilities of locating quantum particles. Information philosophy goes beyond a priori logic and its puzzles, beyond analytic language and its paradoxes, beyond philosophical claims of necessary truths, to a contingent physical world that is best represented as made of dynamic, interacting information structures. Knowledge can be defined as information in minds that is a partial isomorphism (mapping) of the information structures in the external world. Information philosophy is a correspondence theory.
Sadly, there is no isomorphism, no information in common, between words and objects. This accounts for much of the failing of analytic language philosophy in the past century. Although language is an excellent tool for human communication, it is arbitrary, ambiguous, and ill- suited to represent the world directly. Human languages do not picture reality.
Information is the lingua franca of the universe. The extraordinarily sophisticated connection between words and objects is made in human minds, mediated by the brain's experience recorder and reproducer (ERR). Words stimulate neurons to start firing and to play back those experiences that include relevant objects.
By contrast, a dynamic information model of an information structure in the world is presented immediately to the mind as a simulation of reality experienced for itself, not through words. Without words and related experiences previously recorded in your mental experience recorder, you could not comprehend words. They would be mere noise, with no meaning. By comparison, a diagram, a photograph, an animation, or a moving picture can be seen and mostly understood by human beings, independent of their native tongue.
The basic elements of information philosophy are dynamical models of information structures. They go far beyond logic and language as a representation of the fundamental, metaphysical, nature of reality. Visual and interactive models "write" directly into our mental experience recorders. Computer animated models must incorporate all the laws of nature, from the differential equations of quantum physics to the myriad information processes of biology. Simulations are not only our most accurate knowledge of the physical world, they are among the best teaching tools ever devised. We can transfer knowledge non- verbally to coming generations in most of the world's population via the Internet and nearly ubiquitous smartphones. Consider the dense information in Drew Berry's real- time animations of molecular biology.
These are the kinds of dynamic models of information structures that we believe can best explain the fundamental nature of reality - "beyond logic and language.". If you think about it, everything you know is pure abstract information. Everything you are is an information structure, a combination of matter and energy that embodies, communicates, and most important, processes your information. Everything that you value contains information. And while the atoms, molecules, and cells of your body are important, many only last a few minutes and most are completely replaced in just a few years. But your immaterial information, from your original DNA to your latest experiences, will be with you for your lifetime.
You are a creator of new information, part of the cosmic creation process. Your free will depends on your unique ability to create freely generated thoughts, multiple ideas in your mind as alternative possibilities for your willed decisions and responsible actions. Anyone with a serious interest in philosophy should understand how information is created and destroyed, because information is much more fundamental than the logic and language tools philosophers use today. Information philosophy goes "beyond logic and language.".
Information is the sine qua non of meaning. This I- Phi website aims to provide a deep understanding of information that should be in every philosopher's toolbox. Watch Welcome To Willits Online Metacritic here. We will show why information should actually be the preferred basis for the critical analysis of current problems in a wide range of disciplines - from information creation in cosmology to information in quantum physics, from information in biology (especially evolution) to psychology, where it offers a solution to the classic mind- body problem and the problem of consciousness. And of course in philosophy, where failed language analysis can be replaced or augmented by immaterial information analysis as a basis for justified knowledge, objective values, human free will, and a surprisingly large number of problems in metaphysics. Above all, information philosophy hopes to replace beliefs with knowledge. Instead of the primitive idea of an other- worldly creator, we propose a comprehensive explanation of the creation of this world that has evolved into the human creativity that invents such ideas.
The "miracle of creation" is happening now, in the universe and in you and by you. But what is information? How is it created? Why is it a better tool for examining philosophical problems than traditional logic or linguistic analysis?
And what are some examples of classic problems in philosophy, in physics, and in metaphysics with information philosophy solutions? What problems has information philosophy solved? Why has philosophy made so little progress? Is it because philosophers prefer problems, while scientists seek solutions?
Must a philosophical problem once solved become science and leave philosophy? Bertrand Russell thought so. The information philosopher thinks not. The Problems of Philosophy, 1. But in order to remain philosophy, interested philosophers must examine our proposed information- based solutions and evaluate them as part of the philosophical dialogue.
Among the proposed solutions to classic philosophical problems are.