Information Philosophy

What if the universe is not a finished object waiting to be observed — but a reality brought into definite form through questions, information, and participation? John Archibald Wheeler was one of the most daring physicists of the twentieth century. He helped shape nuclear physics, revived Einstein’s general relativity, gave the black hole its unforgettable name, explored wormholes and quantum foam, and mentored some of the greatest minds in modern science. Yet his most provocative legacy came later, when he began asking whether reality itself might arise from information. In Wheeler ...

As technologies of automated computation rapidly transform human culture, we are being urged to believe that human minds are machines and machines are potentially minds. But what if the question of machine consciousness is not a hard problem awaiting better theories and technologies, but malformed—born from a metaphysics that first exiled feeling, purpose, and meaning from nature? Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence challenges the corporate myth of “artificial intelligence” and the emerging threat of cognitive enclosure: the attempt to meter and ...

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.

What if the mind is not locked inside the skull, but woven through the living patterns that connect us to each other and to nature? Gregory Bateson was one of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers — an anthropologist, systems theorist, cybernetic pioneer, communication theorist, and ecological philosopher who challenged the modern habit of reducing reality to isolated parts. In Bateson and the Ecology of Mind: Information, Pattern, and the Conscious Web of Nature, Clayton Louis Turnage explores Bateson’s revolutionary vision of mind as a living system of relationships, ...

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story...

Behind the familiar surfaces of the telephone, radio, and television lies a sophisticated and intriguing body of knowledge known as information theory. This is the theory that has permitted the rapid development of all sorts of communication, from color television to the clear transmission of photographs from the vicinity of Jupiter. Even more revolutionary progress is expected in the future.  

What kind of reality must exist for a quantum computer to work? David Deutsch did not merely help pioneer quantum computation. He challenged physics to rethink reality itself. In David Deutsch and the Quantum Multiverse, Clayton Louis Turnage explores one of the boldest thinkers in modern quantum foundations. Deutsch argues that quantum mechanics is not just a tool for predicting experiments — it is a description of a vast physical reality where the wave function is real, collapse never occurs, and our world may be only one branch of an immense quantum multiverse. This book examines ...

A rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention, with the tools we need to reclaim our humanity, by a group of writers, artists, and activists in the vanguard of the movement “A stirring battle cry on behalf of our shared humanity against the forces that seek to diminish and...

What if the universe is not silent? What if reality is made not only of matter, energy, and law—but of signs? Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the most original minds in American philosophy: a scientist, logician, mathematician, founder of pragmatism, and creator of one of the most powerful theories of signs ever developed. Yet his vision reaches far beyond language or symbolism. For Peirce, signs are not merely words on a page. A fossil is a sign of vanished life. Smoke is a sign of fire. A symptom is a sign of disease. A mathematical equation is a sign of hidden structure. A scientific...

What if humanity began describing something structurally similar to simulated reality 2,500 years before the invention of the computer? Buddhist teachers portrayed samsara as a self-sustaining world of appearances from which one could awaken. Hindu traditions explored maya, cosmic dreams, and worlds nested within worlds. Plato imagined prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, Zhuangzi questioned whether he was a man dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a man, and Gnostic writers described a lower world constructed by an imperfect creator. These traditions were not secretly ...

The one thing we know from the inside — and the one thing science has yet to explain. You are conscious right now. There is light reaching your eyes, words forming meaning, perhaps a faint sound in the room. Why should any of that be felt? Why is the firing of neurons accompanied by experience at all? What It Is Like is a complete, rigorous, and readable map of the debate — written for students, researchers, and serious general readers, and assuming no prior background. The book covers: The problem itself — what "consciousness" actually means, the hard problem, and the philosophical ...

What if quantum mechanics is not telling us that reality disappears when we look — but that reality is deeper, more unified, and more mysterious than we ever imagined? Basil Hiley was one of the most important yet least publicly known figures in the hidden-order tradition of quantum physics. As David Bohm’s closest long-term collaborator, Hiley helped carry Bohm’s radical vision beyond pilot waves and hidden variables into a deeper search for the mathematical structure of wholeness. In Basil Hiley and the Undivided Universe, readers enter the world of Bohmian mechanics, quantum ...

Are we living in a computer simulation? In 'The Simulation,' Nate Calloway moves past the viral headlines and tech-billionaire endorsements to provide a rigorous philosophical autopsy of the most provocative idea of our time. While pop science often treats the simulation hypothesis as a new discovery, Calloway reveals its ancient roots, tracing a line from Descartes’s 'Evil Demon' and Plato’s Cave to Nick Bostrom’s modern trilemma. This book dissects the core assumptions required for a simulated reality—from the 'Functionalist Gamble' of substrate-independent consciousness to the '...

In a world where there is so much conflicting information about how we are supposed to live, what can we really know? Knowing the truth, what’s real from what’s fake, should be easy. In today’s world, that’s far from the case. In The Certainty Illusion, Timothy Caulfield lifts the...

Entropy is one of the most profound and misunderstood concepts in modern science — at once a physical quantity, a measure of uncertainty, and a metaphor for the passage of time itself. Entropy: The Order of Disorder explores this concept in its full philosophical and scientific depth, tracing its evolution from the thermodynamics of Clausius and Boltzmann to the cosmology of the expanding universe, the information theory of Shannon, and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

What if the universe is not made of matter? What if reality is built from something deeper — information? For centuries, humanity believed the universe was made from tiny pieces of physical substance: atoms, particles, and energy. But across history, some of the greatest thinkers have suspected something far stranger. Reality may not be made of matter at all. It may be made of patterns, mathematics, and information. In The Secret History of the Informational Universe, Clayton Louis Turnage takes readers on a fascinating journey through the hidden intellectual story behind one of the most ...

Internet journalist and entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart shares his outspoken views about the liberal media machine, the federal government and how he sees that Americans everywhere are being misled. "Brash, funny, fiery, and irreverent." —Rush Limbaugh, American conservative political...

What if the universe is not made of matter… but of information? For centuries, science has attempted to explain reality in terms of particles, energy, and physical laws. Yet one profound mystery remains unsolved: Why does consciousness exist at all? In Conscious Computational Cosmology, Clayton Louis Turnage presents a bold new philosophical framework that reimagines the foundations of reality itself. Drawing from modern physics, information theory, and philosophy of mind, this book explores a revolutionary possibility: The universe may be a vast computational process unfolding within ...

Governments pay her. Criminals fear her. Nobody sees her coming. Vanessa “Michael” Munroe deals in information—expensive information—working for corporations, heads of state, private clients, and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise. Born to missionary parents in...

Intellectual History for Modern Life: How Major Ideas from Philosophy, Science, and Culture Continue to Shape Contemporary Thinking BOOK 6: Information, Technology, and the Future of Thought: How Media, Data, and Artificial Intelligence Are Reshaping Human Thinking explores one of the most important intellectual shifts of the modern era: how the tools we use to store, share, and process information are changing the way human beings think. From the earliest forms of communication to artificial intelligence systems that now generate language and make decisions, this book traces the deep ...