My own metaphysics is information-based and I know I’ve made a link or two to “The Information Philosopher” site before. I didn’t know any more about the “Bob Doyle” who curates the site in terms of his own philosophical thinking (*), BUT …
… as a resource of collected links, people and publications it is mind-bogglingly huge and well organised / indexed with descriptive pages – a veritable Wikipedia of Information Philosophy. Marvellous resource – general Google search hits on relevant topics eg on “Bertalanffy and Ergodic” invariably throw up masses of hits on these pages.
[Although local installations of Google’s search engine were withdrawn a decade ago, he uses Google with his site as a constraint filter in all his links and on-site searches. Better than inbuilt blog searches I reckon. Almost certainly means all searches lead to greater Google indexing of the local content too. Neat?]
Anyway. Learning the fact that Boltzmann coined the idea of the “ergode” back in 1877 – picked-up by Gibbs (of free-energy fame) and Ehrenfest – through Wiener, Bertalanffy, Shannon et al – to chaos theory and the likes of Stuart Kaufmann, much referenced by … Karl Friston only yesterday.
Nothing new under the sun,
all roads lead to systems thinking.
(*) That is a very comprehensive “about” page. Clearly a man after mine own – very positive relationship with Dennett for example, and author in 2009 of:
Robert O. Doyle,
“Free Will: it’s a normal biological property,
not a gift or a mystery,”
Nature, 459, June 2009, p.1052.
I’ll say! And …
Free Will:
The Scandal in Philosophy.
Published in June 2011.
Exactly how I feel. The continued “mystification” of conscious will is a dreadful meme holding back so much human value.
I wonder, any relation to John C Doyle? (Otherwise may explain my earlier confusion over a Dennett / Doyle relationship?)
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[Post Notes:
Actually only made one link to Information Philosopher before. Where I primarily noted the scale of the resource, and the fact I’d come across it following up a Frank Ramsay reference. But purely coincidentally the same post, a quite important one in terms of consolidating my agenda about a year and a half ago, also includes a very positive “holding out for a hero” reference to John C Doyle.]