I first thought of using the word Informationalism to describe a new social philosophy sometime in the year 2005. While I did this independently, I think it is safe to assume that such a word is bound to pop up in other instances in our information driven age. I want to focus on one such instance, which comes from a paper by a philosophy student named Damon Woolsey. A link to the paper which I will analyze can be found here. The paper, titled Informationalism, places a slightly different emphasis on the word than I do. While mine is a social philosophy, his is what I would call a philosophy proper. However, after the reader becomes familiar with the philosophy proper, it is easy to see how the social philosophy is expressible in Woolsey's terms. Let me explain:
First, I will contrast my own definition of Informationalism with Woolsey's.
Informationalism (According to Me): The belief that the primary goal of society should be to maximize the growth rate of the stock of information, while allowing all members of that society to freely and equitably access that stock.
Informationalism (According to Woolsey): "The physical and the phenomenal both supervene on the informational." (pp 2).
Perhaps the first difference that the reader will notice is that my definition is normative i.e. I am making value statements about actions, whereas the second definition is a positive and falsifiable statement.
Furthermore, since the second statement is more philosophically rigorous, the reader might benefit from my attempt at a translation. I interpret this definition of Informationalism as meaning that the material world and the world of sensation both follow from or are contained in the world of Information. It is an attempt to construct a framework where the classical split between the mind and the body is reconciled by allowing them to be expressions of the same thing; in this case information. How does this work? For a comprehensive understanding, I will encourage you to read the paper, as I am going to focus more on the "results".
First, Woolsey makes what I find to be a fairly convincing argument against the necessity of an external world of "matter", by pointing out that our common perceptions of different kinds of "stuff" is not based on some universal or external standard, but can actually be better captured by relativistic definitions that are all easily expressible logically or mathematically.
Second, he points out that our concept of time (while also relativistic) is also predicated on notions of cause and effect, which can be expressed without time as an algorithmic process. This process is really just information about how logical or mathematical definitions behave, and are called iprocesses.
Third, he also touches on the idea of an istructure, which I interpret as a set of iprocesses that are capable of perceiving and thus reacting to certain kinds of information. Woolsey uses the difference between a pile of bricks and a brick building to show the function of istructures. Essentially, any organism can be thought of as a complicated istructure that perceives and reacts to its environment in a particular way. Humans can look at the same quantity of bricks in either format, and their istructure is capable of perceiving them as a certain kind of information. However, humans have the capacity to perceive additional information implied by the organization of the bricks into a building i.e. this is a home. Other istructures won't necessarily recognize this reorganization the same way, or at all.
Finally, now that we have an Informationalist interpretation of all phenomena, Woolsey provides a general definition of reality. He does this by defining what he calls a logical possibility, which is something that contains no inherent contradiction (pp 10). And we are led down the argument that if reality consists of everything that exists, and all things that exist can actually be defined in terms of logical possibilities, then reality is just the set of all logical possibilities. We can build ourselves all the way back to istructures by noting that mathematical definitions, iprocesses, and istructures are all made up of logical possibilities.
My Comments and Critique
Woolsey emphasizes that his paper was just a foray into Informationalism, so I'm hoping to offer some additional considerations should he decide to delve deeper into it.
1. Doesn't this story sound quite a bit like what goes on inside of a computer when it is executing a program? When I think of an instructure, I think of a computer program that I can see on a sheet of paper. To me, the program alone is static. I know its function. I can see the statements and expressions (definitions and iprocesses?) and I know it can only receive subsets of all the possible forms of input of which I am aware. I perceive all of this as a whole. Yet, as the entity that executes the program, I don't perceive this timeless whole. I must execute the program in steps. Thus, perhaps our notions of the physical, phenomenal, and the temporal are artifacts of our being contained in an istructure.
2. How does the problem of Schrodinger's cat fit into the realm of logical possibilities? More specifically, the notion of quantum superposition might mean that: "Schrodinger's cat is alive; Schrodinger's cat is dead" is a logical possibility. If it is a logical possibility, then it is real, and we seem to have something real that is a contradiction?
3. Since instructures can take information as an input, and produce information as an output for other istructures. Isn't there some kind of feedback or reflexive process going on, and how might one characterize it?
Social Informationalism Reinterpreted
Assuming Woolsey is right, I think it is possible and probably beneficial to express the root cause argument behind social Informationalism in his terms. If we look at the collection of humans in society as a larger and fairly complicated istructure, we notice that it is capable of taking in vast amounts of information from other istructures and iprocesses to produce several kinds of outputs. One output that the istructure seems to produce is its modified self over time (remember that periods exist for us inside reality). I would say that living organisms in general are characterized by the fact that they tend to be persistent istructures. In other words, our istructures uses informational input to modify its own structure in order to persist, and all inputs that is receives are, in fact, informational. Not all istructures do this, for instance a Blue Giant Star doesn't seem particularly interested in making more Blue Giant Stars. Social Informationalism then is making the leap from saying that this is what humanity is and does, to this is what humanity should do.
Too Long to Read Summary: Damon Woolsey wrote an independent paper defining the term Informationalism in a positive and philosophically proper way. In this paper he makes a good argument that the material and the phenomenal world both follow from information. This information comes from the interaction of different iprocess and istructures, which are essentially algorithms made up of definitions and logical possibilities. We perceive these things as separate because we are part of them. Social Informationalism can be expressed better using his terminology when we realize that all sources of information taken in from the environment provide opportunities for modifying our position in this world to make it persistent, but choosing to do so is normative.
