Can Informational Realism Help Sort Out the Mind–Body Problem?
Quote:Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 25 of Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023), “How Informational Realism Dissolves the Mind-Body Problem” by design theorist William A. Dembski. Informational realism is also the topic of Dembski’s book, Being as Communion (Routledge, 2014) (Routledge 2014).
Quote:Informational realism does not deny the existence of things (i.e., entities or substances). But within informational realism, what defines things is their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other things. Things are inferred from the information they communicate. Information, as the relational glue that holds reality together, thus assumes primacy in informational realism. In informational realism, things make their reality felt by communicating or exchanging information. Thus, things that are not in immediate or mediate informational contact with other things might just as well not exist and so, in fact, don’t exist within informational realism. Informationally isolated or disconnected entities thereby become nonentities.
Quote:You may also wish to read: It from bit: What did John Archibald Wheeler get right—and wrong? In a chapter in a forthcoming book, William Dembski explores the strengths and weaknesses of Wheeler’s perspective that the universe is, at bottom, information. Dembski agrees that the universe is, at bottom, information but proposes “informational realism” as a sounder approach to unpacking the idea.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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