Welcome to Philaxiom, the blog+ of Bruce R. Long. The + is for the free encyclopedia, which is currently very empty and more like a dictionary, but a work in gradual progress nonetheless. I am a postgraduate researcher in the Philosophy Department at The University of Sydney, specialising in the philosophy of information theory (generally known as the philosophy of information). My other interests include the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, cognitive science and the philosophy of science (especially the philsoophy of physics and quantum information theory).  I completed my Honours in philosophy in 2008 (Shannon and Dretske: Information Theory and Philosophy), and an MPhil in English (Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction) in 2009-10. In 1996 I completed my B App. Sc. in Computing, and I worked for several years in various software engineering and systems development roles in the IT industry. While an undergraduate, I tutored database theory, software development lifecycles and database applications at The University of Western Sydney from 2003 until 2008 when I stopped to focus on my thesis work. I still dabble in software engineering as a hobby and part of my research. The content management system that supports this Web site was developed using MS Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET Framework v3.5 and MS SQL Server 2008. The site exhibits the basics of heterogeneous information sources. There is XML content, RSS feed content, filesystem content, and content extracted via structured query language from a relational database which uses foreign keys and data normalistion for consistency and data integrity. The back end was coded in C#. The rest of the time I spend with my three children Christopher(11), Katya(9) and Jesse(6).

Please send any enquiries regarding the philosophy of information and information theory to bruce.long@arts.usyd.edu.au. Send requests to contribute to the encyclopedia to editor@philaxiom.info

Current PhD Abstract:

This abstract may change in future. I have only just completed my first year.

One of the most persistent problems in information theory and the philosophy of information is that of determining what information is. Some theorists have asserted that established widely different conceptions of information are so prolific that any attempt to answer the problem – to provide either a unifying or a reductive metaphysical conception of information - is ill-conceived (Shannon[2], Floridi[3,6]). However, such pluralism about information is often accompanied by unifying conceptions of information (Floridi[1,3,4,5,6]). Often these involve reducing information to some basic ontological or conceptual element. The intuition that information must be something in particular, or be reducible to something in particular, is a strong intuition for good reasons. Cognitive agents treat many different things in a uniform way as containing and supplying information. We should suspect there is some element common among them that constitutes information itself. Love letters, mathematical proofs, babies crying, the wind on our face: we regard them all as embodying and conveying information. Moreover, we take it that DNA contains information, that comets carry information, and that scientific instruments extract information from nature and represent it to us. It is valid to theorise that instances of information either are, or reduce to instances of, some particular kind of thing. I will consider five main categories of theories of information: mathematical and logical, semantic, epistemic or subjectivist, physicalist, and Platonist. I will demonstrate internal inconsistencies and problems with the conception and ontology of information in each prominent theory. Along the way I will respond with alternatives. In the end I will develop and defend a reductive theory belonging in the physicalist category. Importantly, there is significant definitional and conceptual overlap between theories within and between the abovementioned categories. For example, most semantic information theories are also mathematical theories. Mathematical and logical theories define information according to various mathematical (especially statistical) measures of physical dynamical processes, or of descriptions of such processes, or of messages or signals produced by dynamical processes (Shannon, Kolmogorov[1], Dretske[3], Grunwald and Vitanyi[2], Adriaans[1], Kåhre[1]). Such theories are often not clear about what information is. They usually identify it with the definition and value of the measure. Semantic theories are generally developed to add a conception of the meaning of information which is taken to be lacking in some way in mathematical theories (Carnap and Bar-Hillel, Dretske[3], Devlin, Floridi[6,7], Weaver). Most semantic theories see information as somehow having meaning by either corresponding or referring in some way to facts or real entities (Dretske[3], Carnap, Floridi[3,4,5,6], Devlin). Still stronger forms of semantic theories stipulate that information is meaning (Fodor). Subjectivist theories – which are generally also semantic theories - see the information associated with something as subjectively determined by a cognitive agent- percipient's perception and knowledge of that thing (Dretske[1,3,4]). Physicalist theories of information are common in computer science and especially quantum information theory. Information on these theories can only exist within physical representations and physical entities (Landauer and Bennett, Di Vincenzo and Loss). Platonist conceptions of information generally oppose physicalist conceptions and regard that information is abstract and/or reduces to abstract relations (Floridi[1,3,4]). My conclusions are that information exists apart from cognitive agents (contra subjectivism), that information is in fact a natural kind because actual information is necessarily inseparable from spatiotemporal structure (physicalism), that there is thus no such thing as abstract information even if abstract entities are real (against platonism), and that all types of information ultimately reduce to 'physical information' (information intrinsic to spatiotemporal structure.)

Partial Bibliography