Descartes' Metaphysics
René Descartes made a turn from what exists to
knowledge of what exists. He changed the emphasis from a study of
being to a study of the conditions of knowledge or
epistemology.
Descartes was the origin of the
Mind-Body Problem. He famously divided the world into mind (the ideal realm of thoughts) and body (the material world). For him, the physical world was a
deterministic machine, but our ideas and thoughts could be free (
undetermined) and could change things in the material world (through the pineal gland in the brain, he thought).
Information philosophy restores an immaterial
mind to the impoverished and deflated metaphysics that we have had since empiricism and
naturalism rejected the dualist philosophy of
René Descartes and its troublesome
mind-body problem.
Information philosophy restores the metaphysical existence of a Cartesian realm that is "beyond the natural" in the sense since at least
David Hume and
Immanuel Kant that the "laws of Nature" completely
determine everything that exists, everything that happens, everything that exists in the phenomenal and material world.
While information philosophy is a form of Descartes'
idealism/materialism dualism, it is not a
substance dualism. Information is a
physical, though immaterial,
property of matter. Information philosophy is a
property dualism.
Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.
Information is
immaterial.
It is the modern
spirit, the
ghost in the machine. It is the mind in the body. It is the soul. And when we die, our personal information and its communication perish. The matter remains.
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