It seems that philosophy has remained stuck on the question of language, unable to integrate the concept of information except to offer a superficial critique of its triviality. This is all the more unfortunate given that it is therefore incapable of thinking about our current reality, which is precisely that of the information age. However, this article is not about current events, news reports, communication, or networks, but rather about considerations that may seem much more outdated regarding the very concept of information as it has manifested itself in the digital and computerized world. Both science and lifestyles have been profoundly affected by this, without philosophers seeming to be particularly concerned, except for vain and completely useless moral condemnations, when it is their categories that should be shaken up.
This is what we will try to show by examining what connects information and purpose, as well as what separates the sender from the receiver, information from fact, software from hardware, and the fundamental dualism of body and mind that cuts us off from immediate presence but should allow us to establish a true spiritual materialism. This could renew the meaning of life as uncertainty about the future, without which there is no information of value. It would be reckless to try to draw any political conclusions from such general premises, but we could nevertheless derive from this seemingly thin basis an ethic of reaction and correction of our mistakes, or at least shed new light on older questions.
First, we need to understand what links the concept of information to a purpose without which it has no meaning. Intentionality filters and organizes data, noesis structures the noema (“we only hear what we expect to hear,” the rest is just noise). The relevance of information, without which it has no informational value, depends on our degrees of freedom, our ability to react in order to achieve its goal, which can be defined as a reversal of natural entropy (negentropy), since it is a matter of not letting things happen. Similarly, at the level of the physical signal, information is defined as the opposite of entropy, an improbable salience that stands out from the background noise. Information is mediation that only makes sense in the action it guides (the difference that makes the difference). Like affect, information is a function of our capacity to act.
The purpose, or intentionality, that gives value to information aims at an effect that can only be repetition, a memory of the past. Purpose as a product of reproduction is the condition for information, life, and freedom, which are inseparable. This temporal reversal of an effect that becomes a cause through the grace of hindsight and memory is necessary for information to become an event, for us to experience the temporality of life and evolution, as well as history (information is time itself, the event in its temporality, what happens and to which we must react).
As a result, and this is the other “well-known” point, but one whose full significance is not fully appreciated, information creates a new dimension such as cyberspace, which does not belong to Euclidean space, the division between thought and extension, which is also their interpenetration and which marks the separation between the psychic and the somatic, as between the living and the dead, a biosphere agitated in the midst of a dreary space. It is moreover because information and life are inseparable from active purposes that nature, in Euclidean space this time, is the site of conflicts between opposing purposes, in contrast to the indifference of physical forces, which have a cause but no purpose and are never mistaken (information, like life, is capable of error, cf. Canguilhem).
Information and cybernetics have a bad reputation, to say the least. There is no shortage of heated and repetitive criticism of their binary logic and control systems, which seem to reduce us to the status of ants in an inhuman Metropolis, if not the world of programmed illusions in The Matrix! Yet we did not wait for the modern world to play with religious illusions and enslave peoples. Cybernetics, which was simply intended to be the science of the means to achieve ends and of governance, was instead built on the fact that not everything could be programmed and on the mechanisms of living organisms (feedback, feedback loops, error correction) to compensate for this, guided by the perception of reality to achieve its ends according to the thermostat principle, where the effect becomes the cause. Cybernetics merely imitated living organisms or generalized their mechanisms to all goal-oriented systems, with goal-oriented management based on results, which is a kind of new discourse on method applied to action and which has undoubtedly proven its worth, despite equally undeniable abuses. This allows us to understand information through its role in a system of which it is only one element, having no meaning in itself but becoming essential only in relation to the end goal. Of course, it all depends on the purpose for which we organize ourselves, but we must not confuse principles with their more or less dogmatic or perverse application (information has a cost and evaluation can be counterproductive). However, it cannot be said that it was its critics who defeated its promising beginnings, but rather its excesses, which quickly led to a “second-order cybernetics” that was more suspicious of the notion of systems and left more room for self-organization, which was a real step forward. However, this eventually took over, with vague concepts such as emergence effectively suppressing any effective organization, as well as much of the early thinking behind systems theory, which was considered obsolete. This did not prevent the principles of cybernetics from flourishing in reality (economic or technical), but it did at least justify their abandonment in theory. It is no coincidence that at the same time, self-organization became the magic alibi of neoliberalism to defend market self-regulation, the limitations of which we have all seen. By neglecting the system too much, we provoke systemic crises!
We need to return to what was the first serious attempt at what might be called spiritual materialism, the only rational concept of the mind (which does not deny it) and its connection to the body (how the immaterial mind can control a material body), based on the ontological difference between data and its material support (between the memory address and its content). Indeed, more than language, which is unique to our species, it is information that can form the basis of a materialism that can be called spiritual in that it accounts for the incarnation of the mind in a body and the introduction of finality into the chain of causes. Of course, this is not to reduce the richness of human experience and thought; there is always a need to complicate the picture further, not to remain with the most primitive organisms or simple automatisms. But here we have the seeds of a materialist understanding of life and thought that was lacking in previous thinkers, including Marxists. On the one hand, we have more or less mystical conceptions assuring us of a divine essence that is completely different from animals, and on the other, an implacable determinism that reduces us to automatons, devoid of any freedom or thought. The challenge is to preserve both the material world and the world of information. Just because the first cyberneticists were poor philosophers or had to proceed somewhat blindly does not mean that we should not return to the task with greater subtlety and caution. It is time to move away from these symmetrical errors in their unilateralism and become aware of the implications of this information that is so pervasive and yet so poorly understood, promising us in any case to focus on bad news rather than good news (we're not talking about trains that arrive on time!).
The concept of information may be older, but it only took on its current meaning in the 1920s and 1930s with statistics and, above all, information theory, which broke away from signal theory (notably through error correction), as well as the discovery of homeostasis ensured by feedback loops, all of this shortly before the dawn of computer science and the discovery of DNA. Since then, philosophy does not seem to have taken a serious interest in this new concept, which it has tended to reject with contempt, like Heidegger, who saw it as a threat to thought, reducing information to calculation and quantity. This rejection of new technologies prevents us from thinking about our times, but above all from being able to pose ancient philosophical problems in a completely different way.
Of course, one could say that philosophy always repeats itself, and that computers and digital devices will not change anything. Since Plato, we have mostly just repeated, commented on, or extended what tradition has handed down to us, in science as in philosophy. Contrary to contemporary wisdom, we should admit that having a new idea is almost always just falling into a new error (especially since it seems so brilliant to us). We must not confuse information with pure invention. New ideas emerge only from experience itself (cognition is when we come up against reality). That is why it is better to study the history of philosophy and keep abreast of scientific advances. The great philosophers contradict each other less than we think; it is more a question of formulation and the new interpretations that can be made of them. So, while it is not really a question of inventing a new philosophy, it is at least a question of integrating the discoveries of the times into philosophy, which it does belatedly, as we know only too well, but which provides an opportunity to see history in action, how the new redistributes places and reformulates questions.
After Kuhn and Foucault, René Passet showed how the economic theories of an era remained dependent on the scientific paradigm of the moment. This is striking, as earlier theories could not imagine what would only be discovered later and would enable new ways of thinking. Science influences us more than we think, and philosophy is no exception. It could even be said that what is new in philosophy is largely due to advances in science and technology. At the same time, science generally benefits from philosophical clarification, which is lacking when it comes to information, which is used in all sorts of ways (particularly in physics). It turns out that we have been undergoing a paradigm shift for some time now, not only with computer science but also with theories of chaos, complexity, and imperfect information, in the same vein as quantum physics in relation to Newtonian mechanics, and giving rise to just as much wild speculation. It is not certain that the philosophies in vogue have realized this.
There was indeed a linguistic moment in philosophy, whose basis was relatively narrow, but this did not prevent the work of appropriating the laws of language (from phonology to kinship structures) from being as useful as it was fruitful, despite its excesses. In the same way, with a base that is undoubtedly just as limited but just as decisive, it would be necessary to have a philosophy of information for the digital age, synthesizing philosophies of life and philosophies of language (between existentialism and structuralism). One might legitimately ask what is the point of focusing on what appears to be a regression from language, which better characterizes our humanity, a regression to biology in its simplest forms, or even to automatons. However, the scope of information is all the greater because it is a more fundamental concept that renews ontology in its temporality (information is as general a concept as that of being).
I had already outlined the philosophical implications of the concept of information in my book “Le monde de l'information” (The World of Information) and in “L'improbable miracle d'exister” (The Improbable Miracle of Existence), and if I am returning to it, it is not because I have so much to add, but only because the absence of this concept of information seems to me to perpetuate a whole series of metaphysical errors that we are still burdened with, particularly regarding consciousness or a mind that we should no longer be able to think of as floating above the waters, when the mind is nothing more than the capacity of a body to learn and react. One of the symptoms of this failure to take information into account can be found in the vogue for a retrograde Spinozism that has been spreading for some time now, becoming the dominant philosophy for those who want simple answers devoid of dialectic, a philosophy for high school seniors, one might say, if it weren't also the natural philosophy of scientists. The idea that the mind is nothing but the reverse side of the body makes no sense in a universe of signs that communicate by detaching themselves from their materiality. The very idea of what a body is should be radically transformed.
It is not a question of sticking to a physical conception of information (such as that of Simondon, for example). In-formation is not giving shape to a brick, but only perceiving it, internalizing it, and possibly reacting to it. It is a cognitive and active process. We must maintain the dualism between mind and body, vision and the object seen, between information and its medium, software and hardware. This does not prevent there also being a certain unity between electronics and programs, intertwined as in living bodies, both being fundamentally different in their mode of existence and interdependent. This psychosomatic entanglement, this heterogeneous and interdependent compound, is the only way to recognize the reality of a thinking and sentient soul that is not a mere epiphenomenon, while remaining utterly materialistic (the materiality of the digital and of an immaterial that imposes itself materially). The concept of information allows us to think more rigorously about this dualism of consciousness and its object, of perception and the perceived, of the transmitter and the receiver. It is this prior dualism that allows us to speak of spiritual materialism when they are combined, because although there is no information without a material medium, it is not to be confused with it, only taking on meaning through what concerns us or through a program that knows what to do with it.
We must be convinced that there is no information in itself. One could even say that there is no information outside of living beings if we had not built machines that extend our abilities by being capable of memory, logic, and conditional reaction. What constitutes information as such is answering our questions or concerns, an anti-entropic function that is another way, this time more direct, of opposing the biological to the physical. It is through this opposition to the world, which is also adaptation to the world, that information takes on meaning in an evolution that is ultimately cognitive, caught up in a dialectic where prior knowledge is confronted with present experience and changes experienced over time (because there are several temporalities, with the long term triumphing over the short term only in terms of duration).
Information is therefore not as simple as it seems, and the materialism that is claimed is profoundly transformed by the mediation of information. It is a materialism that is not only active but also biologizing, which can no longer neglect emotion (psycho-sociology), any more than our limited rationality, as if ecological or sociological causality were mechanical (perfect and calculable) when it must pass through the mediation of information from individuals and groups. The world of information is a world of hearsay where representation never quite corresponds to reality, but this does not prevent the world from existing for us as an exteriority that is beyond doubt, and we live in this world, in the experience we have of it, which is imposed on us by the information we receive. Such is our experience, where the apparatus of perception fades behind what is perceived. It is not only the material world that imposes itself on us in its objectivity; the world of signs and, for us, that of culture or institutions, impose themselves just as much. In reality, we are caught up in discourses with their own logic and preconceptions, in a daily repetition and collective processes where there is no doubt about what to do or say. This goes far beyond simple information, but pheromones can be just as imperative and objective for insects. In any case, we remain within the strict separation of subject and object mediated by a code, a grid of interpretation, a map that is not the territory but presents itself as such.
It must be made very clear that this is not at all about reducing everything to information, which is specific to living beings and their reproduction, because, for us, being-speaking beings is superimposed on language, which is something else entirely. There are therefore two distinct parts, although they share many characteristics: a philosophy of information, which is a philosophy of life or of the digital, and a philosophy of language based on narrative language (storytelling), which is a philosophy of culture and conscious existence between the past and the future. In this case, we are no longer dealing with a transmitter-receiver but with responsible interlocutors, a speaking being and a listener (a writer and their readers), which introduces a third dimension: the Other, truth, and history. This is what makes it absurd to want to reduce everything to the brain, forgetting that it is the organ of exteriority and the senses, forgetting language, the gaze of the Other, the dominant ideology, the truths of the day, and the very real processes (material, technical, social, economic, historical) that organize consciousness and its cognitive reflexes. These cannot, however, be too disconnected from material reality and purely manipulative. The subject of perception is little more than memory, the result of learning, whereas it is other speaking beings who shape us and give us a social role, an identity, a soul that we will not necessarily find within ourselves. However, we cannot reduce everything to language, and while we must avoid reductionism, we must also think in the simplest and most universal terms.
Of course, a philosophy of information cannot lead to any kind of wisdom, but at most to a shift in ethics. In any case, it can be said that philosophy itself already has its own ethics, an ethics linked to language and even to public speech. It is therefore not surprising to find the essentials of this in the philosophies of language, communication, and information, which overlap in part without being truly comparable. Unlike philosophies, wisdoms are normative, like psychology, they claim to heal the ills of the soul through a discipline of the body aimed at an absence of thought and indifference to the world (ataraxia), closing themselves off to information (which is indeed disturbing). It is understandable that a philosophy of information might object to these therapeutic practices, but just as philosophy has always done, it does not seek to repress problems or empty the mind, but starts from the fact that we think and speak and that we can become aware of this, and therefore also aware of our ignorance and actual contradictions, false assumptions, or self-deception. Not only awareness, but also the expression of the negative, as opposed to positive thinking and self-suggestion. The only morality of philosophy, characterized by public discourse and rejecting all secret initiation, is to cancel out what cancels itself out and keep only a reason that does not contradict itself, a demand for authenticity. It is the good faith of Zarathustra (the real one, not Nietzsche's) against the bad faith of Sartre, if you will. Up to this point, we would remain at the level of information that could always be misleading if it were not also a matter of self-awareness (know thyself, which means first of all, know your ignorance), through which the moral dimension of philosophy is introduced, which lies in the awareness of one's relationship to others. Acting conscientiously means demonstrating a consciousness that is effectively moral in its ability to distinguish between good and evil, that is, between what can be publicly (universally) supported and what cannot. A philosophy of information cannot go that far, but one of the few things it can add to a philosophy of communication or language, with which it shares the question of falsification, is the anti-entropic function of information (“the crooked stick wants to be straightened,” claimed Ernst Bloch) and therefore also the question of limits or regulations.
We can all agree that information is not enough to establish ethics and that we need to incorporate the negative, desire, and the unconscious, which complicates things quite a bit... All this to say that it is by no means a question of reducing everything to a series of zeros and ones, disregarding human richness and intellectual history. Contrary to the claim that information can explain everything, we must instead start from the fact that, despite the saturation of useless information, we still lack information! This initial ignorance, without which information would have no meaning, is precisely what makes a philosophy of information a philosophy of freedom, in that we need additional information to make decisions. Without this element of ignorance, we would effectively be nothing more than automatons. What prevents us from claiming that we are entirely determined by our origins or interests is precisely that we do not know what to do and that we have conflicts of conscience! It is our anxiety and lack of information that awakens all our senses and defines consciousness for Laborit (which is therefore not a flow at all). To this freedom of thought, paradoxically given by our limited rationality, we must add, as we have seen, the freedom to deceive, since information is not the thing itself. Of course, the freedom to lie is inseparable from language and our responsibility towards others. Much of our moral “responsibility” can be attributed to the reciprocity of interlocutors, except that information also plays a decisive role in our responsibility, particularly for ecological threats that we only know about through the information we have been able to obtain and whose relevance, urgency, and possible remedies we must evaluate. Because it is linked to a purpose and to our capacity for action, we could derive from information (and not from communication or language) a kind of obligation to react, not to remain passive. We know at least that the more complex the information to be processed, the greater the autonomy required of the actors. There are other properties of information that could have been mentioned, such as its non-linearity, which distinguishes it from the proportionality of physical forces and deserves more attention in a digital economy.
These are just a few of the contributions of a philosophy of information that could change our view of the world, but becoming aware of information always means trying to become aware of ourselves, of who we are. The digital age is very instructive in this respect, radically changing perspectives, because while information cannot be reduced to computer science, the latter has shed light on its biological role and the question of consciousness. Ultimately, Heidegger was right to fear the concept of information, which effectively reduces to nothing the obscurantist side of his history of Being, just as it renders the very idea of nature inconsistent. We would like to contrast the cold world of information with animal flesh covered in hair, or even smells, which are nothing more than information that captures us and triggers a whole series of reactions within us. The peacock and the skunk show how much the animal world is already a world of signs.
The opprobrium heaped on information is of the same order as the condemnation of technology. It is a moral judgment that pits the good life against an inhuman life. There is the natural on one side and the artificial on the other, which can be easily illustrated, particularly in science fiction, but which is a little more complicated in reality. There is no doubt that we have many automatic responses, whether instinctive or habitual, as well as ready-made answers that can easily be confused with those of a computer. However, if artificial life is not life, it is because life is constantly evolving. The world of information is not one where every key will find its lock in the satisfaction of its natural needs; it is first and foremost a changing world. If living beings are defined by the goals they actively pursue, we cannot assign them an ultimate goal, but only to remain alert and react to the surprise of information, which is more a matter of learning and play than of a supposed enjoyment of being in its presence or a desire that has been satisfied. In the harsh light of information, it is no longer tenable to consider our essence as more corporeal than intellectual and devoid of anything negative, a nostalgia for the unity of a religious vision of life where all information would be superfluous to a life already lived and simply in accordance with its destiny. In doing so, we forget not only the divine gaze that is supposed to give the world a univocal meaning (onto-theology), but above all the extent of our ignorance in the face of what happens to us and mobilizes all our attention. Indeed, what information undoubtedly teaches us is that life is inseparable from the uncertainty of the future, which is always under construction, that life is evolution and change. It is undoubtedly for the same reason that a human life outside of history would be very boring, without the obligation to choose sides, without truth at stake. Under these conditions, it is impossible to claim to have the last word, but it is right to add to the fundamental concepts of philosophy this little word “information,” which seems so insignificant but on which our lives depend more than we realize.
