This page collects English-language preprints and related research materials by Noman Lee. These essays are part of the broader Information Philosophy Project, which develops a philosophical framework connecting Bergson, information theory, memory, artificial intelligence, quantum physics, and ontology.
First Wave: Information Philosophy and Generative Logic
Generative Logic
An Essay on Bergson, Active Inference, and the Quantum-AI Frontier
This essay proposes a “generative logic” whose basic unit is not the proposition but the leap, whose evaluative axis is not truth but fit, and whose objectivity is neither universal nor private but field-shared. It connects Bergson’s philosophy of duration and perception with active inference, artificial intelligence, and quantum-informed computation.
Memory Is Not in the Brain
Reductionism’s Self-Dissolution and the Return to Bergson
This essay argues that the question “Where is memory stored?” is ill-formed. By following neural reductionism consistently, the search for the location of memory disperses across dynamic, distributed, and reconstructive processes. The essay reads this convergence as a return, by another route, to Bergson’s non-localization thesis of memory.
Why Must Something Be Stored Somewhere?
The Hard Problem as a Symptom of Spatialized Intelligence
This essay diagnoses the hard problem of consciousness as an effect of spatialized intelligence: the tendency to treat experience as a content that must be located, produced, or added to physical processing. It proposes a Bergsonian alternative in which experience is understood as the temporal thickness of a process that endures.
Second Wave: Toward an Ontology of Absence
Information Is Subtraction
From Epistemic Coarse-Graining to an Ontology of the Cut
This essay argues that information is not something added but what remains when possibility is subtracted. It distinguishes epistemic subtraction, performed by cognizing organisms, from ontological subtraction, in which the world articulates itself through cuts prior to any observer.
The Direction of Subtraction
Duration, the Arrow of Time, and What Symmetry Leaves Behind
This essay reads the arrow of time through the operation of subtraction. Noether’s theorem and Landauer’s principle are interpreted, philosophically, as two sides of a structure in which conservation, erasure, irreversibility, and duration are related through the direction of what cannot be recovered.
Dismantling the Élan Vital
Evolution and Origin as the Updating of Modes of Forgetting
This essay revisits Bergson’s élan vital not as a vital force but as an intuition about the structured arrival of biological novelty. It connects Bergson’s question to contemporary discussions of developmental bias, variational bias, niche construction, and the origin of life.
Related Books
These essays draw on arguments developed in Lee’s Japanese-language books, including Joho Jitsuzairon Josetsu [An Introduction to Information Realism] and the forthcoming three-volume Ketsuraku no Sonzairon [Ontology of Absence].