Information Philosophy Project
The Information Philosophy Project is an attempt to rethink information, memory, consciousness, life, and matter from a philosophical perspective informed by contemporary science.
Its starting point is the idea that information should not be understood merely as data, signal, or representation. Information is treated instead as a generative structure: a process by which possibility is narrowed, selected, forgotten, and actualized.
The project draws on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of memory and duration, while also engaging with contemporary discussions in information theory, quantum physics, artificial intelligence, predictive processing, active inference, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory.
Central Questions
What is information, if it is not simply something added or stored?
Is memory located in the brain, or is memory better understood as a non-localized temporal structure?
Why does consciousness appear as a “hard problem”?
Can perception be understood as generation rather than passive reception?
Can evolution be reinterpreted as the updating of modes of forgetting rather than merely the accumulation of random variation?
Can a new metaphysics be developed from the concepts of subtraction, absence, duration, and generative process?
Key Concepts
Information
Information is not treated primarily as an addition of content, but as the residue of a subtraction: what remains when a field of possibilities is narrowed.
Memory
Memory is not understood as a stored object located in the brain, but as the temporal thickness of a being that endures.
Subtraction
Subtraction names the operation by which a field of possibilities is cut into a determinate actuality.
Absence
Absence is not simple nothingness. It is the structured field of what has been excluded, forgotten, or left unrealized.
Forgetting
Forgetting is not merely failure or loss. It is the active selectivity that makes perception, action, life, and thought possible.
Generative Logic
Generative logic is a proposed logic of becoming, in which the basic unit is not the proposition but the leap from indeterminacy to determination.
Ontology of Absence
The fullest development of this project appears in Ketsuraku no Sonzairon [Ontology of Absence], a forthcoming three-volume work that develops the framework across foundations, physics, and life.