The Nature of Information
Mind, consciousness, and the fundamental creative force in the universe are mass-energy forms
of a wholly mass-energy, space-time continuum. That is the central premise of my book,
THE NATURE OF INFORMATION (Praeger/Greenwood). The book proposes a revolutionary
theory of information as a wholly mass-energy process, enabling the fundamental
universal creative force or mechanism, and mind and consciousness, to be understood as entirely
mass-energy phenomena. This eliminates, conceptually, the so-called mind-body or brain-mind problem,
and describes a material universe that embodies its own immanent creative and control
mechanisms, obviating the need for any metaphysical or supernatural force to explain them.
Although modern science describes the universe as a mass-energy system, and the objects and
events that comprise it as mass-energy phenomena, it utilizes the abstract term "information"
extensively to characterize not only a broad range of physical, chemical and biological processes,
but also mind, consciousness and mental events, despite the lack of a general definition of
information valid for all its uses. THE NATURE OF INFORMATION provides such a definition,
resulting not only in identification of the fundamental creative and control mechanism immanent in
the universe by which mass-energy systems generate and regulate their organization and
behavior, but the natural unification of matter and mind.
THE NATURE OF INFORMATION traces the evolution of the term "information" from its general
linguistic use into the mainstream of modern science, proposing an entirely new definition of
information as a mass-energy phenomenon. It demonstrates that information is in all cases a form
phenomenon, both form and information are mass-energy, rather than abstract, phenomena, mind
can be viewed as a mass-energy form-manipulating process, and form constitutes a mechanism
immanent in the physical universe via which mass-energy systems can communicate
informationally and control their own energetic activities.
The universe as a total mass-energy system will be seen to be able to exercise its creative, control
and communicative functions by manipulating forms of itself (e.g., structures, patterns,
arrangements, etc.), many of which remain constant over multiple inward and outward mass-
energy flows, enabling us to view ourselves, finally, as forms of a self-organizing, self-regulating,
mass-energy universe, joined to the rest of the world in a natural and fundamental way. As
physicist Victor Weisskopf put it, "Nature, in the form of man, begins to recognize itself." The
Nature of Information. p. x.
The review of the book by the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 68. No. 2) reads, in part:
"Mind, self-consciousness, and other such obstreperous rebels against the creeping materialist
hegemony are cajoled into peaceful co-existence with science, by turning them into sophisticated
patterns of flow of form...The doctrine that...mind is just matter is taken not as demeaning mind,
but as ennobling matter...Materialism takes on the mantle of evangelical deep ecology."
This revolutionary work on understanding information flow as an entirely mass-energy process will
prove invaluable to a wide range of scholars in the physical, chemical, biological, cognitive and
social sciences, as well as the humanities, and be of particular significance to information theorists,
philosophers of science, philosophers of mind, and all those interested in understanding the
universe, including mind and consciousness, as a total mass-energy system.
The book is available at www.abc-clio.com and at Amazon.com. It also is available at many
university libraries, including those at Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Columbia,
Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, and Oxford, as well as a number of regional public libraries.
To see a complete list, click on LIBRARIES. To read selections from the book, click on SELECTIONS.
Copyright (c) 2013 by Paul Young
