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Re:A physicist argues that information is at the root of eve... by _delirium on Sunday April 25, 2010 @05:08PM (#1293540)
I don't tend to find these varieties of ontological reductionism that compelling, though it is interesting to read when people propose new ones. Sure, you can construct a coherent account of how everything really is just X for a lot of X, and everything else is merely higher-level structure on top of it. But picking the X always seems to be a bit arbitrary. Here he argues for the primacy of information; traditional materialists argued for atoms; some dynamicists argue for dynamics and state spaces; phenomenologists argue for conscious experience; Cartesian dualists argue for both atoms plus consciousness (everything reduces to those two, but neither reduces to the other); social constructionists argue for human social relations; some mathematicians argue for atoms plus math; etc.

Although I don't like everything else they write, I sort of like the manifesto of the Object-Oriented Ontologists, which is more or less that, while objects like televisions undoubtedly are made up of atoms, can be analyzed using information theory, are phenomenological entities, have a (perhaps socially constructed) role in human society etc., those are each just methods of investigating televisions, and televisions themselves "really" do exist as well: http://ooo.gatech.edu/

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