INFORMATION, CERTAINTY AND IDENTITY: TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF INFORMATION BEYOND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME

Abstract

This research contributes to an innovative rearticulation of the Philosophy of Information by defining it as a phenomenology of information, both in its most basic sense as a phenomenology of certainty and as a phenomenology of identity. It is argued that the ultimate condition of possibility of conscious experience is certainty, understood in terms of reflexive identity and informational coincidence, based on the Informational Singularity of Self-Consciousness (ISS) and the Principle of the Direct Relation (PDR). Contrary to the predominant conceptions that privilege uncertainty, the analysis reveals that certainty possesses an intrinsic informational value, stabilises phenomena and constitutes the basis of cognition, meaning and self-consciousness. The research also demonstrates that this phenomenology of information generalises Husserl's phenomenology of internal time-consciousness: the structures of temporality (that is, retention, protention, the living present) presuppose a prior stratum of informational identity. The correspondence between certainty and time is structurally comparable to the correspondence between predicate logic and propositional logic; certainty provides the richer structural basis for the assertion of time. Combining phenomenological, semantic and quantitative approaches, the theoretical framework offers a comprehensive solution with philosophical implications for the philosophy of mind, logic and the philosophy of information. It provides new conceptual instruments for addressing classical philosophical questions concerning identity, analyticity and the informational basis of experience.