Biosophy is a neologism
Biosophy combines two Greek roots: bios (βίος, life) and sophia (σοφία, wisdom). The word therefore means, literally, the wisdom of life.
It is a neologism in the sense that it is not a term with a single settled meaning in any established discipline. The word has been coined and used independently by several thinkers across two centuries, each time with a different meaning. Biosophy at biosophy.org is one specific, technical, and computational definition of the word — distinct from all prior uses, and compatible with none of them in their original form.
Understanding what biosophy.org's Biosophy is requires understanding what it is not.
Prior uses of the word
Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler (1806)
The word was probably first used in 1806 by Troxler, a Swiss philosopher working in the tradition of Schelling's German idealism. Troxler used biosophy to mean an intuitive, holistic comprehension of vital forces — life understood through feeling and contemplation rather than through analysis. This was a Romantic and vitalist use of the word, opposed to the emerging empiricism of natural science.
Biosophy.org's Biosophy is the opposite of this. It is analytic, formal, computable, and builds on science rather than standing apart from it.
Peter Wessel Zapffe (1930s–1940s)
The Norwegian philosopher Zapffe used biology as the foundation of his philosophy of tragic human consciousness — the idea that human cognitive capacity exceeds what existence can justify. His biosophy was existentialist in character, using biological facts as the ground of a pessimistic metaphysics.
Biosophy.org's Biosophy shares the commitment that biology is philosophically foundational, but reaches the opposite conclusion about direction. Where Zapffe's biosophy finds tragedy in biological awareness, biosophy.org's Biosophy finds computation, structure, and the possibility of computable meaning.
Frederick Kettner and the Biosophical Institute (1928–1957)
Kettner, a philosopher inspired by Spinoza and Brunner, founded the Biosophical Institute in the United States and defined biosophy as "the science and art of intelligent living based on the awareness and practice of spiritual values, ethical-social principles, and character qualities essential to individual freedom and social harmony." His goal was world peace through character education and the cultivation of the spiritual nature within human beings. The institute gathered supporters including Albert Einstein, and established groups across multiple continents.
Kettner's biosophy was humanist, Spinozist, and spiritual — concerned with ethical self-development and peace. It was not computational, not biological in the scientific sense, and not concerned with information processing.
Biosophy.org's Biosophy is explicitly computational and scientific. It respects Kettner's humanist goals — life-enhancing intelligence is one of its core ethical commitments — but the frameworks share only a name and a root.
Jong Bhak's Biosophy (1995–present)
Biosophy.org's Biosophy was developed by Jong Bhak beginning in 1995 while studying at Cambridge University. Bhak defines Biosophy as a "new way of performing philosophy generated from scientific and biological awareness." The main difference of Bhak's biosophy from other philosophy is that his biosophy is a computable philosophy. It borrows Russell's logicism and extends it to a computational set of ideas and knowledge. One ultimate aim of biosophy is to construct a logical thinking machine that can do philosophy for human beings.
This definition is technically continuous with but conceptually distinct from all prior uses.
Where prior biosophies were humanist (Kettner), existentialist (Zapffe), or Romantic-idealist (Troxler), Bhak's Biosophy is:
- Scientific — grounded in biology, genomics, evolutionary theory, and computational science
- Computable — claims must be expressible as algorithms and running programs, not only as philosophical arguments
- Biological in the technical sense — not "biological" as a metaphor for life-affirming, but biological as in cells, genomes, information processing, and the actual mechanisms of living systems
- Information-theoretic — the universe is studied as an information network, with BiOs (Biological Information Objects) as the fundamental units
Why the word was reused rather than coined anew
The 2015 page noted that "many people in the past and future had/will have different definitions on the morphome of biosophy." This is correct and worth reflecting on.
The word was reused — not coined fresh — because the root meaning of bios + sophia is genuinely right for what biosophy.org's Biosophy is. The wisdom of life, understood computationally, is precisely what the framework aims to produce. No other existing term captures the combination of biological grounding, philosophical ambition, and computational method that characterizes it.
The prior uses of the word were not wrong to reach for the same roots. They were reaching for the same underlying intuition — that life contains or reveals a wisdom that philosophy should attend to — but with different methods and different conclusions. Biosophy.org's Biosophy is what that intuition produces when it is developed with 21st-century scientific and computational tools rather than with Romantic idealism, existentialism, or Spinozist humanism.
The current definition
Biosophy at biosophy.org is a scientific, biological, and computational philosophy of the universe.
Its foundations are:
- Logicism — coherent claims must be expressible in formal, logical terms
- Biologicism — biology is the proper ground of philosophy; life is the most concentrated known form of adaptive, purposive computation
- Computability — claims must be runnable, not merely statable
- The Biouniverse — the universe as organized information in process
- AWA — the informational ecosystem of Earth and the universe
- The Biogrid — the connected fabric of information-processing relationships
- BiOs — biological information objects, the basic units of the framework
- Covolution — the dynamical principle by which BiOs and their environments change together
- BioOS — the biological operating system running on living substrates
- Philosophy engines — BiOs capable of modeling the Biogrid itself
Its notation is Bios — a specification language for BiO_Loops.
Its ethics is life-enhancing intelligence — a commitment that is compatible with Kettner's humanist goals, even though the frameworks are otherwise different.
It is not a religion, not a spiritual movement, and not a belief system.
It is a research program. Its claims must become definitions, schemas, algorithms, simulations, and working software. A biosopher does not only think. A biosopher builds.
The word going forward
Because "biosophy" has prior uses, publications and communications from biosophy.org typically specify "Biosophy (biosophy.org)" when precision is needed, or refer to "Jong Bhak's Biosophy" or "computational biosophy" to distinguish the framework from Kettner's tradition, which is still represented by the Biosophical Institute.
The Wikipedia article on Biosophy acknowledges both the Kettner tradition and Bhak's computational framework as distinct uses of the same word. Biosophy.org is not in competition with the Biosophical Institute's work. They share a word and a root intuition. They are otherwise separate projects with different methods, different conclusions, and different ambitions.
댓글 0