Whoever speaks of an information field today usually means one of two things: either an esoteric concept in which the cosmos functions as a sort of cosmic database, or a technical model in which consciousness is reduced to information processing. Both readings miss what is philosophically at stake. The one mystifies information; the other de-souls it. What lies between them is an older and deeper question: how does the cosmos communicate itself to the human being?
#The Concept Between Esotericism and Computer Science
Rupert Sheldrake popularised the idea, with his morphogenetic fields, that forms and behaviours are transmitted not only genetically but through a supra-individual field. Ervin Laszlo speaks of the Akashic field as a cosmic memory. David Bohm designed the implicate order as a physical model in which meaning and matter are not separated. All three share the attempt to think non-local connections that elude causal-mechanical explanation.
On the other side stands the information paradigm of computer science and recent philosophy of consciousness. Here information is treated as a fundamental category: consciousness arises through information processing, communication is data exchange, the cosmos can be described as a computational structure. Joscha Bach stated this position consistently in the Everlast AI Debate (2026): what we call consciousness is ultimately the information processing of a system that becomes aware of its own states.
#Why Information Is Not Enough
Gwendolin Kirchhoff rejects both truncations. She refuses the attribution that the cosmos is a machine because the machine lacks precisely those qualities the human being immediately perceives: aliveness and consciousness (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate). Information in the computational sense operates with discrete units that can be stored, copied, and transmitted. What is lost in this process is everything that cannot be digitised: the mood of a room, the atmosphere of an encounter, the quality of a moment.
A mother who recognises her child’s cry among a hundred others is not processing data. She perceives a quality that addresses itself to no measuring instrument. The fact that neuroscientists can decompose this perception into neural correlates does not explain why it feels a particular way to hear that cry. Experiential quality remains a blank in the information model. Whoever reduces everything to data processing incurs precisely the problem that David Chalmers formulated as the Hard Problem of Consciousness: even a complete description of information flows does not explain why subjective experience exists.
#Schelling’s World-Soul: The Cosmos as Communicating
What Schelling designed in Von der Weltseele (1798) was something other than an information field in today’s sense. For him, nature is not a storage medium and not a computing engine but a pervasively ensouled organism in which every force answers to a counter-force. The world-soul is the organising principle through which all that is living stands in an inner connection. The inorganic, on Schelling’s thesis, is only the negated organic; the dead is only repressed life.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) radicalised this position. In Was die Erde will (1998) he formulated the ontological thesis that life arises without exception only from life, never from the dead. If the cosmos is alive, then it also communicates. Nature is something alive in its own right. As something alive in its own right, the human being can enter into communication with it, and then it answers (cf. Kirchhoff, J., passim in the Gwendolin-Jochen conversations, 2019-2025). This is not a mystical addendum to natural science but a foundational ontological decision: either what we perceive is an epiphenomenon of dead matter, or it is participation in something living.
#Qualities Instead of Data
What Gwendolin Kirchhoff called “information field” in the debate with Joscha Bach means the experiential space in which the human being perceives qualitative connections. There are intuitive feats of transgression in the mind that AI cannot perform, because it recombines what already exists but does not carry out the inner seeing that allowed Nikola Tesla to literally behold his rotating magnetic field before he built it (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate). The capacity to inwardly see what does not yet exist is not a computational operation. It presupposes that the human being has access to a dimension that communicates itself qualitatively.
Schopenhauer described this access as a subterranean passage, a secret connection, that places the human being by betrayal within the fortress that cannot be taken from without (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1819). Natural science stands outside and measures. The philosophically perceiving person finds a way inward because they are themselves part of what they know. Like is known only by like, as Schelling formulated: whoever is alive recognises the living.
This has consequences for what can be understood by a field. The field spoken of here does not consist of storable information. It consists of experienceable quality: the heaviness or lightness of a space, the rightness or wrongness of a situation, what another person radiates without putting it into words. What Jochen Kirchhoff called the space-organ is precisely the capacity to perceive these qualities — an inner organ of perception for the living.
#The Repressed Question Behind the Concept
That the term “information field” has become so influential — in esotericism as in computer science — points to a longing it cannot itself fulfil. The human being senses that a connection exists that transcends what can be mechanically explained. Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, Laszlo’s Akashic field, Bohm’s implicate order are attempts to name this connection. They come closer to the matter than reductive materialism does, yet they remain within its framework insofar as they treat “information” as a neutral, quasi-physical substance. Information here is still something that can be possessed, stored, and processed.
Natural philosophy in the tradition of Schelling and Kirchhoff thinks the connection differently. The cosmos communicates itself not through data but through its own aliveness, which resonates in the human being when they open themselves to it. The Cosmic Anthropos is the thought that the human being need not first produce this openness but that it corresponds to their nature as part of the living whole. The real information field is not a field alongside reality. It is reality itself, experienced as a communicating whole.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach [video].
Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie [video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-jL1EER5Q.
Kirchhoff, J. (2023). Leben mit der Weltseele [video]. Pantheismus TV, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uViHZauN5o.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.