There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy
A Growing Problem for Materialists
by Sea Breeze 70 Replies latest social current
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TD
With respect, Seabreeze, you're still bouncing back and forth between abstract and specific definitions of information.
When my cat knocks a drinking glass off the counter and it shatters on the tile floor in the kitchen, the auditory wave striking my eardrums is, in a sense, information.
But that is not information in the sense of the encoding of thought. It was an accident, where purely natural forces took over.
Similarly, when physicists quibble over the difference between a matter wave and an information wave, they're not saying what you seem to think they're saying.
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slimboyfat
Information can be stored in lots of ways. I forget which people (was it the Inca?) recorded information by tying knots in strings. Usually we wouldn’t think of strings with knots in them as information, and usually it’s not, but in this context it is information.
Theoretically you could take a string from this culture and compare it with a string from a different context which just so happens to have the same pattern of knots. What makes one string information, and the other identical piece of string not information? It seems there is nothing about the string itself that makes it information or not information. How we interpret it, and whether it reasonably correlates with what was intended, may influence whether we regard it as information.
What if we can’t understand it? Take the example of undeciphered texts such as the Voynich manuscript. Does it contain information? Some think it does and others think it doesn’t. In this case the difference seems to come down to whether the text represents a language that was understandable to the author of the text. Even if we never discover the meaning of the text, there seems to be an assumption that the text still contains information so long as it contains a message that is in principle decipherable, even if it is never actually deciphered.
Is DNA information? I don’t think the answer is easy or straightforward. Related questions that might need to be resolved at the same time is whether there was intentionality behind it, and whether we as humans are supposed to understand the purpose and function of the information DNA contains.
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Mr.Finkelstein
Seabreeze is postulating that information came first before the material world came to be.
How does he support and originate that suggestion should be easy to understand in how and where ............ "WORD"
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Sea Breeze
When my cat knocks a drinking glass off the counter and it shatters on the tile floor in the kitchen, the auditory wave striking my eardrums is, in a sense, information.
Exactly.... and you can backtrack the cause and effect sequence back to the mind of your cat that chose to jump on your end table. Still came from a mind (the cat), even though the information is mostly rudimentary interpretation in the mind of the recipient.
DNA instruction on the other hand is a very complex code that contains instructions about future events (event planning) . This is similar to the double slit experiment which seems to dematerialize objects and reintegrate the atoms again under certain potential conditions.Regardless, the point of the post is that information in itself isn't a material thing. Yet, science is forcing materialists to grapple with the immaterial in order to explain the material.
This has historically been off limits to materialists. But the boundaries of materialism aren't so clear anymore when faced with the reality of information probability waves being fundamental to matter.“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
― Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers -
stavro
After Watson and Crick, we know that genes themselves, within their minute internal structure, are long strings of pure digital information. What is more, they are truly digital, in the full and strong sense of computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense of the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code, with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal. . . .
Our genetic system, which is the universal system of all life on the planet, is digital to the core. With word-for-word accuracy, you could encode the whole of the New Testament in those parts of the human genome that are at present filled with “junk” DNA – that is, DNA not used, at least in the ordinary way, by the body. Every cell in your body contains the equivalent of forty-six immense data tapes, reeling off digital characters via numerous reading heads working simultaneously. In every cell, these tapes – the chromosomes – contain the same information, but the reading heads in different kinds of cells seek out different parts of the database for their own specialist purposes. . . .
Genes are pure information – information that can be encoded, recoded and decoded, without any degradation or change of meaning. Pure information can be copied and, since it is digital information, the fidelity of the copying can be immense. DNA characters are copied with an accuracy that rivals anything modern engineers can do.
Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, 16-19
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Anony Mous
@SeaBreeze you are confusing information as we understand it (bits and bytes, words etc) with what information actually is - energy.
Energy doesn't have to be organized (think of a controlled explosion) to create something that is (what we perceive to be) useful. Energy is only useful, because we believe it is useful, but the Universe doesn't know, not even an ant really cares, what we think is useful.
We only know we are here because we can perceive these things, not the other way around, causation only goes in one direction, yes you can rewind, but not without knowing the state of the entire universe(s) at any point in time and thus our state being outside these universe(s).
Once you understand that any 'god' would have to be outside this universe, would you understand the impossibility of a 'god' as a generator of energy. We know this as this 'god' that creates the energy (or information, whatever you'd like to call it) would have to obey the laws of this universe once it enters into it to affect it, and thus becomes a part of the causality, that is what it means to collapse the waveform after all since you cannot interact with the waveform without collapsing it.
It's a bit hard to understand if you are primed to see a god in all this, but basically, a god with a destined goal would violate the laws of thermodynamics to generate the universe as no energy/information can be generated, only transformed and our Universe really does add up to zero energy, which is very simplistically implied by Newton's 3rd law.
Say we take your god-person and he conforms to Newton's laws, then where did that god-person get or create the energy to begin with? At least with a zero-sum Universe where every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you don't need to explain the god-person at all, he's just a zero-sum added complexity.
PS: I do know that Newton's Third Law doesn't exactly apply at these scales, but is a simplified case of Einstein's theories on relativity.
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TD
Seabreeze
We could just as easily replace the cat with a gust of wind from an open window....
In neither case is the shattering of glass information in the sense that language, codes, cyphers, hieroglyphics, paintings, pictograms. knotted strings, story sticks and all other products of intelligent minds are.
When physicists speak of an information wave vs a matter waved, they're talking about theoretical states at the quantum level. Neither is information in the specific sense above, which we reserve to describe the transmission of thought.
We could, I suppose, argue that the molecular arrangement of carbon in your example is the information contained in the wave, but that doesn't really get us anywhere, as it's simply a circular prior assumption of the intelligent design of carbon.
DNA comes a little closer to making your point because there's no question that the instructions to encode proteins are in a sense, information, but it's also equally true that were talking about biochemical reactions that happen all on their own even in the most primitive forms of life
Resolving that question would require us to go back to the source of life itself, which is the million dollar question and what the whole debate is about.
--Interesting patio conversation over a beer, but not a question that can be resolved with a magic bullet.
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Mr.Finkelstein
...and on the 7th day mankind rested from telling how the universe came to be, for he knew that there would be more stories to tell.