Do Jeffrey Shallit’s writings offer more information than a blank page?

. Hi Eugene, I think Brenner's many statements in that interview are powerful in many ways. Also, to my mind, Hoshika et al have done some very interesting things, but they haven't actually increased the extant code because they have yet to establish any interpretive constraints to accommodate the additions. Those constraints aren't incidental, they are necessary. Upright BiPed

I stand corrected with respect to my comment #51. This weird response I got to a different post actually. There I was pointing to the work of American biologists who synthesized an 8-letter nucleotide alphabet. I said that this was nothing less than a POC for ID, that this suggested that there is physical indeterminacy in how translation of biological information is organized, and that whatever is created by a mind can also be reverse-engineered by a mind. The same person who responded to this post of mine, actually responded to the quote I posted in #47 above. That is why I made a mistake. To this quote, he said that the article misinforms the reader )) EugeneS

UB Interestingly, I got a response to this quote from a reader of my Russian blog. He said I was dragging in miracles into science under false pretenses. Oh, boy. BTW, I have seen Brenner's video. Very nice. EugeneS

Wow, UB. No I haven't seen it. Looking forward to watching it. Thanks! EugeneS

. ES, you've probably already seen this, but if not, you'll find it interesting: Sidney Brenner Upright BiPed

Perfect, ES Von Neumann's quiescent (non-dynamic) description, and his pondering on why the molecules of life are the sizes that they are. Thank you. Upright BiPed

A somewhat lengthy quote from David H. Ardell, Informatic Approaches for Molecular Translation, doi: 10.1007/3-540-32392-9. This quote shows that what UB says is correct. These things are already part of general knowledge.

Crucial for the remainder of our arguments is that there is a duality between the effective component, which in biological terms could be called the “soma” and the quiescent description, called the “germ-line.” In this duality the germ-line plays a dual role: both as a source of programmatic information and as a passive source of data for copying. The description represents, and instructs the creation of, the machines that copy and express it. I assert that living information flows are almost always representational (if not self-representational) and therefore always consist of a duality between a mediated signal and a machine that must transduce the information in that signal. To my knowledge, the aforementioned Scientific American article to the contrary, neither Von Neumann nor anyone else ever proved that this duality was necessary for self-reproduction, that is whether genetic descriptions are a requirement for self-reproduction. An organism could also use itself directly as the source of information necessary to construct itself. Yet Von Neumann and others make some compelling arguments about the advantages of genetic descriptions for self-reproduction and other powers: Homogeneity of components: the information has its basis in a small number of like components. Thus the problem of replication (the reproduction of information) can be simplified tremendously. Defined state: the whole concept of an active, dynamic entity directly using itself as a source of information for reproduction is complicated by the fact that the stimulation associated with observation and necessary for copying may change the state of other components of the automaton. At best this would reduce the fidelity of self-reproduction and at worst could lead to undefined conditions. This shows clearly why Von Neumann emphasized “quiescence” as an aspect of the description. Consistency: Von Neumann constructs self-reproduction in the stronger context of universal construction. He suggests that it is unlikely that a machine with the power of universal construction can be programmed to obtain descriptions of itself directly from itself without entering logical fallacy. Completeness: By containing an independently copied representation of itself, the automaton avoids representing its own representation ad infinitum to maintain this representation for its offspring. Generalizability: Von Neumann constructs his scheme for self-reproduction in a context that is immediately generalizable to the reproduction of a more general automaton, itself plus a generalized component, and this is demonstrated through the use of the description. In this way Von Neumann argued that quiescent descriptions allow self-reproducing automata to construct automata more complex than themselves, something machines generally cannot do. Evolvability: Variations in quiescent descriptions can occur without altering the integrity of the automaton itself, facilitating the generation of variation to be acted on by natural selection. These properties are strikingly reminiscent of design principles of programs and programming languages.

I spent 5 minutes googling for von Neumann's quiescent description. EugeneS

. I think I was already clear, Seversky. My comments shouldn‘t need any further explanation. When you are confronted with physical evidence that doesn’t comport to your liking, you quickly gather up an irrelevant observation and incoherent reasoning to erect an escape hatch; and you jump. You brought the up the mystery of consciousness specifically so that you could hide in the tall grass, and this is certainly not the first time you’ve done so. Just a few months ago I was talking to you about this same system (this organized physical mechanism that you gave examples of above) in relation to DNA. I was commenting on the significant recorded history of prediction and discovery related to this system in DNA. There were predictions made by some of the greatest intellects of the modern era; there were subsequent discoveries that forever removed the mystery of how a cell freely specifies a protein in heredity. Your answer (full of meandering babble) was to focus on the idea that we had only discovered DNA a half century ago, thereby implying that some as-yet unraveled mystery would certainly explain and counteract whatever was being said in favor of design. And what was being said is that the symbol system that enables DNA to function was predicted as fundamentally necessary prior to its discovery and confirmation. You sought further cover by suggesting that design proponents, absent any first-hand evidence of a designer, must first eliminate any unknown natural causes for anything they suggest as a candidate for design. Not only does that ridiculous standard render materialism completely non-falsifiable (and therefore unscientific), but just a few words later, with the shoe on the other foot, you substitute a whole new standard for the complete lack of any materialist explanations: “the fact that we do not know of something does not mean it does not exist”. You are completely incoherent Seversky, but this is what you do here. You run from physical evidence and reason (and recorded history as well). As I said then, in the face of physical evidence, you sell fear and ignorance. Upright BiPed

Earth to seversky- Materialists cannot account for living organisms. They definitely don't have a mechanism capable of producing brains. Materialism is and always has been, a non-starter. ET

hazel:

This brings up the question of how does the immaterial interact with the material?

By design. Information made the material world, by design, hazel. ET

I am well aware that the interpretation of sound is not inherent in a vibrating membrane any more than the interpretation of image-forming light is inherent in Wald's visual cycle. My original post was written to offer my perspective in answer to the question Hazel asked "This brings up the question of how does the immaterial interact with the material?" Please explain where you think I have been dishonest. Seversky

. Consciousness was never even mentioned, Sev. The internal processing of the brain was never mentioned. In abject fear of science and reason, you literally made up an escape door and ran through it. You know damn well that the interpretation of sound is not inherent in a vibrating membrane, whether that vibrating membrane is attached to a human brain or the lead wires of a microphone. You may very well be the weakest man to ever visit this site Sev - not because you are ignorant (you are certainly not that) but because you are steadfastly dishonest about these issues. Upright BiPed

All I see here is another facet of the hard problem of consciousness. How are the 'signals', generated by the interaction of the physical sense organs with environmental stimuli, processed and integrated to render our conscious experience of the physical reality we assume is out there? I think we can agree that nobody has yet come up with a persuasive theory of how it happens but that, of itself, does not mean that there isn't one. And if materialists are having a hard time constructing a materialist explanation of how the conscious mind exists and works, proponents of an immaterial mind have an even more difficult job explaining what it is and how it works.. Because without that it seems to me to be indistinguishable from spiritualist or supernaturalist narratives which are not really explanations at all. Seversky

. Just in case you were pondering the implications… This phenomenon you’ve given examples of (where one arrangement of matter serves as a medium of information and a second arrangement establishes what is being specified); there is a higher order of this mechanism which has been well-described by science. It is where multiple referents are specified from a common medium. It requires the organization of a token code to function, using spatial orientation within the medium to differentiate one token from another, and it becomes transcibable between mediums. This organization appeared at the origin of life because it offers the capacity necessary to describe the multiple interpretive constraints in the system, enabling the organization to begin and persist over time. And did I mention, the only other place that science has been able to document such a physical organization is in human language and mathematics – two unambiguous correlates of intelligence? Upright BiPed

.

We see when photons of light are absorbed by molecules of chemicals in the light-sensitive cells on our retinas. We hear when pressure waves in the air impact our eardrums and cause them to vibrate. If neither of those effects happens then we don’t see or hear anything.

Are you suggesting that photons of light (being absorbed by our retinas) would have to be physically interpreted as the image of something in the path of those photons? Are you suggesting that pressure waves fluttering across a membrane would have to be interpreted as a sound? Is the interpretation of sound not inherent in the fluttering membrane? And that something else that is establishing the interpretation, wouldn't it have to be material as well - a specific arrangement of matter of some kind? Welcome to the irrefutable world of irreducible complexity, Sev. It's required to specify something among alternatives in a lawful universe. It shows up in physical history at the origin of life. Upright BiPed

Seversky referencing Trekkies as authoritative scientific sources again??? Triple facepalm http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sY4IKaC8s54/U0M0RXxqmSI/AAAAAAAAGa8/ETxQDnx5q9g/s1600/Triple-facepalm.jpeg bornagain77

Hazel@ 34

This brings up the question of how does the immaterial interact with the material? Given that matter and energy, as we know them today, are quantum phenomena that are quite unlike what we use to think “matter” was, why call information immaterial and the quantum matter and energy material? Why separate the two? If information interacts with matter and energy, which you call the material world, then it seems to me information is also part of the material world. I don’t see why you make the distinction between physical world and material world. It’s all working together, so why not just one term?

Good points. I was reminded of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode called "The Next Phase". In this story, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge and Ensign Ro Laren were beaming back to the Enterprise when an explosion caused the inevitable transporter malfunction. When they rematerialized on board the ship, they were completely invisible to the other crew and undetectable by the ship's sensors. They were able to walk through walls and other people as if they weren't there. They could see and hear the Enterprise crew but could not be seen or heard themselves. For astute Trekkies, this was a problem. We see when photons of light are absorbed by molecules of chemicals in the light-sensitive cells on our retinas. We hear when pressure waves in the air impact our eardrums and cause them to vibrate. If neither of those effects happens then we don't see or hear anything. Since the light and sounds inside the ship were passing uninterrupted right through LaForge and Laren, they shouldn't have been able to see or hear anything at all of the ship and its crew. The same should be true of any immaterial consciousness. Without our physical senses, such an entity could not experience the universe as we do. It couldn't use a material brain either since it would still have no interface with physical reality. As for information preceding the existence of matter and energy, if there is nothing there at all, what is the information about and who or what is being informed about nothing? Seversky

OK bornagain77, I understand what you are saying. As I understand it neither matter nor energy would exist without information, anyway. ET

Without getting too technical in delineating the stark differences between immaterial information and matter and energy, i.e. material, one reason, as has been highlighted on this very thread, is that Darwinian materialists themselves continually refuse to acknowledge the physical reality of immaterial information itself. i.e. Ed G post 15

What is immaterial about it? As complex as the process may be, protein synthesis is still just a chemical reaction. As such, DNA contains “information” in the same way that any chemical compound does. Ed G

to wit:

“Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism.’… Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes… This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.” George Williams – Evolutionary Biologist – “A Package of Information” https://books.google.com/books?id=V3x1YPgvOJcC&pg=PA43

Further quotes as to how information undermines atheistic materialism itself

John Wheeler (1911–2008) summarizes his life in physics - February 2014 Excerpt: "I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950?s, I was in the grip of the idea that Everything Is Particles. I was looking for ways to build all basic entities – neutrons, protons, mesons, and so on – out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons, and photons. I call my second period Everything Is Fields. From the time I fell in love with general relativity and gravitation in 1952 until late in my career, I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and space-time itself. Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything Is Information. The more I have pondered the mystery of the quantum and our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory." – J. A. Wheeler, K. Ford, Geons, Black Hole, & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics New York W.W. Norton & Co, 1998, pp 63-64. https://uncommondescent.com/informatics/john-wheeler-1911-2008-summarizes-his-life-in-physics/ "The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena." Vlatko Vedral - Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of Wolfson College - a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics. “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” (48:35 minute mark) “In the beginning was the Word” John 1:1 (49:54 minute mark) Prof Anton Zeilinger speaks on quantum physics. at UCT https://youtu.be/s3ZPWW5NOrw?t=2984 The Foundation of Reality: Information or Quantum Mechanics? - May 18, 2009 Excerpt: it is not the laws of physics that determine how information behaves in our Universe, but the other way round. The implication is extraordinary: that somehow, information is the ghostly bedrock of our Universe and from it, all else is derived. That really is mind-blowing. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/413515/the-foundation-of-reality-information-or-quantum-mechanics/

Verse:

John 1:1-4 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

Thanks for the straightforward answer, ba. I think your view is (correct me if I’m wrong) is that the phrase “physical world” encompasses more than the “material world”: the material world is made of matter and energy, but the physical world includes both the material world and an immaterial component, information. Furthermore, information interacts with the material world: it has “a ‘top down’ physical effect on matter and energy”, in your words. This brings up the question of how does the immaterial interact with the material? Given that matter and energy, as we know them today, are quantum phenomena that are quite unlike what we use to think “matter” was, why call information immaterial and the quantum matter and energy material? Why separate the two? If information interacts with matter and energy, which you call the material world, then it seems to me information is also part of the material world. I don’t see why you make the distinction between physical world and material world. It’s all working together, so why not just one term? hazel

“Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.” Scientists show how to erase information without using energy – January 2011 Excerpt: Until now, scientists have thought that the process of erasing information requires energy. But a new study shows that, theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all.,,, “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”, Vaccaro explained. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-scientists-erase-energy.html Information is physical (but not how Rolf Landauer meant) - video https://youtu.be/H35I83y5Uro

bornagain77

Physical does not strictly equal material. I am using physical in the broad sense of x having a physical effect on y (George Ellis), not in the strict sense that physical must always equal material. Immaterial information has a 'top down' physical effect on matter and energy, hence immaterial information must be physical in some meaningful sense. (again George Ellis) If immaterial information had no physical effect on matter and energy, then quantum information, which is NOT matter or energy, (i.e. it is immaterial), could not be examined by physics, which is the study of what is 'physical':

physical phys·?i·?cal | ?fi-zi-k?l Definition of physical (Entry 1 of 2) 1a: of or relating to natural science b(1): of or relating to physics (2): characterized or produced by the forces and operations of physics

bornagain77

ba writes,

Immaterial information IS a physically real entity, separate from matter and energy, since it has ‘top down’ physical effects on matter and energy. This would be impossible if immaterial information were not physically real in some meaningful sense.

Don't you see a bit of an inconsistency here, ba. If information "IS a physically real entity, separate from matter and energy," why would one call it immaterial? hazel

Seversky spews nonsense left and right with nothing but bare assertion and ignores all the evidence that falsifies his position. For instance, his claim that quantum mechanics confirms reductive materialism to the nTH degree is pure nonsense. Not even fit for response. But as to this one false claim that Seversky made in particular:

I think you will find that there are developmental biologists who can provide a great deal of information about how embryos reach their adult form.

First off, developmental biology is not your friend

Developmental gene regulatory networks—an insurmountable impediment to evolution - by Jeffrey P. Tomkins and Jerry Bergman - August 2018 Excerpt: As Davidson has documented, a dGRN that regulates body-plan development “is very impervious to change” and usually leads to “catastrophic loss of the body part or loss of viability altogether”.12 This observable consequence virtually always occurs if even one dGRN subcircuit is interrupted. Because most of these changes are always “catastrophically bad, flexibility is minimal, and since the subcircuits are all interconnected … there is only one way for things to work. And indeed the embryos of each species can develop in only one way.”12 In his book, Intelligent Design proponent Stephen Meyer noted that “Davidson’s work highlights a profound contradiction between the neo-Darwinian account of how new animal body plans are built and one of the most basic principles of engineering—the principle of constraints.”26 As a result, “the more functionally integrated a system is, the more difficult it is to change any part of it without damaging or destroying the system as a whole”.26 Because this system of gene regulation controls animal-body-plan development in such an exquisitely integrated fashion, any significant alterations in its gene regulatory networks inevitably damage or destroy the developing animal. This now-proven fact creates critical problems for the evolution of new animal body plans and the new dGRNs necessary to produce them, preventing gradual evolution via mutation and selection from a pre-existing body plan and set of dGRNs. Developmental biologists openly recognize these clear problems for the standard evolutionary synthesis. The problem as elaborated by Davidson, noted that neo-Darwinian evolution erroneously assumes that all microevolutionary processes equate to macroevolutionary mechanisms, thus producing the false conclusion that the “evolution of enzymes or flower colors can be used as current proxies for study of evolution of the body plan”.12 Typical evolutionary research programs involve studying genetic variation within a species or genus involving inter-fertile natural populations or populations from controlled crosses. From a developmental systems biology perspective, the genes or regulatory features involved in such variability lie at the peripheral nodes and do not explain novel body plans associated with macroevolution. Davidson notes that the standard evolutionary synthesis “erroneously assumes that change in protein-coding sequence is the basic cause of change in [the] developmental program; and it [also] erroneously assumes that evolutionary change in body-plan morphology occurs by a continuous process”.12 Davidson also aptly notes that “these assumptions are basically counterfactual” because the “neo-Darwinian synthesis from which these ideas stem was a pre-molecular biology concoction focused on population genetics and adaptation natural history”.12 Neo-Darwinism in any form does not provide a mechanistic means of changing the genomic regulatory systems that drive embryonic development of the body plan. Alternating the peripheral differentiation process associated with observable variability is an entirely different scenario from building a new form of animal life by changing the fundamental structure of a resilient dGRN.,,, Summary At the very core of the validity of models for macroevolution is how organisms develop. Any form of Darwinian evolution requires that new developmental adaptations arise via random mutations that somehow provide a novel advantageous selectable trait. Decades of developmental genetics research in a wide variety of organisms has documented in detail the fact that once an embryo begins to develop along a certain trajectory, mutations in top and mid-level transcription factor genes in the hierarchy model of regulation described by Davidson cause fatal catastrophe in the program. This mutation-intolerant obstacle poses a complete barrier for the modern Darwinian synthesis, the neutral model, and saltational evolution. Another important aspect of the developmental genetics paradigm is the paradox of conserved protein sequence among top-level transcription factors combined with their intolerance of mutation. It is quite a quandary for the evolutionist—extreme conservation of sequence would seem to support common descent yet lack of mutability negates the fundamental requirement of evolutionary change. An Intelligent Design model, however, would predict that common code serving a general common purpose would be found among unrelated engineered systems that were the work of the same Creator—exactly as we find in man-made systems. https://creation.com/developmental-gene-regulatory-networks

Secondly, dGRN's are not deterministic but are 'context dependent'

Rethinking gene regulatory networks in light of alternative splicing, intrinsically disordered protein domains, and post-translational modifications - 2016 Abstract Models for genetic regulation and cell fate specification characteristically assume that gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are essentially deterministic and exhibit multiple stable states specifying alternative, but pre-figured cell fates. Mounting evidence shows, however, that most eukaryotic precursor RNAs undergo alternative splicing (AS) and that the majority of transcription factors contain intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) domains whose functionalities are context dependent as well as subject to post-translational modification (PTM). Consequently, many transcription factors do not have fixed cis-acting regulatory targets, and developmental determination by GRNs alone is untenable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4341551/

Simply put, the fact that dGRNs are not deterministic but are context dependent means that, "There is, in short, nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly should have six legs, a pair of wings, and a dot-sized brain and we should have two arms, two legs, and a mind capable of comprehending that overarching history of our universe."

Between Sapientia and Scientia — Michael Aeschliman’s Profound Interpretation James Le Fanu - September 9, 2019 Excerpt: The ability to spell out the full sequence of genes should reveal, it was reasonable to assume, the distinctive genetic instructions that determine the diverse forms of the millions of species, so readily distinguishable one from the other. Biologists were thus understandably disconcerted to discover precisely the reverse to be the case. Contrary to all expectations, many DNA sequences involved in embryo development are remarkably similar across the vast spectrum of organismic complexity, from a millimeter-long worm to ourselves.7 There is, in short, nothing in the genomes of fly and man to explain why the fly should have six legs, a pair of wings, and a dot-sized brain and we should have two arms, two legs, and a mind capable of comprehending that overarching history of our universe. So we have moved in the very recent past from supposing we might know the principles of genetic inheritance to recognizing we have no realistic conception of what they might be. As Phillip Gell, professor of genetics at the University of Birmingham, observed, “This gap in our knowledge is not merely unbridged, but in principle unbridgeable and our ignorance will remain ineluctable.”8 https://evolutionnews.org/2019/09/between-sapientia-and-scientia-michael-aeschlimans-profound-interpretation/

Shoot, Darwinists can't even explain how a single protein might achieve its final folded form much less how billions of trillions of proteins in an organism might arrive at the final form of an organism:

The Humpty-Dumpty Effect: A Revolutionary Paper with Far-Reaching Implications – Paul Nelson – October 23, 2012 Excerpt: Put simply, the Levinthal paradox states that when one calculates the number of possible topological (rotational) configurations for the amino acids in even a small (say, 100 residue) unfolded protein, random search could never find the final folded conformation of that same protein during the lifetime of the physical universe. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/a_revolutionary065521.html

bornagain77

ET:

But bornagain misspoke about it being physical. If it isn’t matter nor energy it isn’t physical.

No, in so far as immaterial information has physical effects on matter and energy, i.e. on material, I did not misspeak. Immaterial information IS a physically real entity, separate from matter and energy, since it has 'top down' physical effects on matter and energy. This would be impossible if immaterial information were not physically real in some meaningful sense. As George Ellis himself stated,

Recognising Top-Down Causation George Ellis, University of Cape Town Causation: The nature of causation is highly contested territory, and I will take a pragmatic view: Definition 1: Causal Effect If making a change in a quantity X results in a reliable demonstrable change in a quantity Y in a given context, then X has a causal effect on Y. Example: I press the key labelled “A” on my computer keyboard; the letter “A” appears on my computer screen.,,, Definition 2: Existence If Y is a physical entity made up of ordinary matter, and X is some kind of entity that has a demonstrable causal effect on Y as per Definition 1, then we must acknowledge that X also exists (even if it is not made up of such matter). This is clearly a sensible and testable criterion; in the example above, it leads to the conclusion that both the data and the relevant software exist. If we do not adopt this definition, we will have instances of uncaused changes in the world; I presume we wish to avoid that situation.,,, Causal Efficacy of Non Physical entities: Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored. The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts. Excerpt page 7: The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, for example state vector preparation, where top-down constraints allow non-unitary behaviour at the lower levels. It may well play a key role in the quantum measurement problem (the dual of state vector preparation) [5]. One can bear in mind here that wherever equivalence classes of entities play a key role, such as in Crutchfield’s computational mechanics [29], this is an indication that top-down causation is at play.,,, Life and the brain: living systems are highly structured modular hierarchical systems, and there are many similarities to the digital computer case, even though they are not digital computers. The lower level interactions are constrained by network connections, thereby creating possibilities of truly complex behaviour. Top-down causation is prevalent at all levels in the brain: for example it is crucial to vision [24,25] as well as the relation of the individual brain to society [2]. The hardware (the brain) can do nothing without the excitations that animate it: indeed this is the difference between life and death. The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities. http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf

bornagain77

‘Information is information, neither matter nor energy. Any materialism that fails to take account of this will not survive one day'.- Norbert Weiner

Information is a fundamental entity. It is a real entity. It exists in the real, physical world. But bornagain misspoke about it being physical. If it isn't matter nor energy it isn't physical. ET

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this minute solar system of the atom together . . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind."- Max Planck

Max Planck was first to formulate quantum theory so it seems it isn't materialistic at all. ET

"Newtonian materialism" is nonsense seeing that Newton posited an Intelligent Being and saw science as a way to understand God's Creation. ET

I have had this discussion with others, possibly including ba. Obviously classical deterministic Newtonian materialism has been shown to be insufficient and outdated for at least 100 years. However, the introduction of such things as relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have grown out of studying the physical world: what one might call neo-materialism has changed and expanded our concepts of the physical world, but, as Sev is pointing out, not added anything that goes beyond the physical world. The physical world is just very different than we once thought it was. hazel

Bornagain77@ 6

i.e. It has now been experimentally demonstrated, contrary to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, that immaterial information is a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy.

I look forward to seeing you and the researchers explain how immaterial information can also be a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy because I don't think they are saying what you think they are saying.

And as the following article states, “Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy,,, A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems.”

You reject materialism yet even quantum entanglement is describe here as a "physical resource". Maybe you need to reconsider your position on materialism? Seversky

Ed George:

As such, DNA contains “information” in the same way that any chemical compound does.

And yet scientists disagree with you, Ed. ET

Ed George:

An object only has as much information as the person observing it ascribes to it.

And that is wrong. All artifacts contain, at a minimum, all the information required to construct them. ET

. So Seversky, a dedronchronoligist looks at a tree stump and counts 75 seasons of growth in the rings, and you think that the age of the tree (being 75 seasons) is contained in the rings? Is that right? Upright BiPed

Bornagain77@ 6

You just can’t make this stuff up. Seversky apparently has no clue what the reductive materialism that undergirds his very own Darwinian worldview actually entails.

And it's a tad ironic that you seem to be completely unaware that quantum mechanics is reductive materialism taken to the n-th degree. It reduces everything to the properties of material or physical reality at the smallest scale we have been able to observe thus far.

Though Charles Darwin himself knew nothing about the information in life that is constraining it to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, he, none-the-less, was a reductive materialist. As Adam Sedgwick himself chastised Darwin, “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.”

Neither evolution nor quantum theory have anything to do with morality

Since Seversky apparently does not grasp even the basics of his own reductive materialistic philosophy that undergirds his Darwinian worldview, there is scant hope that he will ever understand the falsification of his reductive materialism by quantum mechanics in general and its falsification by quantum information in particular.

Once again, it's a tad ironic that you seem to be completely unaware that quantum mechanics, far from falsifying reductive materialism, is reductive materialism taken to the n-th degree. It reduces everything to the properties of material or physical reality at the smallest scale we have been able to observe thus far.

Number one science itself, specifically advances in quantum mechanics, have now falsified reductive materialism as being true. Specifically, advances in quantum mechanics have now falsified hidden variables and have now also falsified ‘realism’ itself. (‘Realism’ is the belief that a material reality exists separate from our conscious observation of it.

Once again, if nothing exists until we observe it, what are we observing in the first place. Concerning the quantum world, to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means” Seversky

Upright BiPed@ 4

Be a good chap Sev, and give us an example of the “history of that tree” that a dendrochronologist might infer from observing those rings.

Tree rings provide snapshots of Earth's past climate

If you’ve ever seen a tree stump, you’ve probably noticed that the top of a stump has a series of concentric rings. These rings can tell us how old the tree is, and what the weather was like during each year of the tree’s life. The light-colored rings represent wood that grew in the spring and early summer, while the dark rings represent wood that grew in the late summer and fall. One light ring plus one dark ring equals one year of the tree’s life. Because trees are sensitive to local climate conditions, such as rain and temperature, they give scientists some information about that area’s local climate in the past. For example, tree rings usually grow wider in warm, wet years and they are thinner in years when it is cold and dry. If the tree has experienced stressful conditions, such as a drought, the tree might hardly grow at all in those years.

Seversky

as to:

"As complex as the process may be, protein synthesis is still just a chemical reaction." "As such, DNA contains “information” in the same way that any chemical compound does."

Golly gee whiz, Ed (and Seversky) are apparently stuck in the stone ages, back when Darwinists claimed that information was not really in DNA but that it was all just complex chemistry. (I thought Darwinists had at least moved on to calling the information in life "emergent' instead of still calling it 'merely complex chemistry' :) )

"And at this point, strangely enough, the discovery of DNA, which is so widely thought to prove that life is mere chemistry, provides the missing link for proving the contrary. That the formation of a DNA molecule is embodied in the morphology of the corresponding offspring, assures us of the fact that this morphology is not the product of a chemical equilibration, but is designed by other than chemical forces." Michael Polanyi, “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,” Chemical and Engineering News 45 (August 1967): 66, 55-66 "Information theory can be applied to any situation involving messages. It follows therefore that the language of life, the genetic code written along the lengths of DNA molecules, in groups of three coding for the various twenty-two amino acids of proteins, can also be expressed in terms of a given amount of information." Edmund Jack Ambrose, The Nature and Origin of the Biological World (New York: Halsted Press, 1982), 125. Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life - Hubert P. Yockey, 2005 “The belief of mechanist-reductionists that the chemical processes in living matter do not differ in principle from those in dead matter is incorrect. There is no trace of messages determining the results of chemical reactions in inanimate matter. If genetical processes were just complicated biochemistry, the laws of mass action and thermodynamics would govern the placement of amino acids in the protein sequences.” (Let me provide the unstated conclusion:) But they don’t. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/living-things-machines-and-intelligent-design-part-two-of-a-response-to-the-smithy/#comment-353336 A New Design Argument - Charles Thaxton Excerpt: "There is an identity of structure between DNA (and protein) and written linguistic messages. Since we know by experience that intelligence produces written messages, and no other cause is known, the implication, according to the abductive method, is that intelligent cause produced DNA and protein. The significance of this result lies in the security of it, for it is much stronger than if the structures were merely similar. We are not dealing with anything like a superficial resemblance between DNA and a written text. We are not saying DNA is like a message. Rather, DNA is a message. True design thus returns to biology." http://www.arn.org/docs/thaxton/ct_newdesign3198.htm Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life - Hubert P. Yockey, 2005 Excerpt: “Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon, 1948) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies.” http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521802932&ss=exc Dr. Stephen Meyer: What Kind of Information Does DNA Contain? - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FUVQkfB9jQ Denying the Signature: Functional Information Is the Fact to Be Explained - Stephen C. Meyer - November 19, 2015 Excerpt: As my colleague Casey Luskin has established, no serious biologist post-Watson and Crick has denied that DNA and RNA contain functional information expressed in a digital form -- information that directs the construction of functional proteins (and editing of RNA molecules). Thus, contra Bishop and O'Connor, my characterization of DNA and RNA as molecules that store functional or specified information is not even remotely controversial within mainstream biology. Nor is my judgment controversial that the gene expression system (the system by which proteins are synthesized in accord with the information stored on the DNA molecule) constitutes an information processing system. That is what the network of proteins and RNA molecules involved in the gene-expression system do: They process (that is copy, translate, and express) the information stored within the DNA molecule. The information processing systems present in the cell may well be much more precise than those that human computer engineers have designed, but that does not mean that describing the gene expression system as an information processing system is inaccurate. Describing the gene expression system as an information processing system is not to employ a metaphor. It is to describe what the system does -- again, to process (or express) genetic information. ,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/denying_the_sig_2101021.html UprightBiped explains why the genetic code is not chemistry to a Darwinist https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/trying-hard-to-be-charitable/#comment-516755

As to protein synthesis in particular: Ed, please do explain protein folding in terms of this 'complex chemistry' that you imagine runs the show in protein synthesis (instead of immaterial information running the show)

The Humpty-Dumpty Effect: A Revolutionary Paper with Far-Reaching Implications - Paul Nelson - October 23, 2012 Excerpt: Put simply, the Levinthal paradox states that when one calculates the number of possible topological (rotational) configurations for the amino acids in even a small (say, 100 residue) unfolded protein, random search could never find the final folded conformation of that same protein during the lifetime of the physical universe. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/a_revolutionary065521.html Physicists Discover Quantum Law of Protein Folding – February 22, 2011 Quantum mechanics finally explains why protein folding depends on temperature in such a strange way. Excerpt: First, a little background on protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that become biologically active only when they fold into specific, highly complex shapes. The puzzle is how proteins do this so quickly when they have so many possible configurations to choose from. To put this in perspective, a relatively small protein of only 100 amino acids can take some 10^100 different configurations. If it tried these shapes at the rate of 100 billion a second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to find the correct one. Just how these molecules do the job in nanoseconds, nobody knows.,,, Today, Luo and Lo say these curves can be easily explained if the process of folding is a quantum affair. By conventional thinking, a chain of amino acids can only change from one shape to another by mechanically passing though various shapes in between. But Luo and Lo say that if this process were a quantum one, the shape could change by quantum transition, meaning that the protein could ‘jump’ from one shape to another without necessarily forming the shapes in between.,,, Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins. That's a significant breakthrough. Luo and Lo's equations amount to the first universal laws of protein folding. That’s the equivalent in biology to something like the thermodynamic laws in physics. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/423087/physicists-discover-quantum-law-of-protein/ Rubik's Cube Is a Hand-Sized Illustration of Intelligent Design – Dec. 2, 2014 Excerpt: The world record (for solving a Rubik's cube) is now 4.904 seconds,,, You need a search algorithm (for solving a Rubik's cube).,,, (Randomly) Trying all 43 x 10^18 (43 quintillion) combinations (of a Rubik's cube) at 1 per second would take 1.3 trillion years. The robot would have a 50-50 chance of getting the solution in half that time, but it would already vastly exceed the time available (about forty times the age of the universe).,,, How fast can an intelligent cause solve it? 4.904 seconds. That's the power of intelligent causes over unguided causes.,,, The Rubik's cube is simple compared to a protein. Imagine solving a cube with 20 colors and 100 sides. Then imagine solving hundreds of different such cubes, each with its own solution, simultaneously in the same place at the same time (in nanoseconds). (That is exactly what is happening thousands of times a second in each of the trillions of cells of your body as you read this right now). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/12/rubiks_cube_is101311.html

Must be nice being a Darwinist, science rolls along and yet you never have to keep up with the latest developments.. You just keep repeating the same debunked ideas as if they are still relevant and then ignore, and mock, everyone who points your fallacious ideas out to you. bornagain77

If we adhere to the classical Shannon definition of information it is a set of messages or meanings in common between a transmitter and a receiver, and both are necessary for information to exist. For our discussion context: Shallit's writings contain increased information over a blank page if readers understood Shallit's thoughts and intentions. A sculpture increases information because the viewers (receivers) have an aesthetic response as intended by the sculptor (transmitter). A zipped file may have latent information but does not become true information until it is unzipped and read by someone who can make sense of it. It might have been just zipped gibberish. Cell DNA is gibberish when a sequence is printed out for human reading but is very much information to the cell machines that read it and do something useful with it. I was once welcomed home from an extended trip to Japan by my family, who hung a sign that said 'welcome home' in Japanese, courtesy of a neighborhood friend who knew the language. It had meaning to me and to our neighbor, but was gibberish to my family, who had hung the sign upside-down. It is a mistake to think information is something constant and easily quantified because the information content of something depends completely on who or what is being informed. The sequence 59-72-81-86-96-103 is low in information until you ride the B subway line in Manhattan. glennbdixon

.

As complex as the process may be, protein synthesis is still just a chemical reaction.

I don’t think anyone has suggested that protein synthesis isn’t a chemical process.

As such, DNA contains “information” in the same way that any chemical compound does.

Is that right Ed? Help us out and tell us exactly what information is found in some compound like iron oxide, and how does it “contain” that information. Then, by all means, tell us what information is found in a codon such as AGU. How does that information result in serine being added to a peptide during synthesis. If they are just the same, as you say, it should be a snap. Upright BiPed

BA77

Could you be a little more specific? Are you trying to claim that immaterial information does not really exist in DNA?

What is immaterial about it? As complex as the process may be, protein synthesis is still just a chemical reaction. As such, DNA contains “information” in the same way that any chemical compound does. Ed George

'An object only has as much information as the person observing it ascribes to it.' So you actually believe that DNA does not contain any actual information independent of what a person observing it may ascribe to it? Could you be a little more specific? Are you trying to claim that immaterial information does not really exist in DNA? bornagain77

I have to agree with Seversky. An object only has as much information as the person observing it ascribes to it. Ed George

seversky:

I think you will find that there are developmental biologists who can provide a great deal of information about how embryos reach their adult form.

They can't even account for the existence of developmental biology! And not one developmental biologist knows what determines the final form. As Dr Michael Denton wrote:

Yet by the late 1980s it was becoming obvious to most genetic researchers, including myself, since my own main research interest in the ‘80s and ‘90s was human genetics, that the heroic effort to find information specifying life’s order in the genes had failed. There was no longer the slightest justification for believing there exists anything in the genome remotely resembling a program capable of specifying in detail all the complex order of the phenotype. The emerging picture made it increasingly difficult to see genes as Weismann’s “unambiguous bearers of information” or view them as the sole source of the durability and stability of organic form. It is true that genes influence every aspect of development, but influencing something is not the same as determining it. Only a small fraction of all known genes, such as the developmental fate switching genes, can be imputed to have any sort of directing or controlling influence on form generation. From being “isolated directors” of a one-way game of life, genes are now considered to be interactive players in a dynamic two-way dance of almost unfathomable complexity, as described by Keller in The Century of The Gene- Michael Denton “An Anti-Darwinian Intellectual Journey”, Uncommon Dissent (2004), pages 171-2

ET

Earth to seversky- there is DATA in tree rings. That DATA is then given meaning by the scientists and only then do we have information. Trees are data recorders. Period. ET

An off-topic, could people who have been around here for a long enough time, point me to a post by niwrad (AFAIR) that was about analyzing different types of programming errors with respect to what they can do to the self-replicating code.The author argues there that there is some sort of functional core that being replicated with errors is fatal to the code etc. I would be reeeally thankful to anyone who helps me locate that OP. Thanks! EugeneS

Why bother paying attention to what people like Jeffrey Shallit say at all? He can't see further than his nose and is quite a loudmouth )) EugeneS

Bob Marks:

[W]e all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four U.S. Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji.

Michael Egnor:

A sculpture has more information than the raw material from which the image was sculpted. Mount Rushmore obviously has more information than the mountains surrounding it.

I see what you have done there! DiEb

And now this ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information is shown to be ubiquitous within biological life. For example, DNA itself does not belong to the world of classical mechanics, i.e. to reductive materialism, but instead DNA belongs to the world of quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.

"What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state." Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176

As well, in the following 2006 article entitled ‘Classical and Quantum Information Channels in Protein Chain’ it was stated that, “On the basis of force constants, displacements of each atom in peptide plane, and time of action we found that the value of the peptide plane action is close to the Planck constant. This indicates that peptide plane from the energy viewpoint possesses synergetic classical/quantum properties.”

Classical and Quantum Information Channels in Protein Chain - Dj. Koruga, A. Tomi?, Z. Ratkaj, L. Matija - 2006 Abstract: Investigation of the properties of peptide plane in protein chain from both classical and quantum approach is presented. We calculated interatomic force constants for peptide plane and hydrogen bonds between peptide planes in protein chain. On the basis of force constants, displacements of each atom in peptide plane, and time of action we found that the value of the peptide plane action is close to the Planck constant. This indicates that peptide plane from the energy viewpoint possesses synergetic classical/quantum properties. Consideration of peptide planes in protein chain from information viewpoint also shows that protein chain possesses classical and quantum properties. So, it appears that protein chain behaves as a triple dual system: (1) structural - amino acids and peptide planes, (2) energy - classical and quantum state, and (3) information - classical and quantum coding. Based on experimental facts of protein chain, we proposed from the structure-energy-information viewpoint its synergetic code system. http://www.scientific.net/MSF.518.491

And in the following more recent 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,

Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552

And as this follow up paper stated, "There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,

Quantum Critical Proteins – Stuart Lindsay – Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Arizona State University – 2018 Excerpt: The difficulty with this proposal lies in its improbability. Only an infinitesimal density of random states exists near the critical point.,, Gábor Vattay et al. recently examined a number of proteins and conducting and insulating polymers.14 The distribution for the insulators and conductors were as expected, but the functional proteins all fell on the quantum-critical distribution. Such a result cannot be a consequence of chance.,,, WHAT OF quantum criticality? Vattay et al. carried out electronic structure calculations for the very large protein used in our work. They found that the distribution of energy-level spacings fell on exactly the quantum-critical distribution, implying that this protein is also quantum critical. There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,, http://inference-review.com/article/quantum-critical-proteins Gábor Vattay et al., “Quantum Criticality at the Origin of Life,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 626 (2015); Gábor Vattay, Stuart Kauffman, and Samuli Niiranen, “Quantum Biology on the Edge of Quantum Chaos,” PLOS One 9, no. 3 (2014)

Moreover, it is also important to reiterate, as was pointed out at the beginning of this post, that quantum entanglement is a ‘non-local’, beyond pace and time, effect that has no possible explanation within the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinists, i.e. falsification of hidden variables. Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum entanglement and/or quantum information of the cell. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

One final note, it is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time - 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html

The implication of finding 'non-local', beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”

Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe - Oct. 19, 2017 - Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” - Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - video (5:00 minute mark) https://www.disclose.tv/leading-scientists-say-consciousness-cannot-die-it-goes-back-to-the-universe-315604

Verse:

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

bornagain77

Specifically, advances in quantum information theory have now shown that “entropy is always dependent on the observer.” To repeat what I stated in my earlier post, in the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle's location and/or position converts information into energy.

Maxwell's demon demonstration turns information into energy - November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the "Maxwell demon" thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a "spiral-staircase-like" potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html

And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,"

Demonic device converts information to energy - 2010 Excerpt: "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content," says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. "This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale," says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

Seversky said "we now need to know what the researchers mean by “entropy” in this context", so here is a technical paper on those entropic details,

Researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics - October 20, 2016 Excerpt: "It establishes a connection between well-documented quantum physics processes and the theoretical quantum channels that make up quantum information theory." The work predicts certain conditions under which the H-theorem might be violated and entropy—in the short term—might actually decrease.,,, "Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching," Vinokur said. "This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell's demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine." For example, he said, the principle could be designed into a "refrigerator" which could be cooled remotely—that is, the energy expended to cool it could take place anywhere. The authors are planning to work closely with a team of experimentalists to design a proof-of-concept system, they said. http://phys.org/news/2016-10-posit-locally-circumvent-law-thermodynamics.html

And the following 2018 article states that, “Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics.”

Information engine operates with nearly perfect efficiency - Lisa Zyga - January 19, 2018 Excerpt: Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine's efficiency is bounded by a recently proposed generalized second law of thermodynamics, and it is the first information engine to approach this new bound.,,, https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html

i.e. It has now been experimentally demonstrated, contrary to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, that immaterial information is a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy. It is also important to understand that quantum entanglement is critical for quantum information processing to even be possible in the first place. As the following article states, “quantum entanglement, plays crucial roles in quantum information processing such as quantum computation, quantum teleportation, dense coding, quantum error correction, quantum cryptographic schemes, entanglement swapping, and remote states preparation.”

Quantum Information and Entanglement - 2010 Excerpt: ,,, quantum entanglement, which can be traced back to the EPR paradox in 1935 and gave rise to the discussions on the foundations of quantum mechanics related to reality and locality, plays crucial roles in quantum information processing such as quantum computation, quantum teleportation, dense coding, quantum error correction, quantum cryptographic schemes, entanglement swapping, and remote states preparation. Many striking achievements have been witnessed for the past ten years. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/amp/2010/657878/

And as the following article states, “Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy,,, A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems.”

Quantum Entanglement and Information Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/

And now classical information has now been shown to be a subset of quantum information by the following method, As the following article states, the deletion of data, under certain conditions, can create a cooling effect instead of generating heat. The cooling effect appears when the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement is invoked.,,, In the new paper, the researchers,,, show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object's entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,,

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy - June 1, 2011 Excerpt: Recent research by a team of physicists,,, describe,,, how the deletion of data, under certain conditions, can create a cooling effect instead of generating heat. The cooling effect appears when the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement is invoked.,,, The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object's entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,, No heat, even a cooling effect; In the case of perfect classical knowledge of a computer memory (zero entropy), deletion of the data requires in theory no energy at all. The researchers prove that "more than complete knowledge" from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy. This is the physical meaning of negative entropy. Renner emphasizes, however, "This doesn't mean that we can develop a perpetual motion machine." The data can only be deleted once, so there is no possibility to continue to generate energy. The process also destroys the entanglement, and it would take an input of energy to reset the system to its starting state. The equations are consistent with what's known as the second law of thermodynamics: the idea that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. Vedral says "We're working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

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Seversky states,

For this to have any bearing on evolution, you need to show where Darwin claimed that “immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis”.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Seversky apparently has no clue what the reductive materialism that undergirds his very own Darwinian worldview actually entails.

Reductive materialism philosophy Excerpt: Reductive Materialism. The view that only the material world (matter) is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, e.g., atoms, molecules, and everything else thought to make up what we know as “matter.” https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/reduc-body.html

Though Charles Darwin himself knew nothing about the information in life that is constraining it to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, he, none-the-less, was a reductive materialist. As Adam Sedgwick himself chastised Darwin, “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.”

My dear Darwin ,,, “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.” - Adam Sedgwick - 24 November 1859 https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2548.xml

Since Seversky apparently does not grasp even the basics of his own reductive materialistic philosophy that undergirds his Darwinian worldview, there is scant hope that he will ever understand the falsification of his reductive materialism by quantum mechanics in general and its falsification by quantum information in particular. But anyways, (for benefit of the unbiased reader), there are a few problems with the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic belief that “that only the material world (matter) is truly real”. Number one science itself, specifically advances in quantum mechanics, have now falsified reductive materialism as being true. Specifically, advances in quantum mechanics have now falsified hidden variables and have now also falsified ‘realism’ itself. (‘Realism’ is the belief that a material reality exists separate from our conscious observation of it.

Einstein vs quantum mechanics, and why he’d be a convert today – June 13, 2014 Excerpt: In a nutshell, experimentalists John Clauser, Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger, Paul Kwiat and colleagues have performed the Bell proposal for a test of Einstein’s hidden variable theories. All results so far support quantum mechanics. It seems that when two particles undergo entanglement, whatever happens to one of the particles can instantly affect the other, even if the particles are separated! http://phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php Quantum correlations do not imply instant causation – August 12, 2016 Excerpt: A research team led by a Heriot-Watt scientist has shown that the universe is even weirder than had previously been thought. In 2015 the universe was officially proven to be weird. After many decades of research, a series of experiments showed that distant, entangled objects can seemingly interact with each other through what Albert Einstein famously dismissed as “Spooky action at a distance”. A new experiment by an international team led by Heriot-Watt’s Dr Alessandro Fedrizzi has now found that the universe is even weirder than that: entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do. http://phys.org/news/2016-08-quantum-imply-instant-causation.html Experimental test of nonlocal causality – August 10, 2016 DISCUSSION Previous work on causal explanations beyond local hidden-variable models focused on testing Leggett’s crypto-nonlocality (7, 42, 43), a class of models with a very specific choice of hidden variable that is unrelated to Bell’s local causality (44). In contrast, we make no assumptions on the form of the hidden variable and test all models ,,, Our results demonstrate that a causal influence from one measurement outcome to the other, which may be subluminal, superluminal, or even instantaneous, cannot explain the observed correlations.,,, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600162.full “hidden variables don’t exist. If you have proved them come back with PROOF and a Nobel Prize. John Bell theorized that maybe the particles can signal faster than the speed of light. This is what he advocated in his interview in “The Ghost in the Atom.” But the violation of Leggett’s inequality in 2007 takes away that possibility and rules out all non-local hidden variables. Observation instantly defines what properties a particle has and if you assume they had properties before we measured them, then you need evidence, because right now there is none which is why realism is dead, and materialism dies with it. How does the particle know what we are going to pick so it can conform to that?” per Jimfit – UD blogger Quantum physics says goodbye to reality – Apr 20, 2007 Excerpt: Many realizations of the thought experiment have indeed verified the violation of Bell’s inequality. These have ruled out all hidden-variables theories based on joint assumptions of realism, meaning that reality exists when we are not observing it; and locality, meaning that separated events cannot influence one another instantaneously. But a violation of Bell’s inequality does not tell specifically which assumption – realism, locality or both – is discordant with quantum mechanics. Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization. They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell’s thought experiment, Leggett’s inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it. “Our study shows that ‘just’ giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics,” Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. “You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism.” http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/27640 New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It – June 3, 2015 Excerpt: Some particles, such as photons or electrons, can behave both as particles and as waves. Here comes a question of what exactly makes a photon or an electron act either as a particle or a wave. This is what Wheeler’s experiment asks: at what point does an object ‘decide’? The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html The Death of Materialism – InspiringPhilosophy – (Material reality does not exist without an observer) video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0IKLv7KrE Materialism has been dead for decades and recent research only reconfirms this, as this video will show. This video was reviewed by physicist Fred Kuttner and Richard Conn Henry. A few other physicists reviewed this but asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.

Aside from all these technical empirical falsifications of the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic worldview, the main reason why reductive materialism must be false is fairly easy to understand. For something, anything, to be ‘truly real’ for us in the first place we must first and foremost be conscious of it. There is simply no way to circumvent the primary prerequisite of consciousness in any definition of reality that we may put forth. Here are a few quotes from the main founders of quantum mechanics that drives this ‘simple’ point home:

“No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931 “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334. “The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists.” – Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177.

And on top of the fact that it has now been proven that “At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it”, in quantum information theory the central importance of the observer in quantum mechanics has also been further verified. bornagain77

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A dendrochronologist can look at the same rings and infer a great deal about the history of that tree

Be a good chap Sev, and give us an example of the “history of that tree” that a dendrochronologist might infer from observing those rings. Upright BiPed

Bornagain77@ 1

Contrary to what Shallit and other Darwinists presuppose about information, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.

That was not the point of the OP. As for the conversion of information into energy, please define "information" as used in this context, either yourself or what the researchers you are citing mean by it.

Again to repeat that last sentence,“Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

Repeating it doesn't make it any clearer. If anything, it makes it worse because we now need to know what the researchers mean by "entropy" in this context.

Simply put, these developments, that have experimentally verified the Maxwell demon thought experiment, go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis.

For this to have any bearing on evolution, you need to show where Darwin claimed that "immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis".

And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validate a primary claim from ID proponents that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information into a biological system is necessary in order to circumvent the second law.

Again, exactly what is this "information" that is being imparted to some biological system? Is it the same information you and I are exchanging now? Is it the same information that a sculptor imparts to a block of marble when he or she carves it? Or does a sculptor remove information when carving pieces off the block?

To more clearly illustrate just how all this plays out in the ID vs. Evolution debate, it is first important to note that, as I made clear in the following video entitled ‘Darwinism vs Biological Form’, that Darwinists have no real clue how any particular embryo might achieve its final adult form

I think you will find that there are developmental biologists who can provide a great deal of information about how embryos reach their adult form.

Within their theory, Darwinists hold that the basic adult form of any given embryo is ultimately achieved by random mutations to DNA

No, they don't. Seversky

A Darwinist saying something foolish is like a fish getting wet — you expect it. But some foolishness just stands out.

To quote Ronvanwegen, "Give it a break, mate"

A sculpture has more information than the raw material from which the image was sculpted.

Does it? By what definition of "information"? Dr Egnor does not provide one that I can see. To quote a previous example, I can look at a cross-section of a tree-trunk and I will see rings. A dendrochronologist can look at the same rings and infer a great deal about the history of that tree and the environmental conditions through which it passed. Same rings, different information quantity? A lump of marble can be left as is and a geologist can obtain information from it. A sculptor may carve the marble into any number of shapes, both abstract and figurative. Do the resultant shapes have more or less information content than the uncut block and by what measure? Seversky

Of related note: Contrary to what Shallit and other Darwinists presuppose about information, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle's location and/or position converts information into energy.

Maxwell's demon demonstration turns information into energy - November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the "Maxwell demon" thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a "spiral-staircase-like" potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html

And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,"

Demonic device converts information to energy - 2010 Excerpt: "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content," says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. "This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale," says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

Again to repeat that last sentence,“Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, That statement about entropy being a property of an observer who describes the system, for anyone involved in the ID vs. Darwinism debate, ought to send chills down their scientific spine. Simply put, these developments, that have experimentally verified the Maxwell demon thought experiment, go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validate a primary claim from ID proponents that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information into a biological system is necessary in order to circumvent the second law.

Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology – Part II - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSig2CsjKbg

As William Dembski himself stated in 1999, “It is CSI (Complex Specified Information) that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium”

“It is CSI (Complex Specified Information) that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium” William Dembki - Intelligent Design, pg. 159 MOVING ‘FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM’ IN A PREBIOTIC ENVIRONMENT: The role of Maxwell’s Demon in life origin - DAVID L. ABEL Abstract: Can we falsify the following null hypothesis? “A kinetic energy potential cannot be generated by Maxwell’s Demon from an ideal gas equilibrium without purposeful choices of when to open and close the partition’s trap door.” If we can falsify this null hypothesis with an observable naturalistic mechanism, we have moved a long way towards modeling the spontaneous molecular evolution of life. Falsification is essential to discount teleology. But life requires a particular version of “far from equilibrium” that explains formal organization, not just physicodynamic self-ordering as seen in Prigogine’s dissipative structures. Life is controlled and regulated, not just constrained. Life follows arbitrary rules of behavior, not just invariant physical laws. To explain life’s origin and regulation naturalistically, we must first explain the more fundamental question, “How can hotter, faster moving, ideal gas molecules be dichotomized from cooler, slower moving, ideal gas molecules without the Demon’s choice contingency operating the trap door?” https://www.academia.edu/9963341/MOVING_FAR_FROM_EQUILIBRIUM_IN_A_PREBIOTIC_ENVIRONMENT_The_role_of_Maxwell_s_Demon_in_life_origin

To more clearly illustrate just how all this plays out in the ID vs. Evolution debate, it is first important to note that, as I made clear in the following video entitled ‘Darwinism vs Biological Form’, that Darwinists have no real clue how any particular embryo might achieve its final adult form:

Darwinism vs Biological Form - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w

Within their theory, Darwinists hold that the basic adult form of any given embryo is ultimately achieved by random mutations to DNA. Yet, the failure of reductive materialistic explanations to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than mutations to DNA itself. The following article entitled 'Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics', which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that “even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour”,,, The researchers further commented that their findings “challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description."

Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics - December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, "We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s," added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. "So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description." http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html

Thus, not only do Darwinists presently have no clue how an embryo might achieve its adult form, since their theory is based on reductive materialism, it is in fact impossible for them to ever find a real clue as to how an embryo might achieve its adult form.

Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.

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