Sheldon: It is curious that the author of this Aeon article has frozen Wheeler at his second stage, neglecting to mention his final conclusion.
Information
Origin of Life: A review of Paul Davies’ Demon in the Machine
Fernandez: Throughout Demon, Davies injects comments always in support of the Materialistic Darwinist position.
The computer revolution did not show that information could be produced from nothing
Computer engineer Robert J. Marks and colleagues demonstrated that there is still no such thing as a free lunch where information is concerned.
Does communication between predator and prey shape evolution?
Fascinating info about snakes’ warning signals but the author ends up defending dumb Darwinism which, increasingly, complicates explanations. One must come up with a Darwinian explanation for things instead of just reporting and learning from them. Or asking what the information probability is, for this type of change.
How is information present in life?
Marks: For example, if I burn a book to ashes and scatter the ashes around, have I destroyed information? Does it make a difference if there’s another copy of the book?
Sabine Hossenfelder: The black hole information problem is not solvable
Hossenfelder: Today I comment on the recent claim that the black hole information loss problem is “near its end” and explain why this is nonsense.
At Forbes: Hawking’s black hole paradox is NOT solved
Ethan Siegel looks at the limitations: But we’re still a long way away from determining exactly where that information goes, and how it gets out of a black hole. Theorists disagree over the validity and soundness of many of the methods that are currently being employed to do these calculations, and no one has even a theoretical prediction for how this information should be encoded by an evaporating black hole, much less how to measure it.
Jonathan Bartlett: Elon Musk inadvertently tumbles to a big problem in origin of life theory
Bartlett: Indeed, whatever the difficulty of creating life in the lab, making individual prototypes is not nearly as problematic as making “the machine that makes the machine,” which all reproducing living cells can do. That is, the ability of an organism to reproduce is at least an order of magnitude harder that the ability of an organism to just live.
Steve Meyer on James Tour’s podcast
“In this interview, Dr. James Tour and Dr. Stephen Meyer discuss science and faith, while getting into the details on the discovery of complex, sequence specific information required for life’s function and origin, and the required fine-tuned laboratory that we call our universe that must exist in order for assembly to occur.” People are taking reality seriously? What next, we wonder?
Is information really the fifth state of matter? Rob Sheldon responds
Sheldon: Throughout history we have examples of these bad physics generalizations. For example, heat was once considered a fluid embedded in the oak log, absorbed from the sun, called phlogiston. As it turned out, heat is not a material substance.
Eric Holloway: Dembski’s filter is critical for internet communication
It turns out that legions of critics of the explanatory filter use it all the time, without noticing.
Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters
Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Read More…
New paper at Biocomplexity by Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón and Robert J. Marks II
Paper’s conclusion: We have proposed extension of active information for domains other than those confined to a finite interval. Maximum entropy (maxent) is defined on domains other than a finite interval.
When science writer John Horgan reluctantly sort of acknowledged: Information implies minds
Horgan: The concept of information makes no sense in the absence of something to be informed—that is, a conscious observer capable of choice, or free will (sorry, I can’t help it, free will is an obsession).
New vid: What is information?
The fact that anyone is taking information seriously is a big step forward.