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Information

UB’s notes on autocatalytic reaction sets vs languages and symbol systems

UB writes: UB, only way thread, 164: >>My apologies to Origenes, he had asked for my comment, but I was away . . . . I am no expert of course, but thank you for asking me to comment. Frankly you didn’t need my opinion anyway. When you ask “What is the error in supposing something?” you likely already know there is no there there. And someone seriously asking you (like some odd prosecution of your logic) to enumerate what exactly is the biological error or the chemical error in the proposition of something that has never before been seen or recorded in either biology or chemistry — well whatever. Deacon begins by asking the question, what is necessary and Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Is information physical? It depends on what you mean by physical…

Information makes things happen but, curiously, it erases its own history. You’ve read a book in order but can’t know if it was written in that order. Maybe the author started with pivotal Chapter 5, then wrote Chapter 1. Design of any kind does not come with a history included. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Researchers: Humans process information differently from monkeys

The researchers found that, from an information theory perspective, human brains engage in less redundant and more synergistic processing than macaques. So information theory supports human exceptionalism where Darwinism doesn’t? Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Information theory: Evolution as the transfer of information

The authors of the open-access paper, marine researcher Rasmus Skern-Mauritzen and forester Thomas Nygaard Mikkelsen make clear that they understand information to be immaterial. Read More ›

Theoretical physicist on why she stopped working on black hole information loss

Hossenfelder: .... no one can tell which solution is correct in the sense that it actually describes nature, and physicists will not agree on one anyway. Because if they did, they’d have to stop writing papers about it. Read More ›

Intelligent Design=Pattern Recognition

This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing. Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment: Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally clips out, Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Chen, Ph.D., recognized that the clipped pattern in the DNA looked like an L1 inside of the FOXR2 gene. In a moment of serendipity, Diane Flasch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who previously worked with L1s, recognized the signs of an L1 regulatory element. The researchers performed a special technique that sequences longer regions of DNA to decode the Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Does information have mass? An experimental physicist weighs in

Rob Sheldon notes that the more real-world information we have, the less the bits weigh until, at very large amounts of information, they weigh almost nothing. Read More ›

Eric Holloway: Does information weigh something after all? What if it does?

Holloway: If [Melvin] Vopson is correct we now have a mystery because his theory is in tension with the conservation of energy. The only solution is that the system is not closed. So where is the opening in the system? If the system is physically closed, then the influx of information must come from outside the physical realm. Read More ›