Mark Solms: Information, in neuroscience, is a crucial concept, and it’s very hard to think about quantum physics and the big questions that are unsolved that flow from it without the concept of information — which, I hasten to draw your attention to the fact, is not matter. I’m not a materialist for exactly that reason.
Information
Laszlo Bencze offers a thought experiment on whether a random mistake can create information
Bencze: Even in this rare case of a random mistake seemingly creating information (Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, The Man-Moth), the ability of an intelligent agent to notice and respond was critically important.
Chemist: Biology points to intelligent design
Rummo: Dr. Patrick, always up for a good challenge, wrote on the board (in Spanish) “This sentence wrote itself.” The group of doctors and medical students debated the nonsense of such a statement for several minutes until finally Dr. Patrick erased the phrase This sentence and replaced it with DNA, adding “But you all believe this statement, don’t you?”
Book excerpt: Navigational genius of insects
Eric Cassell: The Goulds call this curious dance “the second most information-rich exchange in the animal world,”5 second only to human language. That is quite a statement considering the communication is by insects with only 950,000 neurons, compared to humans with about eighty-five billion.
Rob Sheldon on life from the lab: “Information first” is essential
Information first means it can never be random, just as OOL in the lab is not random. But that doesn’t mean that info-first cannot produce OOL. I’ve written a paper on the info-first OOL problem.
At Mind Matters News: How do we know Lincoln contained more information than his bust?
Egnor: Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist.
At Mind Matters News: Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?
As Jeffrey Shallit claims? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods?
At Mind Matters News: How information becomes everything, including life
Without the information that holds us together, we would just be dust floating around the room.
Researcher: Biology transcends the limits of computation
Marshall: The present paper uses information theory (the mathematical foundation of our digital age) and Turing machines (computers) to highlight inaccuracies in prevailing reductionist models of biology, and proposes that the correct causation sequence is cognition > code > chemicals.
At Mind Matters News: New theory of mind offers more information, less materialism
First, let’s begin by noting a remarkable fact: Panpsychism seems to have triumphed in the area of theories of consciousness.
New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism
I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Read More…
Can information be used as a form of energy?
Researchers: Significance: Around 100 y ago, Szilard imagined how to raise a weight without doing any work, just using the information gained by “looking” at a single gas molecule bouncing inside a box. Here, we designed an engine that stores energy by raising a bead against gravity, driven purely by information about the bead position. No work is done directly on the bead; instead, all dissipation occurs in the measuring apparatus.
Bill Dembski on what John Archibald Wheeler got right and wrong about “it from bit”
Dembski agrees that the universe is, at bottom, information but proposes “informational realism” as a sounder approach to unpacking the idea.
Angus Menuge on the mind–body problem: It’s like developing and then writing down an idea
It would be a very poorly designed system if, every time we wanted to raise our arm, we’d have to know how to adjust each and every molecule in our arm or what specific pattern of nerve signals we would have to send. Well, then we’d be unable to act. And likewise, if what matters is that I don’t stub my toe again, all I’ve got to remember is, don’t push your toe like that rather than worrying about how I did it this time. Because the odds are, I’d never do the same physical movement again.
Chemist James Tour interviews William Dembski May 3, 5:00 pm EST
On information theory, his specialty.