From ScienceDaily: It isn’t easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don’t know exactly how these genes work. Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public “library” to help researchers to find out what […]
Information
At Quanta: Cells find “optimal” solutions, not just good ones
What then becomes of “bad design” arguments, like those of Nathan Lents? In a transient world, any solution can only be optimal for a given life, as it must be factored against other lives.
Theorizing information out of a black hole
Not really being able to integrate information with matter and energy surely means it is hard to say whether information could really be destroyed.
Paul Davies: Incorporating information into science as a physical quantity
In a world where some believe that consciousness must be a material thing, perhaps it’s not surprising that others seek to see information as a physical quantity. Computer scientist Robert J. Marks would ask, what is the weight difference between a full CD and an empty one? Could we start there?
Spiders mimic two different ant types while growing (but secretly signal spidery mates)
Yeah, the story does sound like as plotline from Saturday night with popcorn at the old Downtown Grand but… From ScienceDaily: Viewed from above, the mimics look like skinny, three-segmented ants to fool predators. But in profile, the adult mimics retain their more voluptuous and alluring spider figure to woo nearby mates. UC researchers presented […]
Endangered languages: Efforts to save them sometimes involve questionable claims
On major human issues, there are many personal histories and philosophies but no distinct rational mode of thinking that absolutely prevents conversion to another language.
Paul Davies and the “struggle to define life”
Information is the key? Wait till they discover the Law of Conservation of Information and try applying it to the hapless popular Darwinism that dominates biology today.
Paul Davies: Life’s defining characteristics “better understood as information”
The problem with taking information seriously in the evolution of life, as in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, is that it may rule out favorite “evolution” claims. Taking it seriously and discounting it whenever it matters is a fancy dance.
An information theory argument for the value of human beings
From Eric Holloway, based on creativity: Because creativity is unique to humans and irreducible, all human beings have the ability in principle. The fact that a particular human being’s creativity is not in use or is perhaps unusable at present does not mean that that person does not have the ability. Consequently, all humans have […]
Will AI art end the artist’s life?
Artists can instantiate their ideas more efficiently using better tools. Michelangelo could be more precise than the Stone Age cave artists. But artists can’t just use AI to automate creativity so that the machine writes masterpieces while they doze off. Information does not create and arrange itself via magic.
Real Intelligence Can Never Be Matched by the Artificial
Scary predictions are a thriving business but that does not make them a road map to the future.
Will artificial intelligence design artificial super-intelligence?
Current indications are that Moore’s law’s speed has already slowed or even ceased to be a true description of the information technology (IT) industry today…
Steve Meyer on the information enigma in evolution
Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, offers a handy illustration of the sort of specified complexity that life forms show, which indicates design, in an April 2018 essay: Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source. Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully […]
Plato’s Library: Why information is the true source of new wealth
Jonathan Bartlett explains the relationship between information and prosperity as set out in Eric Holloway’s new paper: our ability to “read from Plato’s Library” of new ideas provides us with an ever-growing supply of
side information that powers the economy.
Eric Holloway: How can we measure meaningful information?
Neither randomness nor order alone create meaning. So how can we identify communications in a scientifically meaningful way? Dropping a handful of toothpicks on the table seems to produce a different sort of pattern than spelling out a word with toothpicks. Surprisingly, this intuitive distinction is harder to make in math and the sciences. Algorithmic […]