Information

Wouldn’t that make information reality? From Rachel Thomas’ evaluation of the work of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at PlusMaths: Wheeler categorised his long and productive life in physics into three periods: “Everything is Particles”, “Everything is Fields”, and “Everything is Information”. (You can read more about his life and work in his autobiography, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam.) The driving idea behind the third period was spurred by his contemplation of the age-old question: “How come existence?” And his answer, first published in a brilliantly written (and very entertaining) paper in 1989, was it from bit: “It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in Read More ›

In a 2010 book. So, is the problem with the Theory of Everything that it doesn’t include information? From The Guardian (2010): Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way Book. Blurb: In Decoding Reality, Vlatko Vedral offers a mind-stretching look at the deepest questions about the universe–where everything comes from, why things are as they are, what everything is. The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, he writes, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena. This view Read More ›

From Pos-Darwinista “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology”. – Richard Dawkins, 1991, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 112. Pos-Darwinista adds, I think he got it wrong – if we want to understand life we should and must think about genetic information. Sure, but once it’s “technology,” it is not random or without intelligence. Darwinism cannot bear that weight. But who knows, with enough name recognition, ol’ Dawkins could end up getting credit for developing the idea. See also: Dawkins becomes theistic evolutionist? and The enigma of information Follow UD News at Twitter!

From the Inbox: One of my good memories from grad school days comes from a time in 1968 when I loaded up some fellow students and drove to another campus to spend an afternoon with Leo Kadanoff and take in his colloquium talk. I was impressed by the clarity of his talk and by his easy going manner. He spoke of his work on critical phenomena and described how fluid properties near a critical point could be described by a single parameter – a correlation length. At one point he showed a slide with some experimental data which agreed spectacularly well with the theory over several decades of variation of correlation length, but missed by a little nearest the critical Read More ›

A tribute to his dissertation advisor Leo Kadanoff (1937–2015) from Bill Dembski: I came to know of Leo on a lark, or by providence, depending on one’s view… With dissertations in math, two happy things can happen: (1) an advisor proposes a problem and the student solves it, writes it up, and gets his degree; (2) the student comes up with a problem, solves it, and the advisor deems it worthy of a dissertation. Other things can happen, but they are less happy, such as the inability of solve a problem (whether given by advisor or self-inspired), or solving the problem and then finding out it’s been solved already. From my vantage, it is a credit to Leo and the Read More ›

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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Yesterday we noted new findings that a math paradox might make physics problems unanswerable be unanswerable (and thus maybe turn the physics problems into paradoxes too). Robert Marks II, computer science prof at Baylor U and editor-in-chief of Bio-Complexity , offers some thoughts: Anything algorithmic can be done by a computer. Give me a recipe for doing something, and I can whip it up in the kitchen. There are things which are not algorithmic the most celebrated of which is Turing’s halting problem: there exists no algorithm able tell whether or not a computer program runs forever or halts. (The halting algorithm must work for any and all computer programs.) But a computer program will halt or won’t halt. But Read More ›

A friend asks, and one would think the answer is yes. He had been reading my Data Basic post, “Is Information, Not Matter, the Foundation of Life?” and had noted this: For example, information is a relationship between realized and unrealized possibilities. It is created by ruling out possibilities. It increases when we increase its resolution. The first six digits tell us that a phone rings in one small region. A unique ten-digit number reaches our friend’s cell. I think that he is asking, how can false information be part of the foundation of life, which is real? A couple of thoughts come to mind: – False information has impact. It causes thing to happen Many life form rely on Read More ›

From Casey Luskin’s talk at Evolution News & Views: Information is not always easy to define, but it often involves a measure of degree of randomness. The fundamental intuition behind information is a reduction in possibilities. The more possibilities you rule out, the more information you’ve conveyed. Nature can produce “information” under certain definitions. Intelligent agents also produce information (certain types, at least). As Henry Quastler observed, “The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” To put it another way: The reduction in uncertainty could occur by an intelligent agent, or through a physical occurrence. Types of information and example follow. Conclusion To summarize, Information can be understood and defined in different ways. Some are useful for Read More ›

No, we didn’t come up with that phrase but it is certainly worth considering, considering almost all alternatives. If you doubt that, see “Maybe if we throw enough models at the origin of life… some of them will stick?” From Quanta: The polymath Christoph Adami is investigating life’s origins by reimagining living things as self-perpetuating information strings. … Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as “the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,” and he says we should think of the Read More ›

From Nautilus: We want to believe that a thing is somehow more than the sum of its parts. That if we removed an electron’s charge, its mass, its spin, there would be something leftover, a bald electron, a haecceity, as the philosophers say, a primitive thisness. We want to believe that there is something that it means to be this electron rather than that, even if no observation, experiment, or statistic could ever reveal it. We want to believe in a primitive thisness because we want to believe in a primitive ourness—that should we one day meet our double, a perfect clone down to every detail, every dream, utterly indistinguishable to even the most discerning observer, that still there would Read More ›

That’s what driving while “intexticated” seems to be: An auto safety site in the United States claims that 23% of auto accidents in 2011 involved a cell phone. If correct, that should be no surprise. The minimum distraction is 5 sec, which is just enough to close the “window of opportunity” that our driving instructors told us about—the few seconds when we can avoid an anticipated crash. Fifty-five percent of young adult drivers think it is easy to text while driving, but 10% were found, when studied, to be driving outside their lane at the time. No wonder they call it “driving while intexticated”: Social media addiction comes, like other addictions, with a free I-deny-I-have-a-problem package. A problem yes. But Read More ›

First, let’s see: And again, here is Crick in his March 19, 1953 letter to his son on his discovery: Notice, how emphatic Crick is: “. . . we believe that the D.N.A. is a code . . . “ Obviously leading scientists agree that DNA reflects coded information that is used in identifiable communication networks in the living cell. (Specifically, machine code that controls protein synthesis in the Ribosome: Zooming out a bit: And looking at the wider metabolic network, we see functionally specific, complex organisation aplenty: So, the presence of FSCO/I, for short (including coded information), should not even be an issue. It is therefore perhaps a back-handed sign of the strength of this point y Quastler: . Read More ›

  In September of 2009 I started a new document on my computer entitled “A System of Symbols”, where I was going to write about the part of design theory that interested me the most – that is, the representations that are required for self-replication (von Neumann, Pattee). My goal was to inventory all the physical conditions necessary for one thing to represent another thing in a material universe. I wrote and rewrote that essay for more than four years — reading, learning, and sharing along the way. As it turns out, writing that essay was my way of coming to understand the issues, and I spent a great deal of that time trying to articulate things I had come to Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say, The Wall Street Journal had an article today (28 Oct.) on a game called Compose Yourself created by a cellist named Philip Sheppard “who is passionate about showing people that they are fundamentally musical, and he wants to make learning about music, and composing in particular, more approcachable for children.” The game consists of 60 transparent overlays sized about 4” x 6” that contain short musical phrases of a few notes. These are to be laid side to side to create compositions. The cards can be inverted or flipped over so each one codes for four separate phrases. Each variation is numbered. So when a series of cards are laid down the Read More ›