Gobsmackingly Stupid Things Atheists Say, Example 8,264

_{Barry Arrington

June 13, 2016

Intelligent Design}

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Jason Rosenhouse writes:

We certainly do not know a priori that piles of bricks do not form images of imaginary unicorns, and it is not logically impossible that they do.

UPDATE:

I decided I could not resist adding Example 8,265 from the some post:

I do not know how the chemical reactions and electrical firings inside my head lead to mental images, but there is copious evidence that they do and zero evidence that anything non-physical is involved

Wow. How does Rosenhouse deal with all of the evidence contrary to his position? Easy peasy. Fiat. Just declare that it does not exist.

Turns out the hard problem of consciousness is not so hard after all. All David Chalmers needed to do was call up Jason Rosenhouse and the conversation would have gone something like this

Dave: Hey, Jason, I have all of these observations that I cannot fit into monist categories. The observations are so puzzling that I have coined a term, the “hard problem of consciousness.”

Jason: Do tell.

David: Yep. I have all of this evidence. How do I deal with it Jason?

Jason: Easy. The evidence does not exist.

David: I’m pretty sure it does.

Jason: Nope. You are wrong. It does not exist.

David. Well, OK then. I’m glad we talked. That’s a load off my mind.

In all seriousness, this is a persistent problem that materialists don’t seem to be able to understand, far less overcome. They genuinely seem to believe that evidence that does not persuade them is “non-evidence” instead of “unpersuasive-to-me-evidence.” See here where I discussed this in depth. Especially amusing is the smug certitude with which Rosenhouse and his ilk dismiss all evidence contrary to their position as if it does not exist. It must be nice to live in a bubble of incurious certitude where one’s beliefs are never challenged because anything that could possibly challenge them does not, by fiat, exist. Nice, but boring.

Comments

MatSpirit @107:
That’s been my point all along. All information is embodied in the arrangement of matter.
Well, that is precisely the opposite of what Phineas is pointing out. If all you mean is that information can be stored or transmitted using matter, then sure. That is well known.
The information is encoded in the material, but it is not the material.
If you mean that a physical medium can store and transmit information, then yes. However, you seem to be arguing that there is information contained in a physical object itself, by its mere existence. That is incorrect, and is based on a misunderstanding of how information arises, coupled with poor definitions.
The material is necessary, however. If you removed every atom from the cylinder and replaced it with nothing, there would be nothing for your calipers to measure.
All this means is that if there weren't any atoms making up a cylinder then there wouldn't be a physical object called a "cylinder" to measure. It has nothing to do with the concept of information. It is just a restatement of the pedestrian observation that what exists, exists.
If anybody doubts this, the best way to refute it is to show us some information that exists without matter.
Information always precedes the physical medium in which it is stored or transmitted. The only way the physical medium can ever contain information is if that information existed prior to being encoded in a particular symbolic language, and prior to that encoded language being represented in the physical medium. And the information is always translatable, transmittable, and able to continue existing even if the original physical medium is lost or destroyed. It was not, and is not, reducible to the physical medium or inextricably tied to the physical medium. They are fundamentally separate from each other.Eric Anderson_{July 25, 2016
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MatSpirit @106: Your example is no different from the ones I discussed previously to show why the information is not in the matter itself. Any example you can ever come up with will suffer from the same issues.
Now suppose someone hands you a cylinder, but doesn’t tell you its dimensions except to say it’s not 5x10cm. Is it possible to measure the cylinder and make a blueprint from it? Sure. You use your trusty calipers to measure the diameter, which turns out to be 7cm and you write that down on the blueprint. Then you measure the length and it turns out to be 15cm and you write that down on the blueprint. You give the cylinder to a metallurgist and he tells you it’s pure aluminum and you write that down on the blueprint. The blueprint now contains enough information so you can hand it to a machinist and he can make a duplicate cylinder.
Yep. A great example of an intelligent agent using the tools of investigation and discovery to generate information about the cylinder. That newly-generated information can now be encoded in a symbolic, language-based system (such as the blueprint) and can be translated, transmitted, conveyed, and so forth, just like any other piece of information.
So where did the information come from? Not from your mind. You didn’t know the dimensions until you measured them. From the calipers? It was right on the dial, after all. But how did those numbers get on the dial? To measure the cylinder’s length, you moved the caliper’s jaws until one jaw was just touching one end and the other jaw was just touching the opposite end and read the length from the dial.
Of course the information came from your mind. It came as the result of an intelligent agent performing an investigative task and then producing information about the cylinder. Calipers don’t exist in a vacuum, the units of measurement don’t exist in a vacuum, the resulting blueprint doesn’t poof into existence from the cylinder itself. The entire exercise is one of an intelligent agent producing information about a physical object. If you doubt this, remove the intelligent agent from the process and see what you get. Erase the units of measurement on the calipers; eliminate the ability of the agent to read and understand the measurements; get rid of the symbolic, coded language in which the blueprint is created. The entire exercise of producing information is one of intelligent activity – activity driven by the mind of the investigator, the mind of the intelligent agents who use an agreed-upon symbolic language to represent the information, the mind of the intelligent agent who produced the calipers and set forth the units of measure. Not a single step of the process leads to information without a mind. Imagine a windstorm or a dog accidentally bumped the caliper points up against the ends of the cylinder. What information do you imagine would be produced as a result? Nothing at all. Not until an intelligent agent comes along who knows how to utilize calipers, understands the units of measure, and has the intent to produce information about the cylinder. Again, you are conflating the process of producing information about something with the idea that the physical object somehow contains the information in the first place. It doesn’t. This is in stark contrast to something like DNA, or a book, or a computer program, in which the string itself contains information or represents something outside of itself. The cylinder does no such thing. It doesn’t contain any information and doesn’t represent anything beyond itself. If, engraved on the side of the cylinder were a message about the length, diameter, makeup and so-on of the cylinder, then, yes, the cylinder would contain information about itself. Information that could be read, translated, encoded, transmitted. But with your blank cylinder, no such information exists unless and until the intelligent agent produces it.
But what are the jaws touching? THE ATOMS of the ends of the cylinder. You are reading the information encoded in the 3-D positions of the atoms of the cylinder!
You are playing word games here. You cannot just assert, as a matter of definitional fiat, that every characteristic of a physical object constitutes information. No. It constitutes a physical characteristic. Nothing more or less. You are also playing games with the concept of information encoding. By measuring a physical object I am certainly not "reading information encoded" in the object. I am simply measuring a physical characteristic of the object. Then I am producing information about that physical object, using my tools of investigation and my intellectual ability. That is the way information arises. That is the way it always works.Eric Anderson_{July 25, 2016
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Phinehas @ 104
The moment you talk about information being “embodied” you’ve pretty much conceded that the information and the “body” it is embodied in are two different things, haven’t you?
That's been my point all along. All information is embodied in the arrangement of matter. In the example above, it's in the 3-D positions of the atoms in the cylinders. The information is definitely not in the atoms. You could remove every atom from the cylinder and replace it with a different aluminum atom and as long as the new atoms were in the same 3-d locations as the originals, you would read the same information on your caliper dial and write the same numbers on your blueprint. The information is encoded in the material, but it is not the material. The material is necessary, however. If you removed every atom from the cylinder and replaced it with nothing, there would be nothing for your calipers to measure. The information is the pattern, not in the matter. If anybody doubts this, the best way to refute it is to show us some information that exists without matter.MatSpirit_{July 10, 2016
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Eric, I'm back for a few days. I thought of a good example of how information is imbedded in all matter. Let's start with a simple blueprint for an aluminum cylinder 5cm in diameter and 10cm long. Does everybody agree that a good blueprint provides enough information to make a cylinder? You'll find the diameter and length on the blueprint along with any other needed information such as the alloy to make it from. Now suppose someone hands you a cylinder, but doesn't tell you its dimensions except to say it's not 5x10cm. Is it possible to measure the cylinder and make a blueprint from it? Sure. You use your trusty calipers to measure the diameter, which turns out to be 7cm and you write that down on the blueprint. Then you measure the length and it turns out to be 15cm and you write that down on the blueprint. You give the cylinder to a metallurgist and he tells you it's pure aluminum and you write that down on the blueprint. The blueprint now contains enough information so you can hand it to a machinist and he can make a duplicate cylinder. So where did the information come from? Not from your mind. You didn't know the dimensions until you measured them. From the calipers? It was right on the dial, after all. But how did those numbers get on the dial? To measure the cylinder's length, you moved the caliper's jaws until one jaw was just touching one end and the other jaw was just touching the opposite end and read the length from the dial. But what are the jaws touching? THE ATOMS of the ends of the cylinder. You are reading the information encoded in the 3-D positions of the atoms of the cylinder! The metallurgist examined the atoms to find out what type they were and you wrote the results down on the blueprint. That information was encoded in the atom's make-up. All the information on your new blueprint was originally in the atoms of that cylinder. You used whatever tools were appropriate for the material aND the in formation you were measuring. I hope that clarifies things for you.MatSpirit_{July 10, 2016
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EA @ 100: It's funny how often the arguments seem to come back to the insistence that there must not be a God even when that wasn't even the subject. That insistence is like the black hole around which the Atheist's thinking revolves. It's gravitational pull is ever-present and cannot be denied. Everything is about God not existing. It's a bit embarrassing to be honest.Phinehas_{June 27, 2016
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The moment you talk about information being "embodied" you've pretty much conceded that the information and the "body" it is embodied in are two different things, haven't you?Phinehas_{June 27, 2016
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The fundamental distinction must be between fact and opinion. Information is a matter of fact issue, therefore information is material. Also, objects can be described in terms of consisting of the laws of nature, rather than that objects follow the laws of nature. Then objects compute information. Mathematics is the obvious theory of everything.mohammadnursyamsu_{June 27, 2016
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mohammad @101: Technically, no. Bits and bytes relate to a measurement of channel capacity, not information, in any substantive sense of the word. But more to the point, the question at issue relates to whether information is purely physical. If it is physical, then, by definition, it must be measurable by one or more of the universally-recognized units of physical measurement, not just by some statistical construct. See my comment #62 for the units we are dealing with.Eric Anderson_{June 27, 2016
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bits and bytes are measurement units of information?mohammadnursyamsu_{June 27, 2016
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MatSpirit: What in the world are you talking about? Why do you keep bringing religion into the discussion? We're addressing a couple of straightforward evidentiary issues -- issues that you, again and again, have studiously avoided. 1. First, is everything material? I have given good reasons for thinking that something we deal with every day in our own lives and in the real world -- information -- cannot be reduced to the physical and the material. We haven't even started to deal with hard problems like consciousness. In the meantime, you have provided no evidence that everything is material, other than a semantic word game relating to the physical characteristics of physical objects, coupled with some unsupported assertions about memory and mind being fully material. 2. Second, if information is material, what units of measure can we use to measure it? Again, you have completely avoided the issue and, therefore, have failed to support your position. Worse, your failure to seriously grapple with the issue suggests that you likely are either unable or unwilling to address it. That is alright. We knew the answer to the question when we asked it, so your refusal to engage the question doesn't detract from our understanding and instead only speaks to your unwillingness to address the central issues and to question your preconceptions. ----- It is ironic that you jumped in here with guns blazing, hoping to teach those foolish ID proponents about information. Now that you have been schooled, I hope you will be more cautious in the future. More importantly, I hope you will take some time to actually think through the issues, rather than just throwing out general materialist claims, coupled with irrelevant religious aspersions.Eric Anderson_{June 27, 2016
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It is obvious that if you rely solely on evidence, you are only ever come up with facts, and not opinions. Besides facts, opinions also define the reality of a situation very much. A woman, a beautiful woman, these are very different situations. One cannot break down beauty into a factual matter, which means the existence of the love for the way the woman looks cannot be a fact, it must be a matter of opinion.mohammadnursyamsu_{June 26, 2016
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Eric, I'm going to reply to @97 first. I don't assume a priori that the physical world is all there is. I don't know anybody who does. My CONCLUSION is that evidence for the material is strong and pretty much self consistent while the evidence for the supernatural is very weak and conflicts with itself. Most of the "evidence" amounts to just someone's word, usually someone who's been dead for over a thousand years. It usually contradicts someone else's thousand year old testimony. People who believe one man's ancient testimony usually disagree with some other thousand year old testimony. One part of one thousand year old testimony often conflicts with other parts of the same testimony. Much of the testimony is palpable wrong. The rest of the "evidence" is usually "philisophical" "reasoning" so poor it goes by the name of theology. I don’t expect you to toss out your worldview based on a single discussion online. But, please, at least allow yourself to honestly and sincerely consider the possibility that your assumption is incorrect. Let it percolate. I won't ask you to view the world for a few weeks without the assumption in place, because religeous assumptions normally grab their victim at at an emotional level where rationaliry has little influence, but try as best you can and see how it goes.MatSpirit_{June 26, 2016
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MatSpirit @92: Your comment was for Origines, but I couldn't help notice the logical issue at stake: Are you at least able to see, able to grasp, that the reason you have the position you do about how the mind and memory and intelligence works is because you assume a priori that the physical is all there is? ----- Yes, if we assume there is nothing but the physical and the materials, we might draw some of the conclusions you do. But if you are willing to question your assumption, which some others are willing to do, it turns out the evidence for a purely materialistic viewpoint is not nearly so strong. I don't expect you to toss out your worldview based on a single discussion online. But, please, at least allow yourself to honestly and sincerely consider the possibility that your assumption is incorrect. Let it percolate. Allow yourself to view the world for a few weeks without the assumption in place, and see how it goes.Eric Anderson_{June 25, 2016
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If I understand correctly, the ID story is that some unidentified, undetectable supernatural agent acting at a time and place unknown arranged matter into patterns that are living creatures.
The intelligent design inference only relates to whether something was designed. Yes, it is an inference – an inference made on the basis of how we understand the world works, as well as literally billions of examples of designed systems. Furthermore, we know for a fact that an intelligent being can create information. And we know for a fact that an intelligent being can create complex, integrated, functioning machines. And we know for a fact that an intelligent being has the ability to choose much of the details of that design process: the when, the why, often the how. As a result, there is much that ID does not seek to explain. It is not a theory of everything. It is not intended to be. Opponents may be disappointed that ID does not seek to answer all questions, but that is a failing of their expectations, not a failing of ID. In contrast, the materialist creation story is, by definition, a mechanistic story. If there is no concrete, identifiable mechanism to produce the artifact in question the theory must fail. Furthermore, in stark contrast to the experience we have with intelligent design all around us, there is not a single example in all the world of molecules coming together by themselves to form life, or even a self-replicating molecule. There is not a single example of a materialistic process forming a complex, functional, information-rich system. The weight of evidence between intelligent design and the materialist creation story is very much on the intelligent design side. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark.
On the other hand, every cell in your body is stuffed full of molecules that replicate themselves and every other protein in your body.
No. There is no self-replicating molecule. That is part of the failure of the materialist creation myth right out of the gate. It posits an entity that has never been seen and that we have good reason to think probably does not, and very likely cannot, exist in the real world. The problem isn’t just that the specific, particular self-replicating molecule that started the evolutionary story hasn’t been identified. The problem is that nothing of its kind has even been identified. Nothing in the class of objects that it claims to be from has been found. It is a pure hypothetical. And one that flies in the face of what we understand of chemistry and physics.
Please forgive us if we think that your unidentified-undetectable-cosmically-unlikely-supernatural-designer-builder-that-mimics-evolution doesn’t exist and that instead of that a few atoms being jostled around by the elements got put into a small 3-D configuration that managed to reproduce itself faster than it was destroyed, thus unleashing the information generating power of evolution.
You are forgiven, but your alternative is quite a joke. A few atoms got jostled around and became a molecule that reproduces itself? Seriously? And then it unleashed the “information generating power of evolution!?” What in the world is that? Please do tell us how this evolution you propose generates vast quantities of information. Is it just another string of accidents, a sequence of more atoms “being jostled around?” Inquiring minds want to know. A long string of accidental particle collisions. That’s it. That’s the materialist creation story. There is nothing more substantive to it than that. ----- BTW, can you please get back to the questions that started this discussion and which you have so studiously avoided: 1. Is “extrinsic” information physical or non-physical? 2. If physical, which of the seven fundamental units of measure can be used to measure it?Eric Anderson_{June 25, 2016
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MatSpirit
On the other hand, every cell in your body is stuffed full of molecules that replicate themselves and every other protein in your body. They’re called ribosomes. Please forgive us if we think that your unidentified-undetectable-cosmically-unlikely-supernatural-designer-builder-that-mimics-evolution doesn’t exist and that instead of that a few atoms being jostled around by the elements got put into a small 3-D configuration that managed to reproduce itself faster than it was destroyed, thus unleashing the information generating power of evolution.
What do you think the mechanism is that Is "the information generating power of evolution" ? What type of information is it generating? Complex DNA sequences? Reproducing something faster than it is destroyed creates information? If you take your cell phone and reproduce the contents on 100 new I phones. These phone numbers are information as you described. Will this process create new information? If we define a subset of information as sequences, or purposeful arrangement of objects like the 0 thru 9 numbers stored as electronic bits on your cell phone, will it create new sequences or phone numbers?bill cole_{June 25, 2016
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MatSpirit @89:
Shannon was a communications engineer working for Ma Bell. He was concerned with transmitting data over a noisy communications channel, so the only kind of information he dealt with was the extrinsic information you can modulate an electrical current or radio wave with. That’s what most people think of when they they think of information . . .
Actually he wasn't so much concerned with information at all, rather the communication channel. But I understand your point. In any case, Shannon has little relevance for the issues we are discussing.
. . . but there’s another whole world of information imbedded in physical objects such as atoms and statues.
Again, you can call a physical characteristic of a physical object "information," but that does not make it so. A physical characteristic of an object is just that: a physical characteristic, and whatever the characteristic is, is what it is -- there is nothing more profound or substantive to it than that. You are ignoring the exercise I laid out in detail about the observer, who is the real source of any information we have about a physical object. We can't just blithely skip over that step of the analysis. Even in all the examples you have provided of physical characteristics, the information you are conveying is itself "extrinsic" information -- it is about something. Furthermore, it is meaningless to call every physical characteristic of every object "information." All that would mean is that information is everywhere, in everything, all around us. Which might seem like a fun idea, but it is utterly useless as a scientific exercise. It is no more helpful than saying "what exists, exists." Critically, that so-called "intrinsic" information throughout the universe would just lie there in all those physical objects dormant, hidden from sight, never available, utterly useless for any rational or scientific inquiry . . . until, as I laid out in detail, an observer comes along, studies the object in question and produces information about the object in question: Real information -- encodable, transmittable, translatable, usable information -- the stuff we deal with in the real world, not in some hypothetical semantic exercise. Additionally, as stated previously, even if we took the view that "intrinsic" information is everywhere in everything, then it would not help one iota in answering the issues we are interested in for purposes of biology. Finally, it would not demonstrate that all information is "physical," as some materialists claim. You have already acknowledged some of the characteristics of "extrinsic" information (encodable, transmittable, translatable), which is good. So we can ask again, the key questions that continue to be avoided: 1. Is "extrinsic" information physical or non-physical? 2. If physical, which of the seven fundamental units of measure can be used to measure it? Alternatively, please go ahead and acknowledge that extrinsic information is non-physical and is not amenable to measurement by the fundamental units of physical measure. That would go a long way toward underscoring your objectivity in the discussion. -----
. . . you can’t transmit atoms or statues through an information channel.
Definitely agree.Eric Anderson_{June 25, 2016
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I probably won't post tomorrow. It's Field Day for amateur radio operators and then there's a very big municipal fireworks display at dusk.MatSpirit_{June 24, 2016
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Origenes @88: Alex Rosenburg: "There is nothing in the whole universe—including, of course, all the neurons in your brain—that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter. …. Physics and neuroscience both tell us, for different reasons, that one clump of matter can’t be about another clump of matter. Computer science combines both to show that human brain states can’t really be about stuff for exactly the same reason that the internal workings of your laptop can’t really be about anything at all." ----------------------------------- > I've read Rosenburg's book and statements like the above made me toss it aside half way through. The man should know better. The human brain, and every other brain big enough to see without a microscope, spends a lot of time and energy surveying the world, sorting the sense impressions, and storing data in memory about what it sees. Evolution has stored more data in memory during gestation. You've probably seen some of the videos that have been circulating around the intertubes showing cats that have had sticks stealthily placed behind them. When the cats see them out of the corner of their eye, the poor animals just about jump out of their skins. Yet Rosenburg apparently doesn't believe that a "lump of matter" called neuronal synapses, probably in the cats amydiglia, are not about snakes and what to do if one sneaks up on you. He's a philosopher who doesn't know his science.MatSpirit_{June 24, 2016
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Uptight Biped @83: "How, therefore, we must ask, is it possible for us to distinguish the living from the lifeless if we can describe both conceptually by the motion of inorganic corpuscles?" Karl Pearson The Grammar of Science I found that at the beginning of Pattee's paper. My answer: The inorganic atoms that are arranged so they reproduce themselves while making a living from the world around them are the living.MatSpirit_{June 24, 2016
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Eric: (a) "Someone – an astronomer, a scientist, some other intelligent agent – using intellectual capacity and tools of discovery,discovers a physical object. The intelligent agent now has some information that he did not previously have. The information arose from his intellectual capacity and his use of tools of discovery." Somewhere a praying mantis, using his basically nonexistant intellectual capacity and his eyes, discovers a physical object. He now has some information he did not have, the object's bug-like size and shape and 3-D location. He lunges towards that location and some unlucky bug becomes his lunch. No intelligence involved. Lots of pattern recognition, though. And patterns are information, so the unintelligent mantis is doing lots of information processing. Quit worrying about intelligence. It's all material. Now what else can we do with 3-D information? Well, if we take several thousand atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and others and move each atom to one specific place, compared to all the others, we get a ribosome and we can make proteins with it. Here's something to think about. Every year, just about every atom in your body is changed. Yet you continue to exist. How can this be? Because you are the pattern your atoms are arranged in. The atoms are switched out with identical replacements in the same positions. The overall pattern does not change, so life goes on. Every atom in your body is (literally) as dead as a door nail. Yet the pattern of those atoms - their type and 3-D placement - make up your living body, busily staying alive while replacing itself every year. And patterns are information. If those atoms were replaced with different types of atoms or deposited in random places, the pattern would be changed and you would die. Eric: "Well, that is quite a story – from the alleged, hypothetical, never-before-seen self-replicating molecule, to the claim that extrinsic information would just “evolve” naturally." If I understand correctly, the ID story is that some unidentified, undetectable supernatural agent acting at a time and place unknown arranged matter into patterns that are living creatures. For some reason, He made an inordinately large percentage of the animals that are big enough to be seen with the naked eye beetles. Every organism he originally made is extinct now, but new ones (also made by Him) have replaced them. About half of the organisms He made, including the malaria organism which preys mainly on children, make their living by killing and eating the other half of the organisms He made. Most curious of all, this supernatural being did His work in such a way as to make it look like evolution did it. That's quite a story. On the other hand, every cell in your body is stuffed full of molecules that replicate themselves and every other protein in your body. They're called ribosomes. Please forgive us if we think that your unidentified-undetectable-cosmically-unlikely-supernatural-designer-builder-that-mimics-evolution doesn't exist and that instead of that a few atoms being jostled around by the elements got put into a small 3-D configuration that managed to reproduce itself faster than it was destroyed, thus unleashing the information generating power of evolution. I think it's way more likely.MatSpirit_{June 24, 2016
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Eric @85: "So when we look at a physical object, such as your atoms, we might do well to promptly ask, 'How can we translate an oxygen atom into Spanish?' 'How can we translate a ring of Saturn into Russian?' The very articulation of the question clashes with our grammatical and logical sensibilities. And it does so precisely because we are asking a nonsensical question, like the old example, 'What number is the color yellow?'” If you remember your Shannon, one of the things information does is answer questions. Every bit should reduce the uncertainty of your answer by half. How do we distinguish an oxygen atom from a hydrogen atom? Primarily by the number of protons in the atom's nucleus. The hydrogen atom has one and the oxygen atom has eight. That's information. You've got two atoms. How do you tell which is hydrogen and which is oxygen? Count the protons. The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom is part of the atom's intrinsic information and it most certainly exists. If you're building a molecule and you need a hydrogen atom to put at a certain place, you can count protons in the two camdidate atoms and unerringly select the hydrogen atom and put it in place and the molecule will work. (Like, for instance, joinIng amino acids to make a protein.) You don't even have to see the hydrogen atom. Just knowing that it has one electron will tell you that. Shannon was a communications engineer working for Ma Bell. He was concerned with transmitting data over a noisy communications channel, so the only kind of information he dealt with was the extrinsic information you can modulate an electrical current or radio wave with. That's what most people think of when they they think of information, but there's another whole world of information imbedded in physical objects such as atoms and statues. Think of it as the information that Shannon's extrinsic information is about. Intrinsic information didn't concern Shannon because you can't transmit atoms or statues through an information channel. If you wanted to translate an oxygen atom to Russian, you couldn't, just like you can't send one through a communications channel. But you could count the protons and translate that extrinsic information (eight) into Russian (?????? if Google translation is correct.) Continued next message.MatSpirit_{June 24, 2016
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Information is about stuff — surely the 'semantic information' which Upright and Pattee are talking about. There is A which is about B. However this simple concept of 'aboutness' cannot be accommodated by naturalism, at least not according to philosopher Alex Rosenberg:
There is nothing in the whole universe—including, of course, all the neurons in your brain—that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter. .... Physics and neuroscience both tell us, for different reasons, that one clump of matter can’t be about another clump of matter. Computer science combines both to show that human brain states can’t really be about stuff for exactly the same reason that the internal workings of your laptop can’t really be about anything at all.
I wonder what Pattee's thoughts are on this.Origenes_{June 24, 2016
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UB @86: Thanks for the comments and for the interesting quote. I'm gratified to see Dr. Pattee's statement and I'll have to check out his paper. I tend to base my position and conclusions on my own research and analysis, rather than the views of "experts". But it is always nice to run across an expert in the field who agrees! :)Eric Anderson_{June 24, 2016
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Hello Eric. Matt, you're conflating "physical information" (which is a wholly anthropocentric misconception) with actual semantic information. It's causing you to misunderstand the core issues. When done intentionally it amounts to self-deception. Listen to what Eric is telling you. Here also are the words of a physicist. He is probably the world's leading researcher on the physics of information. He is also an atheist, and a "soft" reductionist. You have no reason to believe he is misleading you:
It is important to emphasize this epistemic necessity of the complementarity of laws and measurements since it is often ignored. Reductionists try to avoid the epistemic cut and take an entirely objective, unified, or reified view of information as if it exists in the structures of the physical world independent of an organism or observer. Such a view is possible only because formal or structural information measures can, in fact, be applied to any physical structure without regard to its epistemic function in construction, measurement, prediction, or control. That is, structural information measures need have no relation to fitness, function, or meaning. This gratuitous use of structural information measures, while it may be made formally consistent with physical theory, simply has no significance for the naturally selected semantic information in biological systems and for predictive information used in control systems. HH Pattee - The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls Department of Systems Science State University of New York at Binghamton
You can find this paper, and others, on the Bibliography of my website. Biosemiosis.org .Upright BiPed_{June 23, 2016
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Thanks, MatSpirit, for your detailed response. We are getting a little closer to the heart of the matter, so let me drill down one more level deeper in our analysis.
The particles would have lots of intrinsic information – what types of atom they are plus their positions, for instance . . .
What you mean to say is that the particles “have lots of physical characteristics”. That is certainly true. And if a physical object had different physical characteristics then it would be a different physical object. Which is to say that each physical object (a) exists, and (b) has certain physical characteristics. Meaning: it is what it is. There is nothing more profound or substantive than that basic observation: physical objects exist and have certain physical characteristics. Now we could, through an unfortunate abuse of the English language, refer to each physical characteristic of an object as “information.” But notwithstanding the fact that some people have done just that, such a semantic play does not add any meaning or substance to the discussion. Furthermore, if we step back and look at the kinds of characteristics true information has, we realize that the physical characteristics of a physical object don’t quite seem to fit. For example, some of the essentially universal characteristics of information are that it can be represented or encoded, it can be stored, it can be transmitted, and it can be translated. I can take any piece of information (in the normal sense of that word) and I can encode it in a language or other symbolic system, I can then translate it into another language (for example, into Spanish), I can also store it by using a symbolic system, and I can freely transmit it to a receiver. So when we look at a physical object, such as your atoms, we might do well to promptly ask, “How can we translate an oxygen atom into Spanish?” “How can we translate a ring of Saturn into Russian?” The very articulation of the question clashes with our grammatical and logical sensibilities. And it does so precisely because we are asking a nonsensical question, like the old example, “What number is the color yellow?” The disconnect arises because we are asking a question about something that can be done with information (translation) with respect to something that is not information (a physical object). This is not yet a full argument, but this disconnect between the kinds of things we can do with information and the kinds of things we can do with a physical object should give the thoughtful person pause. Let us now answer the source of that intellectual unease by going back to the start and explaining what you really mean when you say that a physical object has intrinsic information. Let us consider how the information you think is intrinsically in the object really comes about. Here is what happens: (a) Someone – an astronomer, a scientist, some other intelligent agent – using intellectual capacity and tools of discovery, discovers a physical object. The intelligent agent now has some information that he did not previously have. The information arose from his intellectual capacity and his use of tools of discovery. (b) The intelligent agent, using intellectual capacity and tools of measurement, measures the physical object. The intelligent agent now has some additional information that he did not previously have. The information resulted from his intellectual capacity and his use of tools of measurement. In science, we often call this information “data.” (c) The intelligent agent, using intellectual capacity and an agreed-upon system of weights and measures, together with an agreed-upon symbolic language, encodes the results of those measurements in some encoding system – a prose language, mathematical formulae, digital images, etc. This is now encoded information, and like any encoded information, is now available for storage, transmission, and translation. The particular media used to store or transmit the information is substantively irrelevant to the information itself, and is a matter of convenience and convention. The information is not tied to the medium. Now, if we are careful in our analysis, there are a couple of additional instructive observations we can take from the above process. First, at each stage of the process, the intelligent agent could halt the process and choose not to proceed further. For example, after discovering the mere existence of the physical object, the intelligent agent may well stop there, never doing any further measurements. After measuring, he might never proceed to encode, store, or transmit the information to anyone else. After encoding, storing, or transmitting the information, the recipient may not retrieve or understand or properly translate the information; or there may not even be a recipient. At each stage, the question of whether we obtain more or less information or whether that information is stored, transmitted, translated or used, is dependent on the intellectual activity and the choice of an intelligent agent, not on the object itself. Second, the information that is gleaned from the above exercise was not in the physical object. Rather, it is information about the physical object, produced by the intelligent agent through his intellectual activity. And that information can continue to exist, and can exist in multiple forms, in multiple languages, stored in various places, even if the physical object ceases to exist. In that sense, yet again, the information about the physical object is separate from the object itself. This distinction between a physical object containing information and an observer producing information about a physical object is critical. As you rightly note, in addition to an observer being able to produce information about a physical object, it is possible for a physical object to also contain information or to represent information about something outside of itself. That is true information and is the way information essentially always works: representing something beyond its mere physical characteristics. ----- The above is the rational way to think about physical characteristics of physical objects as they relate to information. Nevertheless, I fully expect some people will continue to claim that every particle in the universe contains “information” by its mere existence. That is a misnomer and an abuse of the word “information,” but so be it. It is a non-substantive semantic exercise, so it does not impact the substance of the issue at hand. Even if we passionately argue that every particle in the universe contains some kind of “intrinsic” information about itself, we then need to just as forcefully acknowledge that this “intrinsic” information (a) only becomes usable or available or unlocked by the activity of an intelligent agent; and, more to the point for the present discussion, (b) is essentially useless in understanding what we are talking about when we refer to information in a practical sense, and, specifically, is irrelevant to the questions we are interested in for purposes of biology.
But the pattern of the base pairs in DNA has a different kind of information. It contains extrinsic information that represents some other information, in this case the pattern of amino acids in a protein. . . . You can measure the location of a hydrogen atom and you know where it is – orbiting Saturn or imbedded in a comet, for instance. You can’t do that with extrinsic information. You can measure the base pairs in DNA and tell, for instance that three of them have the pattern uracil, cytosine and adenine or UCA. However, you can’t tell that this pattern refers to an amino acid or which amino acid it refers to without more information.
I absolutely agree with the portion quoted above. What you are calling “extrinsic” information is not in the medium itself. This is because information is referential to something outside of itself. This is much of the point we have been making all along. Welcome aboard – you sound like an ID proponent! :) So I’m not sure where your dispute is?
Most likely, the first self-reproducing thing contained only intrinsic information. Atoms joined into a molecule which was able to reproduce itself directly. The extrinsic information system of reproduction evolved later, but unfortunately we have no fossils (so far) to tell us how that happened.
Well, that is quite a story – from the alleged, hypothetical, never-before-seen self-replicating molecule, to the claim that extrinsic information would just “evolve” naturally. Unfortunately, even if we think every particle in the universe contains “instrinsic” information, it is quite clear, both from our understanding of cause and effect in the world and based on billions of examples all around us, that the kind of information we are interested in: real, bona-fide, encodable, storable, transmittable, translatable information – “extrinsic” information, if you prefer to call it that – always and only arises from a mind, from the mental activity of an intelligent agent. ----- Thus we come full circle, back to the heart of the issue: We know that information can be encoded, stored, transmitted and translated. As such, it is necessarily separable from any specific medium or storage device or symbolic system. The idea that physical objects contain information is based on a semantic definitional game and a confusion about how the information actually arises in practice. Physical objects do not contain information in any meaningful sense by their mere existence. However, even if we argue that there is some kind of “instrinsic” information in all physical objects, we then need to immediately recognize that this intrinsic information is not relevant to the issues at hand. What we are interested in, generally in our lives, in technology, in biology, certainly for purposes of debating design and evolution, is real information: encodable, storable, transmittable, translatable, “extrinsic” information. This extrinsic information, as you have noted, is not tied to the medium. It is separable from any particular medium or storage device or symbolic system. I also point out that it is not amenable to measurement by any of the units of measure used for physical objects. I realize that this concept of information being more foundational and beyond the physical medium – “transcending” the physical medium, for lack of a better word – is uncomfortable for those who are committed to a materialist view of reality. But it is the only rational conclusion to be drawn and is far more consonant with the evidence.Eric Anderson_{June 23, 2016
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Sorry for the delay. As you can probably imagine, PaV's discovery that some genes are lost and that evolution has therefore lost the war has knocked us all for a loop. My sides are still aching, in fact. However, just in the remote chance that PaV might be wrong, (some are pointing out that we gain genes too, for instance, and that gene loss is natural [see "Consider the opossum: the evidence for common descent" by vjtorley]) I'll continue explaining information. I just hope I and my fellow mammals can survive a little longer without our genes for making egg yolks. -------- The particles would have lots of intrinsic information - what types of atom they are plus their positions, for instance. A lot of the particles are frozen water. One third of the atoms of that water would contain the information that they are oxygen atoms. The other two thirds would contain the information that they are hydrogen atoms. In addition, each oxygen-hydrogen-hydrogen triplet would have the information that the hydrogen atoms are exchanging electrons with the oxygen atom and that the triplet are now a single molecule of H2O, which has very different properties than oxygen or hydrogen. The particles would also contain information on their location. They are orbiting Saturn in rings, not orbiting the sun as a cloud of gas or a comet. DNA also contains intrinsic information - which atoms compose it and their locations, for instance. But the pattern of the base pairs in DNA has a different kind of information. It contains extrinsic information that represents some other information, in this case the pattern of amino acids in a protein. Intrinsic information refers to the medium itself and can be "read" directly. You can measure the location of a hydrogen atom and you know where it is - orbiting Saturn or imbedded in a comet, for instance. You can't do that with extrinsic information. You can measure the base pairs in DNA and tell, for instance that three of them have the pattern uracil, cytosine and adenine or UCA. However, you can't tell that this pattern refers to an amino acid or which amino acid it refers to without more information. That extra information is carried in the cell's transfer RNA or tRNA. One type of tRNA molecule has an end that matches the UCA pattern perfectly and it carries a serine amino acid on the other. Theach ribosome tacks that serine onto the end of the protein it's building and that's when you discover that the UCA pattern in DNA specifies the amino acid serine. (Actually, there's a lot of monkeying around with copying the DNA to RNA and then editing the RNA before finally getting to serine, but I left that out for simplicity.) Most likely, the first self-reproducing thing contained only intrinsic information. Atoms joined into a molecule which was able to reproduce itself directly. The extrinsic information system of reproduction evolved later, but unfortunately we have no fossils (so far) to tell us how that happenedMatSpirit_{June 22, 2016
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The types and locations of every particle and field in the universe are information.
What information do you imagine is in something like, say, the particles making up the rings of Saturn? And, if there is information in those particles, is it any different from the digitally-coded sequence information found in something like DNA?Eric Anderson_{June 21, 2016
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Eric @ 80: "We encode information in order to store it, transmit it, communicate it. Everyone knows this too. But the information does not start with the physical medium, it does not necessarily end with it, and it is always separable from the physical medium." But what IS the information that you store or transmit in a physical medium and HOW do you "encode" it? The information is the PATTERN you impose on the medium. You store it by changing the medium so it encodes the pattern. If you transfer the information to another medium, you do it by changing the second medium so it incorporates the same (or an equivalent) pattern. I've asked a couple of times for anybody to provide an example of information that is not associated with a medium. If anybody can do that, (and not just claim that information is immaterial) it will instantly refute my claim. While you're looking, examine a source of real, undisputed information. I'd suggest a floppy disk, but Steven Meyer might not be able to follow along, so I'll suggest a very simple e-ink screen such as is found on Kindles and other e-books. Each dot on the screen is a tiny sphere that is white on one side and black on the other. Each sphere can be individually rotated so either the black side is up and you see a black dot or the white side is up and you see a white dot. If you turn all the spheres so their white sides are up, you'll see a white screen. If you turn selected spheres around so their black sides are up, you can form black patterns on the screen. Suppose you turn certain dots around so that there's a single capital letter D in the middle of the screen. Wow! Your screen now contains information! It has a bunch of black dots in the middle of the screen. The dots even happen to form an English capital D in this case, but they could be other patterns too. This is undoubtedly Information and it is also undoubtedly material. The black dots are material. You can see them! You don't even need instruments. Now how did we put that information there? We manipulated the physical medium. The material medium. We rotated some of the physical, material spheres to make them produce black dots. But where exactly is the information? Is it in the black dots? Not exactly. Look at the black dot that forms the upper left most corner of the D. Is the information in that black dot? Not quite. If you put the letter B on the screen, the same dot would be black. Instead, the information is in the PATTERN of ALL the dots. Those black dots, in that pattern and no other pattern of black dots, will make that particular figure in the center of the white screen when they are physically manipulated to show their dark sides. How do you change that information? By changing the physical pattern of the dots and such a change is material. How do you store it? By changing the dots on a second screen so they have the same pattern. Or you can use a lot of external knowl edge incorporated in external electronics and mechanics to read the states of the dots and write their coordinates to a disk file. You can then use more information incorporated in to hardware and software to read the coordinates off the disk and turn the specified balls on a second screen black, thus duplicating the pattern that is the information. What if you turn all of the balls white? You now have a blank screen. There is no D or H there and you have no way of telling, from looking at the screan, what letters used to be there. Unless you have a copy of that information somewhere else, it's lost forever. (Physicists say that information cannot be destroyed, and have done experiments to prove it. However we live in the macro world. Theoretically, you could explode a hand grenade and then merely reverse the trajectory of every one of the gazillion atoms that fly out of it and the hand grenade would "unerase" itself. This turns out to be impractical and we lose a lot of information on the grenades original state.) If you're literate in English you will have a huge amount of additional information encoded in your brain (in the firing potentials of synapses, apparently, and probably in other ways) that enables you to recognize the patterns as English upper case "D" and "H". This lets the patterns index into your knowledge of English (stored as patterns of synapse potentials) and activate / interact with that immense store of information. Gotta stop now and continue later. Eric repeated: "But the information does not start with the physical medium, it does not necessarily end with it, and it is always separable from the physical medium." I think information is totally dependant on a physical medium, whether an e-ink screen, the synapses in a brain, magnetic fields on a disk, pulsating electromagnetic waves or, ultimately and originally the types and positions of every physical entity in the universe. If you take every atom of in the universe, you'll have a bunch of atoms. But the atoms in our universe, in all their types, are actually located such that they are galaxies, stars, planets, various pretty things flying through space and, at least here on earth, living creatures, some of which have brains of such complexity and with such information encoded in their synapses that they can read and write messages like this. The types and locations of every particle and field in the universe are information.MatSpirit_{June 20, 2016
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Eric, from here on this conversation is going to be difficult for two reasons. The first reason is that ID has such a terrible time getting a handle on what information really is. This is not just your personal problem. The belief that information is immaterial is nearly universally held by IDists and it goes right up to the top. For instance, William Dembski, the self-styled "Isaac Newton of Information Theory", has such a poor grasp of the subject that he can't write a coherent book on it. Nothing he's written about information has made any impression at all on the outside world except that the co-author of the "no free lunch" theory, which DembskI misunderstood, wrote that Dembski's book on the subject was "written in jello". That's the very last thing a mathematician wants to hear about a book on a mathematical subject! And he's the smartest guy in the ID room. His inability to write anything revolutionary about information has hurt him, too. If he'd actually written something of Newtonian (or Shannon) quality, he could have written nasty memos to the entire Baylor faculty, published the private names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the Baylor Board of Regents and still kept his job. You don't fire Newton! But in fact, he's been fired by Baylor (a Baptist affiliated university), a fundamentalist seminary and the Discovery Institute. I can see where the seminary and maybe the DI might have fired Newton, but not Baylor! And again, this is your best man. Additionally, it seems to be an article of ID faith that information is not material. The way it's constantly brought up and defended, and the way all evidence to the contrary is resisted, it seems to be a hugely emotional subject to IDists and we know how feeble facts and persuasion are in the face of a strongly held emotional belief. Add to those problems the bizare belief that the human intellect is not the product of the human brain and I rate the chances of changing any IDist's mind about information being immaterial at very close to nill. But I like a challenge so I'll keep trying in the next message.MatSpirit_{June 20, 2016
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MatSpirit: With all due respect, you need to dig down another level and think more deeply about this. Yes, information can be encoded in physical media. Everyone knows this. We encode information in order to store it, transmit it, communicate it. Everyone knows this too. But the information does not start with the physical medium, it does not necessarily end with it, and it is always separable from the physical medium. Regarding your example of Venus de Milo, was there a sculptor who had information he wanted to represent in a physical medium? Of course. Once represented in that physical medium could someone else, using their own faculties, their own intelligence, and their own tools of investigation, receive some information that was communicated through that physical medium? Of course. But the medium is not the information itself. It is a storage or transmittal device. The information did not start with the block of marble. It began with an intelligent being, the sculptor, who then, already having the information, chose to embody it in a medium. Surely we are not suggesting that the sculptor was surprised when his random tappings with the hammer and chisel resulted in this wonderful sculpture? Of course not. The plan, the idea, the formative thought, the information he wanted to convey, was already in existence before the marble had experienced the first blow from the chisel.
If you doubt that all information is embodied in the arrangement of matter, please give an example of any information which exists without matter.
Virtually all substantive information can be divorced from the medium in which it is embodied. Information by its nature is non-physical, and every example you have given focuses not on the information but on the storage or transmission of information. It doesn't matter how physical the storage or transmittal device is. For purposes of the present issue at hand, we can assume that the storage and transmittal devices are physical objects -- objects that can be measured using the fundamental units of measure I referred to. Again, you keep focusing on storage and transmission and communication. But you keep avoiding the central issue: If information is physical, as claimed, which of the physical measures can we use to measure it? Please answer the question. ----- Materialists may want everything in the universe, including love and longing and thoughts and free will and, as we are discussing here, information, to be all reducible to the physical and the material. They may desire that everything be fully explainable in terms of particles and energy. But that does not make it so.Eric Anderson_{June 19, 2016
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