RE: [asa] dawkins and collins on "Fresh Air" interview program

Information in books are only so to conscious, human minds. No machine can ever "read" the meaning of words or sentences unless programmed to do so by a human being. The uses of terms like "one can trivially show" for the increase of information in the Shannon sense is lubricious. Two sentences can have the same information content in the sense of Shannon and be very different in meaning. Humans are needed to decipher what other humans have ciphered. That consciousness is nonphysical is not a "hasty" conclusion. Physical devices cannot detect consciousness only self can detect self. If physical devices cannot detect something, then that something is outside the subject matter of science.

Moorad

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of PvM
Sent: Sun 4/1/2007 4:48 PM
To: Alexanian, Moorad
Cc: Rich Blinne; Iain Strachan; David Opderbeck; Hofmann, Jim; Ted Davis; asa@lists.calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] dawkins and collins on "Fresh Air" interview program

I assume that you are not as much asking about how evolutionary theory
explains information, but rather how does evolutionary theory explain
communication? After all, using simple evolutionary mechanisms of
variation and selection, one can trivially show how information in
the Shannon sense at least, increases.

Informations in books are hardly non physical, they consist of letters
to create words, used to formulate phrases which eventually for the
content of the book. It's the correlation between 'words' and concepts
which creates a message.
Is the informational content non physical? Surely not in books, surely
not in the brain where neurons work together to link external
information with internal concepts.

It's true content, whatever that may be, may very well be non physical
but that's just an assertion which seems to fail on close scrutiny. In
fact, the idea that consciousness is non physical let alone that
evolution cannot explain consciousness, seems rather hasty.

I just sent the following to the list as well which addresses some of
the confusion as to the nature of information and physical properties

While the first quote is posted on April 1, and thus I am not sure
about the level of sincerity, the concept that information is
mass-less and thus a problem for 'materialism' seems to run deep
amongst some ID proponents.

Is the solution to be found in how the concept of information has been defined?

Wikipedia: Information is the result of processing, manipulating and
organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver.
In other words, it is the context in which data is taken.

Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday
usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of
information is closely related to notions of constraint,
communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning,
mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.
----------------------

For instance, if we were to accept the concept of information as
defined by Shannon, then we can measure information. So is information
massless or without energy? While information may not have any mass,
creating information on a disk requires energy to move magnetic
particles which are randomly distributed, into a format that can be
recognized and retrieved.

In fact, Tom Schneider shows that the concept of energy and Shannon
information are related in
http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/nano2/latex/index.html

In other words, the Maxwell Demon:

<quote>
In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell introduced to the world a little being
with a fine touch and a propensity for trouble [Maxwell, 1904]. This
demon controls a door between two gas vessels, and he uses the door to
sort molecules (Fig. 9).

When a rapidly moving molecule approachs from the left, he lets it
through, but a slow one is not allowed passage. Fast ones from the
right don't pass him but slow ones from there do. In this way, fast
molecules end up in the right hand container, which becomes hotter,
and slow molecules go to the left, which becomes colder. The
temperature difference could run a steam engine and supply the world
with free energy. The demon is not creating energy from nothing, which
would be a First Law violation. Instead, he is violating the Second
Law by decreasing the entropy of the system (by doing the separation)
without compensatory heat dissipation. Although the demon does nothing
more than open and close a door, it seems that one could get a
perpetual motion machine that violates the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. One of the many forms of this fundamental law [Jaynes,
1988,Atkins, 1984] states that it is not possible to move heat from a
body at a lower temperature to one at a higher temperature without
performing work. Since it has
</quote>

So the answer is simple, energy is being dissipated in order for the
Demon to work. Does the same apply to ID's claims about information?
 the smallest value for dissipated energy is found to be k_b T ln(2)
Joules per bit. So unless T equals zero (Kelvin), we observe that
information requires the dissipation of a minimal amount of energy
(and thus mass).

Relevant Quotes

Number 1:

<quote>I'm a faithful Catholic. I've often thought: what if Darwinism
were true? I don't mean all of the philosophical materialism that
Darwinists drag along with the science. Materialism is nonsense,
because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn't
exist (it's neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn't exist, then
materialism can't be true.</quote>

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/04/what_if_darwinism_were_right.html

Number 2:

<quote>
"One of the things I do in my classes to get this idea across to
students is I hold up two computer disks. One is loaded with software
and the other is blank. And I ask
"What's the difference in mass between these two computer disks as a
result of the difference in information content that they posses?"
And of course the answer is zero - none. There is no difference as a
result of the information. And that's because information is a
massless quantity. Now if information is not a material entity, then
how can any materialistic explanation explain its origin? How can any
material cause explain its origin. And, this is the real fundamental
problem that the presence of information has posed. It creates a
fundamental challenge to the materialistic scenario because
information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy
cannot produce. Um, in the nineteenth century we thought that there
were two fundamental entities of science: matter and energy. At the
beginning of the 21st century we now recognize that there is a third
fundamental entity, and it's information. It doesn't - it's not
reducible to matter, it's not reducible to energy, but it is still a
very important thing that is real, we buy it we sell it, we send it
down wires. Now what do we make of the fact that information is
present at the very root of all biological function? [picture of DNA]
 That in biology we have matter we have energy but we also have this
third, very important entity, information? The biology of the
information age I think poses a fundamental challenge to any
materialistic approach to the origin of life.
</quote>

http://www.harunyahya.com/articles/70information_beyond_matter.php

Stephen Meyer, "Why Can't Biological Information Originate Through a
Materialistic Process", Unlocking the Mystery of Life, DVD, Produced
by Illustra Media, 2002

On 4/1/07, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu> wrote:
> If evolution is science, say as physics and chemistry are science, then how can evolutionary theory explain information? Consciousness is needed to make sense of a book, which is both physical and nonphysical. The physical part is the subject matter of science and the nonphysical, the informational content of the book, although uses elements of the physical, its true content is nonphysical and accessed by nonphysical consciousness.

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Received on Sun Apr 1 20:14:26 2007