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

"The uses of terms like "one can trivially show" for the increase of
information in the Shannon sense is lubricious. "

And despite it being lubricious(sic) according to you, it is indeed
trivially simple. As you point out information and meaning however are
very different concepts.
So far your 'arguments' have been that consciousness cannot be
detected and yet, MRI scans seem to be useful tools exactly for that
purpose.
If the argument is that we cannot presently detect consciousness, then
again this is not an argument to argue that thus consciousness must be
non-physical. History would be full of examples as to why atoms must
be nonphysical, until we could actually see IBM being spelled out.

Perhaps the discussion could benefit from some clearly defined
terminology and then an argument that goes beyond a mere assertion.

As a side note, the work by Koch and others shows an fascinating
insight into how science is unraveling the concept of consciousness.
Dreams may appear to some to be non-physical, and yet they involve
significant brain activity. And while a machine may not be able to
decypher the dream (yet), there is no guarantee that this is a problem
that cannot be overcome.
For instance,

<quote>. Koch presented the results of his own research in this area,
in which subjects undergoing brain surgery to relieve epileptic
seizures had electrodes implanted in specific neurons in the visual
cortex. Those neurons responded to specific illustrations presented to
their visual field, including, amusingly, a picture of President Bill
Clinton. "This is the Clinton neuron" Koch joked.</quote>

What if we can correlate neuron activity with triggers, could we
reverse engineer the trigger from knowing which neurons were
triggered? Is there any fundamental reason why this may not be the
case?

Just because science may not fully understand consciousness, does not
mean that 1) science cannot explain it nor that 2) consciousness must
be non-physical.

<quote>At the heart of the author's approach is the search for
"neuronal correlates of consciousness" (NCCs). Koch, a cognitive
scientist at Caltech, defines these as the "minimal neuronal events
jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept." That is, if a
specific coalition of neurons is electrically active, then this
produces the specific conscious experience of seeing Bill Clinton,
having a splitting headache, or whatever.</quote>

On 4/1/07, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu> wrote:
> 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 Mon Apr 2 01:52:31 2007