Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

Randy, I think you're alluding here to a really important and usually
overlooked aspect of the ID discussion: the ontology of information. Bill
Dembski, following in the footsteps of communications and cybernetics
theorists who've built on Shannon, views information as a sort of ontic
entity apart from matter and energy (at least that is how I understand the
implications of Dembski's ideas). This idea can't be dismissed lightly --
it is being built into a discipline, the Philosophy of Information, that has
nothing to do with ID, and it underlies much contemporary sociological and
legal theory concerning social norms and law regarding communications, the
Internet, and other types of information.

Personally, my present view is that it's misguided to think of information
as something ontologically separate from matter and energy. I think this
reflects a sort of Cartesian dualism that I'm keen to avoid in both theology
and legal theory. But I'm not so sure its as simple as arguing that genetic
information isn't Shannon information just because genetic information
doesn't appear at present to be medium-independent. It's not impossible to
imagine a biotechnology scenario in which genetic information can be
extracted from an organismal genome, stored on a computing device, and then
"printed" to a "wet ware" printer to produce a synthetic medicine, body
part, organism, etc. After all, whod've thunk fifty years ago that today
we'd be walking around with gigabytes of data on pocket flash drives?

On 4/8/07, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Having finally worked my way through the mountain of posts from the last
> three weeks, I'd like to comment on a couple. There were several references
> to information, its mass and energy, and its relationship to the genome.
> Maybe we should remind ourselves of some of the fundamental principles of
> information.
>
> Claude Shannon was the key pioneer of information theory. Rolf Landauer
> may have done the most to turn it into a bona fide hard science. Charles
> Bennett has been a leader in moving Shannon's ideas in the classical realm
> to the exotic world of quantum theory.
>
> Landauer made a number of key observations:
>
> 1. Information is physical
> 2. Information is independent of its physical embodiment
> 3. Erasing one bit of information dissipates at least kT/2 of energy
>
>
> The first point indicates that without mass or energy, there is no
> information. How much mass is there in information? The old joke is that "my
> briefcase is so heavy because I downloaded so many books onto my hard
> drive." This confuses two types of information--the message or meaning that
> is conveyed vs the basic binary bits underlying that information. A 80GB
> hard drive contains the same number of bits no matter what is downloaded.
> They just aren't all intelligible until we rearrange them.
>
> The second point is easily visualized by thinking of a telephone
> conversation. As the information passes from the mind of person A to the
> mind of person B, the physical medium that conveys the information changes
> many times. The information doesn't.
>
> This also leads to an important observation on the 'information' in the
> genome. Charles Bennett once gently corrected me, saying that technically,
> the more accurate term is 'complexity' not 'information.' The genetic code
> conveyed from one cell to its replicated cell is not 'information' as
> Shannon described. This 'information' is not independent of its physical
> embodiment. The physical embodiment IS the information. It is never
> converted from one medium to another. This is really complexity, not
> information. The supposed notions of conservation of information don't apply
> to the genetic code. It is not a message conveyed from one agent to another.
> Information about the genome and its sequence of course is classical
> information.
>
> Randy
>
>
>
>

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Received on Sun Apr 8 19:41:05 2007