Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

Dave,
    The argument is a little different from what you are citing. I'm not saying that genetic information isn't Shannon-type information because it isn't medium-independent. Rather, it isn't medium-independent because it isn't Shannon-information. That is merely the easiest way to see the ramification of it. It's the fundamental definition of information and complexity. Complexity can be thought of as the amount of information required to describe an object or any entity. Complexity even applies to information itself. Data compression is least efficient in the most complex information streams. The so-called genetic code is the information we use to describe the genome.

    Your sci-fi example doesn't negate the argument. What you describe is really teleportation, in a sense. Information about the genome could in principle be sufficiently complete that it could be reconstructed. That information which is teleported is indeed Shannon-information. The DNA itself isn't information of that type.

    The novelty of DNA is that, unlike virtually everything else in our universe, it is self-replicating. That replication, with an infinitesimal but non-zero error rate, is incredibly potent as a means for generating additional complexity. Other inanimate objects can and do also become more complex--that's entropy, if you will--but nothing comes close to the effectiveness of self-replication.

    Randy
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: Randy Isaac
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sunday, April 08, 2007 7:40 PM
  Subject: 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?
   

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Received on Mon Apr 9 22:19:38 2007