Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

Randy said: *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.
*
Maybe I'm being dense, but this seems to me different only in degree from
the notion of Shannon information in computing. My laptop's hard
drive comprises a platter with of many small magnetic regions that encode
bits of data. Those bits of data can be extracted from the platter /
magnetic medium and transferred to an array of transistor cells on my USB
flash drive. The same bits of data can be extracted from the flash chip and
transferred onto the capacitors of the temporary DRAM memory on the
workstation in a classroom. Then I can teach a class, and hopefully,
between students dozing, IM'ing, surfing the web, and daydreaming, at least
some of the same data can be transferred into the "wetware" medium of my
student's brains.

Certainly I haven't in this process reconstructed *all* the information on
my laptop's hard drive and transferred it to my student's brains -- not even
all the information that was on my hard drive concerning my lecture, since
at least some of the laptop-resident information is specific to the medium
on which it resides. But, from the perspective of information theory, I
don't think you'd say I merely "teleported" my lecture from the laptop to my
students. There was a relatively lossless transfer of some information over
a series of communications channels.

Likewise, I don't see why extracting information from a genetic sequence --
say, a group of genes responsible for regulating the expression of an enzyme
that breaks down industrial waste -- transferring that information to a
computer medium, and then "printing" that information to a set of synthetic
genes for insertion into a biological waste management device, would be a
form of "teleportation" rather than a transfer of Shannon information across
a communications channel to different media. I don't see why this would
be merely a transfer of information "about" a genome any more than taking my
lecture notes off of the hard drive and teaching a class would be merely a
transfer of information "about" my brain or my hard drive -- unless the
whole project of information theory is simply misplaced as an
ontological matter. (I also don't think, BTW, that the wetware "printer" is
entirely in the realm of science fiction anymore.)

On 4/9/07, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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?
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Apr 12 09:33:54 2007