Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

I used the word "teleportation" too loosely for you to extract all that. Strictly speaking, teleportation involves coherence over a long distance between entangled quantum systems so that there is a one-to-one correlation of the states of the relevant particles. I shouldn't have tried to extrapolate the meaning. It's just an analogy there.

To be honest, I don't know what you are saying here. (not sure I know what I'm saying either, for that matter!!) Let me try again.

It may be useful to think of the various types of 'information.' The word is often used indiscriminately. Three of the different uses of the word are:

1. Information capability or capacity. This would be the total number of physical elements which can embody information. Like 80GB on your hard drive. Or 10^80 as the amount of information in the universe since that is the number of fundamental particles thought to be in the universe (or at least it was way back when I went to school)

2. Information as meaning or a message. This is the message that is being conveyed through some physical channel.

3. Information as complexity. This is the configuration of a physical entity, not the meaning or message ascribed to it. The amount of information required to describe a physical configuration is a measure of its complexity. The description should not be confused with the complexity of the system itself.

My point about genetic 'information' vs message 'information' is as follows:

Genetic information is really complexity. It is a particular configuration. This should not be confused with our description of that complexity. Any computer code or information transmitted by sentient beings, human or otherwise, involves assigning a meaning to a particular physical configuration. That is fundamentally different from the genetic code where a particular physical configuration has a function but not an assigned meaning.

Genetic information is transferred through replication, not through transmission via a channel. There's a fundamental difference. Shannon talks about noisy channels and limits of information transfer through those channels. Genetic replication is quite different and doesn't follow those theorems.

To me, the conclusion of all this is that genetic information, while having a lot of similarities to anthropogenic computer code, is fundamentally different from any information transmitted by sentient beings. It is therefore not appropriate to infer an intelligent designer from an analogy between genetic information and human information.

Randy

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: Randy Isaac
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 9:33 AM
  Subject: 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?
>

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Received on Thu Apr 12 18:08:12 2007