Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

On Apr 12, 2007, at 9:20 PM, David Opderbeck wrote:

> If you are thinking ontologically, whatever that is supposed to
> mean, then what would you say was the state of affairs on this
> earth between 4.5 billion and 3.5 billion years ago when there was
> no organic life, let alone sentient life? Was there information on
> this earth?
> Ontology, I'm sure you know, is the study of what exists.
> Materialists say only matter and energy ultimately exists. Some
> forms of ID, I'm sure you also know, challenge materialism at this
> ontological level by suggesting that information exists apart from
> energy and matter. If information exists apart from energy and
> matter, materialism cannot be true. Moreover, if information is
> always produced by intelligence, then there must be a designer of
> the universe, because information as an ontological entity could
> not exist otherwise. This is one reason information theory is so
> central to the strong ID program. It is also one reason why the
> strong ID program has some affinities with fields such as
> artificial intelligence and SETI, both of which implicitly question
> materialism by suggesting that information (or disembodied
> intelligence) might have some kind of existence apart from matter.
>

If information theory is central to strong ID, it's doomed.
Information theory does not define information that way at all. I'm
quite familiar with artificial intelligence and it likewise makes no
anti-materialist commitment. One thing that was discovered by AI
researches was known as the Eliza Effect where people believed the
computer program Eliza was a real psychotherapist. The reason it
worked was because people simply assumed that computer behaviors were
analogous to human behaviors. Likewise, people make the same kind of
assumptions with "information" and "information theory". This is ID's
Achilles' Heal. While it is possible that the genetic code is the
result of intelligent design -- and as a Christian I know this more
than just possible -- nevertheless it is not detectably so.
Concluding otherwise is to commit the logical fallacy of affirming
the following consequent: if something is intelligently designed then
it will have a structure that can be communicated to intelligent beings.

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Received on Fri Apr 13 00:38:48 2007