Information Complication (General)

by dhw, Thursday, November 05, 2015, 20:04 (3094 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Thank you for at last ceasing to conflate the mechanism and the information. However, I'd like to add that the mechanism at the foundation of the living process also reads information that comes from outside the living cell. The cell/cell community would not survive or evolve if its reading mechanism could not process and use the information it absorbs from the environment.-DAVID: Different kind of information, informative, but not functional as the information is within the cell.-“Informative information” is a delightful new category in your long and ever changing list. Whether the cell's “brain” is your 3.8-billion-year computer programme or my “intelligence”, it will still have to process information about the rest of the cell, about its colleagues within the organism, and about the environmental conditions it has to deal with. As I see it, that is how it all functions. What other information does your computer programme or my cellular "intelligence" have to process?-dhw: What gave first life the initial information to use? Shouldn't you also ask what gave first life the mechanism with which to use the initial information? You know the answers perfectly well! Some people say it was an unknown supernatural intelligence they call God or Allah or Jehovah or Yahweh or Mbombo or Unkulunkulu or Nanabozho (real names by the way). Others say it all came about by chance. Some of us admit we don't know.-DAVID: Don't you want to know? Do you care to know?-If I didn't want or care to know, do you think I would have written the “brief guide” and opened up this website? The quest for knowledge is endlessly fascinating and thanks to you and others who have contributed so much to our discussions, I can honestly say that I have learnt an enormous amount. But even you have admitted over and over again that ultimately a conclusion rests on faith and not on reason, and that remains a leap too far for me. Fortunately, I can still happily go on wanting and caring without claiming to know...