Biologic information defined (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 07, 2013, 22:31 (4065 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is the key to our discussion:-http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814508728_0001-It's mainly concerned with defining information and establishing the existence of "Universal Information" contained within and essential to all life. The authors don't deal with cell intelligence. They distinguish between intelligent beings, which have "free choices", and machines, which do not. They don't seem interested in degrees of freedom, so there's no distinction between different organisms. However, the section on senders and receivers seems to me indirectly relevant to our discussion, and I'll manoeuvre it to apply to cells:-1. An original sender is an intelligent agent that creates the original UI message.
As demonstrated by Gitt et al. [10] this intelligent agent must have
a nonmaterial component beyond the embedded UI. This is because even
UI-guided purely physicochemical processes wholly constrained by natural
laws have never been observed to create de novo UI despite all scientific
efforts to date [10, 12]. Since humans do create de novo UI they
qualify as original senders. This is strong evidence that humans have a
nonmaterial component beyond their embedded UI [10].-I don't see how new information can be called "universal", but our main problem here is that no-one has ever observed any de novo creation within natural laws. We simply don't know how new organs and organisms have come into being. If humans can create de novo information now because they have a nonmaterial control centre, then perhaps other animals, birds, insects and cells could have done so in the past, and will do so again when conditions are right. (I doubt if evolution has run its course.) -2. Intermediate transmitters receive a UI message and simply copy, transmit, display or broadcast the message. Ideally, an intermediate transmitter will not distort the meaning of the original message in any way [10]. Intermediate transmitters can be intelligent agents or machines that are specifically designed to perform the transmitting processes.-This leaves open the question of whether transmitters within cells (Albrecht-Buehler's centrosomes) are intelligent agents or machines.-3. Machine receivers obtain and process the messages and perform the commanded action thereby achieving the purpose intended by the original sender. Machine receivers (either mechanical or biological) do not have the capability to freely interpret the messages. They must be 'preprogrammed' with the capability to receive, then process and then execute the commanded actions without requiring that the meaning of the messages be determined. In other words, the programmer must convert the meaning of the messages into a series of preprogrammed executable steps that are initiated by start commands so that the proper actions are performed.-In our context, the programmer would be the centrosome or "Construction Planner", and machine receivers the automatically operating sections of every organ and organism, from cells to humans. But you believe cells are composed only of machine receivers. An analogy would be that the cell community which makes up the human brain is also a machine, carrying out God's instructions, but you believe the cells of the human brain are an original sender, while cellular centrosomes are not. -4. Intelligent receivers possess the capability of determining the meaning of the message and also possess the capability of making free choices. This latter capability allows the intelligent receiver to decide whether to perform the expected action fully, partially or not at all.-A receiver cannot perform an action without also being a transmitter. To clarify: the original message here would be information from a changing environment, meaning necessary adaptation or possible new ways of mastering conditions. The receiver/transmitter (cell brain) interprets, decides, and transmits its own decisions/messages to the rest of the cell or, in a world of multicellularity, cell brains coordinate decisions between the cell communities that make up the whole organism. There would then be multiple instances of intelligent and automatic transmission to produce the innovation (which would happen anyway, even with your "preprogramming" theory).-QUOTE: We may say that people acquired these abilities from their parents and so on down through history. However, this does not in any way explain how the first human acquired this ability. If we assume this happened without intelligent guidance, there are only two alternatives: 1) it is an inherent property of matter or, 2) it is possible for these abilities to 'evolve' over time. A person may choose to believe in either of these alternatives but that person would have to also accept that this is a belief with no hard science to support it.-Inherent property of matter versus (or plus ... I don't see them as mutually exclusive) natural evolution versus God's guidance constitutes the nub of our discussion, and can be applied to every theory about intelligence and innovation. A person may choose to believe that his unknown, unknowable God preprogrammed the first living organisms to produce the FIRST lung, leg, limb, brain, kidney etc., but that person would have to accept that this is a BELIEF with no hard science to support it. Back to Square One.