The Centrality of information (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, June 21, 2014, 12:18 (3809 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This concept of the central role of information, a non-material entity, is the key to my thinking about life, evolution and a non-materialist approach to our discussions. Read all four parts:-http://salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo29/data-basic-IV.php-QUOTE: The informational realist starts with the fact that intelligences create information. As Dembski puts it, "That's what intelligences do for a living. In fact, that's all they do for a living." -There is a kind of mystique being created around the word "information", which in my view requires a more concrete definition than it is given here ("a relational notion"..."created by ruling out possibilities"). I understand it as meaning facts, data, details about a given subject. And although intelligence(s) may create it (as in man-made inventions), they also observe it (as in Nature) and put the bits and pieces together in coherent patterns (which the article makes clear elsewhere). That is not creation but interpretation, and crucially all the examples concern material things (see below).
 
QUOTE (continued): Human intelligence is seen as natural but not -material. It is, however, instantiated in a human being, who has a -material body (including a brain). Materialists, by contrast, see intelligence as a byproduct of unintelligent material nature. The reason they tend to be intensely attached to Darwinian evolutionary theory is that they consider the evolutionary process to be a blind mechanism that acts like an intelligence and can even create intelligences (the Blind Watchmaker). The evidence for this, however, is in the same category as the evidence for the alchemists' Philosopher's Stone, which was said to be able to turn dross into gold. From an informational realist point of view, nature could be material or more than material. Or it could consist entirely of relationships (information) and therefore not be material at all. -I agree that there's no evidence of a blind mechanism, but how does this lead to what follows? Relationships between what? Information about what? The author seems to have forgotten her own earlier examples. Most of the time, we're establishing relationships between material things, and getting information about material things, so how does that make nature possibly non-material? Of course the process by which we do this is mental, but whether human intelligence has its source in materials or in something immaterial is a completely different issue. It has nothing to do with the fact that thought in the form of information or relationships is immaterial.-QUOTE (concluded): Materialist assumptions come unbidden to us because materialism is an accepted frame of reference. In the same way, for millennia, people supposed that the earth was the dull, heavy planet sitting in the center of the solar system while glorious heavenly bodies soared all around. Maybe we are in for as big a surprise as they were.-Maybe, but we shan't get it by arguing that mental concepts are immaterial and therefore everything else including human intelligence may or may not be immaterial.