The Centrality of information (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 21, 2014, 16:01 (3808 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: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. -Information is immaterial. That is the main point and why Shannon information theory was developed which then lead to software coding etc. DNA and all the layers of the genome contain information which is used to create and run life. There is no mystique. 
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> dhw: 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.-I frankly don't know how to answer your objections. Information that we discover in life's processes is immaterial by definition. We understand it through consciousness. DNA codes transmit information, but how that information developed is not known to us. Darwin and the rest of us have made theoretical guesses, which don't explain at all the first living cell.
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> dhw: 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.-We are back to the problem of consciousness, which upset Nagel so much. You read 2 +2= 4 in a book. That book is material but the concept is not. It is information in/for your consciousness. Is life at the cellular level conscious is one of our debates. My approach is that the information in the cell is interpreted biochemically to auotmatically create reactions and processes the cell needs to perform under its informational instructions. It may help you to view the information as instructional guides.