The Centrality of information: a new book;dhw look (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, March 30, 2015, 23:22 (3526 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Read the following review by David J. Kreiter. I explains a lot of the new and current thinking:-http://www.amazon.com/Information-Nature-Reality-Metaphysics-Classics/dp/1107684536/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0XDX71BDF36XMEAS34FN-"Paul Davies says that most physicists now believe that information and not particles and fields are the ground of all being. Beginning with the ancient Greeks up until recent times it has been assumed that the laws of physics, and their mathematically descriptive counterpart were objective aspects of the universe cast in stone, and it was the job of the physicist to uncover these objective truths. This idea was furthered by monotheistic thinking which suggested that the discovery of these objective truths were a window into the mind of God, an idea that has gone unchallenged for three centuries. Davis states: "The fusion of Platonism and Monotheism created the powerful orthodox scientific concept of the laws of physics as ideal, perfect infinitely precise, immutable, eternal unchanging mathematical forms that reside in an abstract platonic heaven beyond space and time. All of these assumptions must be jettisoned to come to an understanding that the laws and states of the universe co-evolve."-"There can be no separation between the information processing nature of the universe and the information processing revolution of life itself. Both the syntactic and the semantic concept of information are involved in the interplay between organisms and their environment in the sense that far from equilibrium system (organisms) need to be associated with an environment that supports the organisms condition. Both the environment (the signal medium) and the organism (the message) are needed for the co-evolution of the organism/environmental system.-" According to Keith Ward and Arthur Peacocke, the information contained in DNA is not semantic information because no understanding is required for the translation and transcription processes that code for proteins. This kind of information belongs to a third category he calls "Shaping" or coded information and it requires no sentience. The functioning of the parts can only be explained by how they contribute to the organism as a whole, and this is true whether we are speaking of the universe as a whole or a living organism. Since consciousness is primordial and contains all possible states, we should not look to the simple to explain the complex, but rather the complex to explain the simple." (My bold and I agree as I have held, no true sentience is needed! They act as if they are sentient. show me how you can tell the difference.)