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

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 01:06 (3526 days ago) @ David Turell

Just some points I picked up on:->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."-We discard 2000 years of science in order to get rid of monotheism? So that we can understand how the universe "evolved"? (Presumably through natural selection, which makes no sense in a universal sense)-> 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. -Part of the problem has always been that mathematics was conflated with reality, instead of being kept in its proper place as a language used to describe observations.-
> "There can be no separation between the information processing nature of the universe and the information processing revolution of life itself. -This almost implies that the universe has a consciousness of sorts, or some force acting to 'process' the information. God?->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.-This implies that it is a one-way communication instead of the feedback loop that it truly is. Environment informs organism which alters environment which informs organism etc.- 
> " 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. -These guys are playing with words here. Translation, Transcription, and Expression all require some level of understanding of the information. ->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. -This again is playing with words. If DNA does not contain facts, i.e. is not semantic, then It could not really function. If it required no sentience, then it should be able to function outside of living organism. Since it can only be read BY something sentient, or by something designed by something sentient (i.e. living creatures/computers) then this statement becomes rather meaningless. How is the universe supposed to work with all this information if it contains no process to manipulate it? If it does contain a process to manipulate the information, who designed it? -
Cells may be little automatons, or semi-automatons, but something had to program them to be so first.

--
What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.