Information Complication (General)

by dhw, Friday, October 30, 2015, 16:35 (3310 days ago)

I am bringing various posts and threads together here in order to keep the argument more focused.-dhw; Just to remind you of our starting point: I have suggested that cellular intelligence is the driving force behind evolution.
DAVID: To remind you, It is cellular information provided by intelligence.-BBELLA: [wrongly attributed to dhw under “...how evolution works”]: David, for me, the above sentence is the whole crux of the matter in this discussion. Why so adamant to say "provided by"? Is it not more probable intelligence and information are two sides of the same coin always existing together being what IS? "Provided by" makes it sound as if at some point in time information didn't exist. That makes no sense. What is intelligence without information? In my view - nothing.
DAVID: I agree intelligence and information are intertwined. To create anything that survives the requirements of nature requires planning, which requires intelligence. Therefore intelligence creates the planning information for the new development. -In response to BBella: David needs “provided by” because he believes in a single mind that created everything. “Planning information” used to be known in Davespeak as intelligent information, and his 38-billion-year programme was also known as intelligent information, which meant that intelligent information created intelligent information. Some of us would be content to say that to create something that can survive requires intelligence and planning. I don't think anyone would have the slightest difficulty understanding us.
 
However, although clearly ALL THAT IS brings intelligence, information and everything else together in a great oneness, and although I agree that intelligence is nothing without information, I don't think this observation works the other way round. For me, intelligence has to have some degree of awareness, but you and I have agreed that neither the stone nor the water is conscious. I would argue that information means what stone and water are, can do, can be made to do, and these properties would still be there even if there were no minds to observe them, find names for them, and use them. Even though I can't share David's faith in a single intelligence that somehow planned all the information in the universe even before the universe existed (David believes it started with the Big Bang - whereas I reserve judgement, as usual), I still share his scepticism that all the information required for life could assemble itself by chance. Hence my dalliance with various concepts of panpsychism and multiple intelligences that use information to further their evolution. So I still want to draw a distinction between intelligence and information. (See also below)
 
Dhw: You say “information runs life.” I don't know what runs life, but I'm pretty sure that it entails a mechanism that processes and uses information.
DAVID: Then we agree, life runs on information.-That is not the same as “information runs life”! My car runs on petrol, but petrol does not run my car, which also has various indispensable mechanisms and needs me to drive it. What runs life is a mechanism that processes information, and we don't know what that mechanism is, either in running life itself or in engendering intelligence.-DAVID: Information and matter are two different domains:-http://edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/h-Ch.1.html-QUOTE: "Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter." -I could not agree more. As I keep saying, information tells us what matter is, does and can be used for.-QUOTE: "The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution."(David's bold)-David's comment: That is the point: information is not material and life operates on information contained in material.-That is also my point, but there is something missing here, and that something is the reason why I am constantly complaining about your use of the word “information”. Evolution entails changes in materials. If we agree that those changes do not come about by chance, we have THREE elements: 1) materials, 2) the information contained in those materials, and 3) the something that collects, processes and uses that information. Now you are calling that something “life”! Generally, you like to refer to it as “intelligent/planning/ dynamic information”, which gives us information processing information, but in fact you recognize only two “operators”: a dabbling God, or a 3.8-billion-year programme for all the changes. That, according to you, is what USES the information to create the innovation or the “message” of the quote. In my alternative, it is an autonomous intelligence that does this. My point is that not only the distinction between matter and information but also that between what is processed (information) and what does the processing (intelligence of whatever sort) is “absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution”.
 
xxxxxxx-I may have difficulty responding to posts during the next two or three days. Apologies in advance.