Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 25, 2015, 14:24 (3285 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: There is more and more comment about information as the basis of life. This guy thinks it came about by chance:-https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151119-life-is-information-adami/-At least this article uses vocabulary I think I understand. However, there is a great deal else that I do not understand, and so as usual I will put my head on the block and pinpoint what does not make sense to me. Perhaps David (or someone else) can put me right (if I am wrong). -QUOTE: In the following interview, Adami defines information as “the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance...” -However, “he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution.”-The repository contains information collected from the past, but information is the ability to make predictions? So we have a repository of abilities to make predictions? May I suggest that the genome contains information about what has worked in the past, and it contains a mechanism that is able to use that past information to deal with current situations. Therefore, information is not the ability to make predictions, but it is the material which some form of intelligence (more anon) uses, among other things, to make predictions. If information IS that intelligence, we have information using information, which seems to me confusing rather than enlightening.-QUOTE: “The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate.”-In other words, nothing to do with prediction, and everything to do with knowledge gained from past experience. How to reproduce or self-replicate is not in itself critical for evolution, since bacteria reproduce but have not evolved. What is critical is the intelligence needed to use existing information in order to innovate. Innovation will be based on the use of past and current information, and I agree that it also entails prediction (how something will work), and then, as I understand the terms, it provides new information.
 
QUOTE: “Adami explains that a precondition for information is the existence of an alphabet, a set of pieces that, when assembled in the right order, expresses something meaningful. No one knows what that alphabet was at the time that inanimate molecules coupled up to produce the first bits of information.”-He later says “the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance.” I would argue that those molecules were the letters of the alphabet which, when assembled in the right order, gave us life. Once they were in the right order, they contained all the information necessary to give (and reproduce) life. But information did not put them together. It is not clear to me, then, what he means by “the first piece of information”. (See also my final comment.)-QUOTE: "We of course know that all life on Earth has enormous amounts of information that comes from evolution, which allows information to grow slowly. Before evolution, you couldn't have this process. As a consequence, the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance."-Yes indeed, information COMES FROM evolution. And it has accumulated from single-celled organisms to vastly complex ones like humans through some kind of mechanism that USES the information already accumulated to create new information. Information by itself is as useless as random letters in the alphabet. It is the product of evolution, not the driving force, and it is not the ability to make predictions, and it doesn't run life or make life evolve. That is the intelligence that uses the information, or that puts the letters together in a meaningful form. I agree that the process of accumulating information would not be possible without evolution, but that does not tell us what it is within the genome that actually does the accumulating and uses the information.
 
To conclude that “the first piece of information” has to have arisen by chance seems to me a complete non sequitur. If he means how to get life from non-life, the focal point for chance v design is not information but what put the letters of the alphabet into meaningful form (information) and continues to expand the range of meanings (information). I agree with David: “It's either chance or design by a mind.” 50/50. And not “has to have” - either way.-xxxxxx-Thank you, David, for your gallant attempt to explain the quantum weirdness article. I will stick with your beautifully honest and quite reassuring statement: “Your confusion is shared by all of us.”