Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 29, 2015, 13:33 (3281 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have never denied the importance of information, or that DNA is full of it! I have simply complained about its indiscriminate and confusing use by yourself and other commentators.
DAVID: Your problem and mine is my assumption ( and those of the folks I read), that when useful information is mentioned as a source of life's organization and controls of its activities, it is obvious that there must be an interpretation mechanism for that information. And it is also important to recognize that the mechanism may well be automatic, as a computer reads input information. It can also be an intelligent reader as a human reading plans. And it must be recognized that functional specified complex information is usually the product of intelligence. Perhaps you have not thought of information and its relationship to intelligence in this way.-My problem is when you and the folks you read try to conflate the interpretive and/or creative mechanism with the information it interprets and/or creates. One of the articles you referred us to emphasized the distinction between matter and information, which is “absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution”. I maintain that the distinction between information and intelligence is equally indispensable, which is why I object to “information as the source of life”, “information runs life”, “information is the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance”. And that is also why I pointed out that your statement “life had to start with available dynamic useful information” contradicted your whole philosophy, which is based on the belief that life started when the necessary information was created and used by a universal intelligence. Information, in my view, is not “dynamic” or “useful” (or “functional”) until intelligence makes it so.
 
I am fully aware of the existence of automatic intelligence: this has been at the heart of our never-ending discussion concerning your automatic versus my autonomous intelligence of cells in their use of information. As regards intelligence producing information, I have suggested again and again that intelligence processes information in order to create the innovations that drive evolution, and every innovation provides new information which can then be used by other intelligences to create more innovations. That is how, in my hypothesis, intelligence uses and produces information to drive evolution forward, but thank you for confirming the very points I have been trying to emphasize in my description of the relationship between intelligence and information. I am delighted to see that you are now taking more care to distinguish between the two. I wish some other writers would do the same instead of using the word “information” indiscriminately and confusingly. I think I've said that before somewhere.-dhw: We have agreed that ”information and intelligence are two separate items.” Why don't we leave it at that?
DAVID: Separate terms but the two are totally inter-twined, as above.-They are only “totally” intertwined if the universe and life were created by your universal intelligence. As I have said before, inanimate matter is full of information, but the information is useless without intelligence to extract it, process it, and use it. And nobody knows the origin of intelligence.