Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 30, 2015, 13:25 (3070 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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...... Information, in my view, is not “dynamic” or “useful” (or “functional”) until intelligence makes it so.-DAVID: Your point is obvious to me and exists behind all my thoughts. Our difference is I assume the inference is understood, and you want exactness in the written matter about it. I've been writing in a shorthand of ideas. I'll try better.

I should have mentioned last time that I doubt if Adami would assume from your statement “life had to start with available dynamic useful information” that this means creation and interpretation by an intelligent mind. He concludes that “the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance”. That shows just how essential it is state explicitly the distinction which you consider to be obvious to yourself and others, so thank you for your gracious acceptance of the need for more precision.-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.
dhw: 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.-DAVID: In your reference to inanimate matter 'the information it is full of' is descriptive. It describes nothing else. Life is process, and requires specialized information to run that process, interpreted automatically or by active intellect.-Why do you have to distinguish between “descriptive” and “specialized” (not to mention “intelligent”, “functional”, “static”, “dynamic”, “informative” etc.) information? According to your philosophy, the information within inanimate matter required intelligence to create, select and combine it into a concoction that produced life. The formula then contained all the information required to “run” life, and evolution is the process whereby intelligence (automatic in your hypothesis, autonomous in mine) uses that information plus information from the environment to innovate, thereby creating new information. All your different “categories” of information explain nothing and add to the confusion vividly illustrated by the diametrically opposite conclusions drawn by you and Adami from the same premise. As I see it, all the arguments are far clearer if we simply distinguish between internal information (stored in the genome) and external (from the world outside the organism).