Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 01, 2015, 17:47 (3069 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
dhw: 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. .... 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).-DAVID: Your intent to simplify only confuses the issue. I assume God created the universe, That required physical processes outlined by our discoveries of the Standard Model, particle physics, etc.-I do not think anyone would disagree that the creation/origin of the universe required physical processes.
 
DAVID: The universe and its inanimate objects contain inactive descriptive information we humans create.-I'm afraid I already find this confusing. How do humans “create” the information? It is already there within the object (and I thought you thought your God created it). We humans analyse the objects and invent words to describe what we find. The results of our analysis and translation into words are what we call information, i.e. data, facts, knowledge about what the objects consist of and do. Inventing words is not the same as inventing what they describe.-DAVID: Animate matter, living organisms, contain an active form of information that contains the instructions for a continuous process interpreted by parts of the living organism that are programmed for just that purpose. If automatic, intelligence planned it. If evolved by chance, mind is not required. These distinctions are the nub of our debate. You are trying to gloss it over. -I find this confusing too. I do not see how information can be active. Inanimate matter can also be active, but it is the component parts that are active, not “information”. (One of your authors emphasized the need to distinguish between matter and information.) The distinction here is that inanimate matter - if we set aside panpsychism for the sake of this discussion - does not appear to contain an intelligent mechanism to interpret information, whereas living organisms do. It is their intelligence that actively uses information, and the continuous process both of living and of evolving is the result of interaction between the organism's intelligence and the information contained within and coming from outside the organism - an important distinction which I drew at the end of the quoted passage above and which you have not commented on. I described this process in the section of my post that you left out:
“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.” Please tell me what part of this you disagree with or find confusing, and what has been glossed over.-The nub of this particular debate, however, has been the indiscriminate and confusing use of the word “information”, and it seems that once again it is causing confusion.
 
Xxxxxxxxxxx-David's comment re “semiotics”: Obviously there must be an intelligently designed decoder, or onboard intelligence to follow the instructions. All we know now is the DNA instructions are used and followed appropriately or there would be no life.-I am happy with this comment, which seems to me no different from intelligence using internal information, allowing for that intelligence to be your God's preprogramming or my autonomous alternative.