Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 02, 2015, 17:56 (3278 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The universe and its inanimate objects contain inactive descriptive information we humans create.
dhw: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).
DAVID: Simple. The understandable info does not exist until we create it. The info does lie, inert in a rock waiting for discovery. We describe the structure of the rock and the info appears for all to see. We now have mentally useful info about the rock.-If the information already exists in the rock, humans did not create it, but now in addition to your list of descriptive, specialized, intelligent, functional, static, dynamic, useful, useless, informative etc. etc., you have given us understandable info and mentally useful info. Yes, we describe the structure of the rock, precisely as I wrote below, and then the info appears for all to see. Once again, we did not create it.-dhw: 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: Of course we have to invent terminology. I don't understand your problem.-My problem here was your confusing claim that humans created the info, and elsewhere in this post your claim that my own account was oversimplified, confusing, and a glossing over of the real issues. I am now trying to unravel your efforts to gloss over the confusion caused by your overcomplicated use of the word “information”. One down, and the rest as follows:
 
dhw: I find this confusing too. I do not see how information can be active.-DAVID: The use of information that describes or runs functions is what I think of as active material. Granted there must be an interpretive mechanism using this info.

And so it is not the information that is active but the use of it by the interpretive mechanism. Thank you for confirming the accuracy of my account. Exit “active information”.-dhw: 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. 
DAVID: Agreed, BUT, not all organisms have intelligence, our usual sticking point. Many lesser organisms have mechanisms which can automatically act appropriately upon the instructions (information) they have.-I have specified throughout this discussion that the intelligence may be your automatic variety or my autonomous variety. Thank you for once again confirming my account.-dhw: 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.”
DAVID: Fine, agreed. The new info allows them to respond to the environment perhaps epigenetically.-Thank you for confirming everything I wrote in the post which you criticized as being oversimplified and confusing and glossing over the distinctions. You might call it an informative discussion!