ID commentary on animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 19:44 (3238 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: “Probability is the only concept you need to define information.” Meaning? Where do the laws/information come from? You can only be speculative. If you talk of God, you get back to infinite regression and ask what are the origins of God. We'll never get there.-DAVID: You do if you accept first cause. -I simply noted down Vedral's responses, which seem to me to lead absolutely nowhere.-dhw: And yet at one stage he says it's all very simple. We don't know where the information comes from, emotions etc. are too complicated to explain, we don't know if the genome or social factors explain humans, but it's all very simple. Just call everything information, and you have a theory. Call it energy and you have a theory. Call it God and you have a theory.-DAVID: He is trapped. He doesn't dare say God is the source, but he accepts that information is at the basis of reality. The bible says, first there is the WORD, Hmmmm, same concept.-He says “everything is information”, just as you wrote earlier that information is “the source of life”. We spent a long time discussing this indiscriminate and confusing use of the word, and we agreed that we must distinguish between matter, information and the mechanism that extracts and processes the information. No need to go over all that again, is there?