ID commentary on animal minds (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 15, 2016, 01:53 (3024 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: What you keep avoiding by complaining about the way 'information as the basis of everything' is presented, is that it carries the implication that a mind carried or development this information that started creation of the universe and the start of life. The information, as you note, cannot come from itself. Someone made the plans.
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> dhw: You might just as well claim that whatever exists “carries the implication” that a mind created it. Theists will agree, and atheists will not. Such statements are as groundless and pointless as “everything is information”. The existence or non-existence of God is the basic question we come back to in nearly all our discussions, and it will not be resolved by the continued misleading and confusing use of the word “information”, which was the point I wished to reiterate in these posts.-You keep resisting the issue of information like it is poison. If you will note in my entry on Free Will , Top Down or Bottom Up, George Ellis demonstrates that Top down is a valid concept. I've always found my thinking consistent with his. This is a key issue that separates me from Romansh and his sense that self and consciousness is an illusion. Romansh is obviously a bottom up believer, who thinks that everything magically-created started with the tiniest particle in the Quantum zoo and built up by some chance process into what we have today. And I see it as part of top Down Planning to make it all work.-My thinking starts with the recognition that there are types of information, descriptive; advanced planning as in designing a building; instructional as in guiding the formation of a building or an embryo; or running a living cell's processes in a properly coordinated fashion to sustain life. -DNA provides a code with instructions that first makes the organism from the zygote, and then conducts the processes of life through many layers of modifiers all running on informational instructions. All codes known to us, come from mental activity. Put all the chemicals know to exist in life a membrane, and there will not be life until you add the instructions (information).-Your complaint that there must be an interpretive mechanism is understood from the beginning by everyone who discusses the issue of the need for basic information at all levels of life. It comes with the concept, so the discussion of information uses a shorthand that assumes all you desire. -The striking thing is that the basis of our reality is the quantum layer of reality, where everything starts in development, and quanta are not fixed but potentialities and averages of possibilities. It is as if the edifice of the evolution of the universe and the appearance of life is standing quicksand, but amazingly it all illogically works. So to me the Top Down is the mental process that plans and organizes the reality we have from all of the potentialities of the quantum energy that is eternal, since there must be something that always exists and there must be a first cause. And there must be planning which is information. All else is chance.-How do you explain the code in DNA?