Information as the source of life's creativity (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 06, 2020, 13:07 (1447 days ago) @ David Turell

Information as the source of life’s creativity
Egnor: Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, defined living things as things that strive for their own perfection. That was what distinguished living things from non-living things. A rock doesn’t wake up in the morning and try to be a better rock. Whereas living things, to greater or lesser degrees of success, try to make themselves better at what they do. They eat, they rest, they interact with nature. They do things to make themselves even better examples of what they are. And it would seem, to me, that that might relate to the difference between information in non-living and in living things. The information in living things is directed to ends; it’s directed to purposes that you don’t see in non-living things in the same way.
"Robert J. Marks: In other words, the entity has to have creativity.

In my view, the heading is totally misleading. Information does not create anything. It takes intelligence to extrapolate it from whatever exists, and then to use it creatively. But with one tiny change, I can only applaud Aquinas, which is why I’ve left the quote in full. “Try to make themselves better at what they do” leaves out what most of them do: namely, to survive. There we have evolution in a nutshell: life forms try to survive, and their creative interaction with an ever changing nature is what either demands or allows for their “improvements”. The exception is humans, who have continued the quest for survival, but have also branched out into other forms of improvement (knowledge, art, comfort etc.) which makes them unique. And Marks’ comment is spot on: information is not the “source” of creativity! There is information present in all things, but only living things (intelligent entities) can USE it creatively. Intelligence is therefore the source of life's creativity.

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Information theory proves design

QUOTE: Additionally, I found Dembski’s key indicator of intelligent design, “complex specified information (CSI)”, to be a more refined form of the information theory concept of “mutual information,” with the additional constraint that the random variable for specification is independent of the described event. This additional constraint results in the second keystone of intelligent design theory: the conservation of information.

Maybe I'm too simplistic in my thinking, but for the life of me I can't see the attractions of “information” as the answer to so many of our problems. In my perhaps jaundiced view, it is a great way of creating loads of waffle to cloak the simplest of arguments: in this case, the sheer complexity of life “proves” design. But of course what it doesn’t prove – and many ID-ers scrupulously avoid such a conclusion – is that the design was created by an unknown, sourceless, eternal being which some people call God. That is a different puzzle. I really can’t understand why people can’t accept the logic of the design argument, but I totally understand why they are reluctant to solve the mystery of how the design came about by creating another mystery of such gigantic proportions. I see no point in even mentioning the term "information".