Evolution: as immaterial information (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 14, 2022, 16:55 (891 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: In cells, where is that 'mind'? What really exists is the cells ability to interpret the information code which also requires information.

dhw: We’re off again! Interpretation is a mental activity! What is the difference between a code and an information code, and what information does an information code require in addition to its information?

All cells act as if they have mental activity. Cells use information they have to decode DNA and perform their procesees, all automatically.

DAVID: I am attempting to show you how information is used in life and by life. Your wild discomfort about the information concept is showing.

dhw: So far all you have told me is that for the start of life, cells had to contain information. We agree that cells spend their lives interpreting information, but that does not tell us how life started, or HOW they are able to interpret information. Information itself, we agree, is passive. It requires mental activity if it is to be interpreted.

We are not discussing how life started but the fact that information had to be part of it.

DAVID: Life does not run on mental activity. Life runs by automatically interpreting the information it contains.

dhw: Living organisms respond to information both inside and outside themselves. I agree that many of these responses are automatic, when the information remains unchanged – e.g. no abnormality inside, and no environmental changes outside. But when conditions change, what you call the “information” changes, and that is when the mental activity of interpretation and decision-making is required.

Cells automatically respond various stimulations outside them.

dhw: Your theory is that 3.8 billion years ago, your God compiled a book of instructions for each new problem, or alternatively he pops in to tell the cells what to do. I find this a little far-fetched, and suggest that instead he may have given cells the autonomous intelligence to work out their own solutions (adaptation) or even to design new ways of exploiting the changes. So we are back to the same straightforward discussion, and we don’t need any of the convoluted categories of information propagating, interpreting, instructing, operating, conceiving etc.

You can't escape that without information life can't/doesn't exist

Missing a part doesn’t matter

QUOTE: "Study of EG has proceeded on the assumption that other regions of her brain had taken up the task of processing language. That’s not as unusual as it sounds; the brain is a living organ, not a machine. Given an opportunity, it can shift burdens around (neuroplasticity.)

dhw: Doesn’t this suggest to you that the cells of which the brain is composed are able to respond intelligently to new demands by taking on new functions?

Yes, brain plasticity processes take on new tasks.

Entropy

dhw: […] Incidentally, the far-sighted Lynn Margulis was also a champion of the theory that cells are intelligent.

DAVID: Yes, they appear to be that way.

dhw: And what appears to be intelligent might actually be intelligent.

So tell how they developed that intelligence, by chance?