Norbert Wiener, MIT Mathematician and Father of Cybernetics
“Information is information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism that fails to take account of this can survive the present day.”
Does the natural universe contain information? Yes. DNA represents both stored information and communicated information. It represents a design, or blueprint, or instructions, for life to be created. Like a musical score to music, it tells what notes to play, when, and for how long.
Some scientists recognize that information constitutes a third element of the universe, something that is neither matter nor energy. Others resist the implications of this recognition.
In all of human experience, information comes from intelligence, and communication comes from mind and not merely matter. Patterns may occur naturally in nature (snowflake, wave patterns on sand), but information and communication do not.
This is the materialistic atheist's conundrum. Based on what we know empirically about information and communication of information, inference to the most likely cause suggests there is a mind and intelligent cause behind life on Earth.
Information implies intelligence. Intelligence implies a mind. A mind implies a Person.
Anyone want to hazard a guess Who this might be?
8 comments:
Uhhh, no. Information is physical. It always has a physical representation, and its processing requires energy and produces entropy. As it is physical, it is entirely explained by thermodynamics.
Start with Rolf Landauer and Edwin Jaynes. Wiener died in 1964 and likely never got to even read Landauer's 1961 paper on the physicality of information and the physics of computation.
By the way, when we say that a system has an information gain or loss we are not making any reference to a mind. Information gain or loss, roughly, is the difference of entropy between an initial and final state. As such it is the difference of two extensive state function calculations. It relates to what we can and cannot know about a system that has undergone a state change, either due to an irreversible process, or due to communication over a channel.
"Information is physical. It always has a physical representation, and its processing requires energy and produces entropy. As it is physical, it is entirely explained by thermodynamics."
Information may reside in a physical medium, but is not to be equated with the medium in which it resides.
I may record my thoughts on paper, or they may reside in my head -- both have physical implications. But where does my next thought come from? From a material source that causes me to think it, or does my thinking cause a physical effect?
"By the way, when we say that a system has an information gain or loss we are not making any reference to a mind."
You are referring to the transmission of information, not the generation of it.
"Information may reside in a physical medium, but is not to be equated with the medium in which it resides."
It is equated to the differential gain in the knowledge that we have about the state of a system, and that differential gain is always represented in a physical form somewhere. Were it not, it would not be processable by any physical apparatus, including the human body. You're trying to give info some magical quality outside of the physical world, and if that's the case, then you're not talking about science, so you can't claim that this is a failure of materialism. You're talking metaphysics, and therefore, you're talking nonsense.
You also seem to want to mash the syntactic description of information with the semantic or pragmatic description. Information may be interpreted at the receiving end in some way (i.e., have meaning extracted per semantic description), and then it may cause a change of state at the receiver (i.e., have a pragmatic effect on the receiver). Nowhere along this chain does it acquire any special nonphysical form, whether it is stored, processed, exchanged, copied or dissipated (erased).
"I may record my thoughts on paper, or they may reside in my head -- both have physical implications. But where does my next thought come from? From a material source that causes me to think it, or does my thinking cause a physical effect?"
Well, without going into too much speculation, I suspect that the simplest answer would be that learned behaviours are stored information patterns that are physically encoded in your nervous system or in your brain. The reception of information of some nature may cause your mental state to change to one that favours a new behaviour based on past experience or some other driver. The particular quirk of our consciousness causes us to attach a wispy notion of will to the action, and it is this that you want to call 'spirit' or 'soul' or just basically the intention behind your action.
"You are referring to the transmission of information, not the generation of it."
I'm not really sure what you're saying here...that the generation of information requires mind? If information is just the difference between the entropy calculations, where does the requirement for mind come from? This has nothing to do with communication vs. generation. The mind (better word: receiver) may be necessary to interpret information for semantic value. If you read Landauer, you'll see that information processing requires energy (as it is manipulation of a physical system). So it takes work to set up and process information. You want to posit some sort of 'first cause' that provided the initial generation of information, but it's not necessary. Information can be generated even in non biological self-organizing systems in free energy gradients. All it requires is a reduction in system entropy, or the creation of organization, and it happens all the time, including in your own body.
The physics of information has come a long way since Wiener. I believe that it would make both Shannon and Boltzmann proud, and they are the undisputed fathers of info theory and stat mech, respectively. Landauer was a later player in the physics of computation, but no less important.
Other people to look up: Prigogine, Haken, Kullback, Kolmogorov and Schrodinger (especially Schrodinger's "What is Life?" book...it's short and sweet).
Sorry for the triple post, but may I suggest a place for your 'first cause', if you really feel it necessary?...time t = 0. At the moment of the Big Bang. Your first cause is safe there, at least for the time being.
After that moment, everything proceeded as if there were nothing driving it but irreversibility (specifically, the laws of thermodynamics).
"You're talking metaphysics, and therefore, you're talking nonsense."
Please clarify:
Are you saying that all metaphysical ideas are untrue because they are not scientific?
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