JohnW
Posts: 3217
Joined: Aug. 2006
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| Quote (NoName @ Feb. 18 2015,09:22) | | Quote (cryptoguru @ Feb. 18 2015,11:53) | | Quote | I'd be very interested to hear his definition of 'information'.
Clearly, pretty much unarguably, natural processes can produce vast amounts of information.
Stellar spectra are information. They are produced by natural phenomena.
Tides are information. They are produced by natural phenomena.
Fingerprints are information. They are produced by natural phenomena. |
Natural laws can produce ordered output, e.g. fractals, orbits, crystals etc.
This is not information ... information is "What is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things" i.e. has meaning
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definit....rmation
Waves can produce patterns on the beach, this is not information ... it is a pattern enforced by a natural system.
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And you're saying that these patterns are meaningless???
That's absurd. The patterns enforced by the natural system of physics and chemistry provides meaningful information about the stellar composition and processes of stars. This isn't 'just some random pattern', it is incredibly meaningful, and the meaning is tightly coupled to very specific and very precise natural laws.
| Quote | DNA holds information about how to build an organism ... it is an instruction set that is meaningful to the processing logic of a biological cell. This is not like a fractal or a wave, this is a deterministic sequence of instructions that is understood by the cell and is used to perform specific tasks.
The data sent to a radio controlled car is information, which has intended purpose in the control of the car ... the wind blowing the car off course is not information, even if it makes a pattern, the car is not deriving meaning from the interaction.
this is stuff a 3 year old would understand ... if you put a sandwich in a DVD player it won't play a movie. In fact, you can't put a CD in a DVD player and expect to watch a movie ... the information isn't there. |
The information contained in a sandwich is not the same as the information contained in a DVD or a CD. But that it is useless for one purpose does not mean it is meaningless, or that it is without purpose.
You're cheating, badly and transparently, by applying entirely artificial constraints on to what meaning you find, and where, solely due to your preselected purposes.
That's not how it's done.
| Quote | Information can't be created randomly. That's utter nonsense.
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Blatant assertion, without support. Information is precisely distinct from randomness, viz. Shannon.
Constrained randomness produces information literally all the time.
[your argument with Wesley snipped]
New information does not appear by magic.
Yet your claim amounts to the assertion that it does.
We have two alternatives -- natural law and magic.
If you reject the one, and look, you did so right at the top of your post, then you're stuck with magic.
It is YOUR position that information appears by magic.
It is OUR position that information appears naturally, by the operations of nature, which, btw, include randomness. |
Looks like "information" is being defined in the same way as CSI, FIASCO and all the other ID sciency terms: "The property of things which look designed to me which makes them look designed to me."
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Math is just a language of reality. Its a waste of time to know it. - Robert Byers
There isn't any probability that the letter d is in the word "mathematics"... The correct answer would be "not even 0" - JoeG
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