What Words Are Not

Faith & Science Conversation
21

Sorry but the plain fact remains is that the spirituality you are selling is that that of Plato and Neoplatonism and for me this contradicts the very reasons I believe in a spiritual aspect to reality in the first place.

Everything physical can be considered an encoding of information in the same medium of particles and forces. Often they have a dynamic structure that maintains itself by replacing its material components from those in its environment and this applies not only to living organisms but to other things like hurricanes and tornadoes. This is why many physicist will consider information to be the very essence of all things physical.

Frankly reducing spirituality to something like this is to do away with it altogether and what you really have is naturalism again. You provide the perfect basis for the naturalists and atheists to simply say that such spirituality is simply an outdated and inferior explanation of nature and science is the far more rational explanation of the same things.

So to clarify once again… I am not saying that the spiritual (non-physical) does not exist, only that it is a mistake to identify these which information, ideas, and other objects of mental activity. It doesn’t do justice to the spiritual and it doesn’t work as a means of establishing the existence of the non-physical either.

22

Only if you decide in advance that the meaning of this pattern of knots is a count of eleven. Patterns mean nothing if there is no agreement as to what the pattern means. You could say it is the agreement that leads to the information. Your DVD example could represent a collection of random numbers instead of a movie if that is the agreement as to what the DVD represents.

23

My understanding is that anything with a particular, distinguishable order constitutes information, shuffling of a given order is an increase in entropy, so that does not rest on intelligibility. This can get very arcane. I have nowhere near the training to read, say, Hawking’s academic papers on the black hole information paradox, so I am not qualified to make contributions towards a physical understanding of information. Once someone has gained the required mathematical skills and the attention of the academic community, then I am inclined to listen to what they have to say.

Interpretation is an interesting question, and I’m not sure what to make of it all yet. For instance, the color green can be defined as a wave length of light, or a physiological response to that light, but that does not really capture our perception of it. Our perception is a reality, but of what kind? Color perception is just a very simplified aspect of our consciousness. While a DVD encoring a picture of a verdant green forest is not remarkable in terms of digital sequences, our interpretation of that information is another level of phenomena. Information itself is entirely explicable in physical terms. The interpretation of information, however, while processed in our brains and so material, is at least somehow emergent. It is remarkable that in all the randomness in the universe, there are little packages of highly organized matter - that would be us - that purposefully channel energy to organize other matter by increasing overall entropy. To me, the existence of consciousness and purpose is the fascinating question.

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24

There is a lot I don’t know about information theory, or Shannon Information or all that … so perhaps my following speculations, ignorant as they may be, might become the occasion of reducing that ignorance.

All those zeros and ones on the DVD might well be indistinguishable from noise to any aliens who can read them. For one thing, if we assume near-perfect data compression - then in fact they are nearly perfectly “random”. Alternatively (and without regard to any compaction) the entire movie could be encrypted using a random (noise-generated) key that is as long as the data itself. In that case, the so-encrypted data and the truly random key itself are now truly indistinguishable until brought together.

In other words - information may sometimes exist only in the eye of the beholder (decoder). If on a long mountain hike I pick up a conspicuous rock along the way and carefully set it down on the opposite side of the tree where I found it, that will mean absolutely nothing to anybody else who comes along afterward. UNLESS … somebody knew about that rock and tree, and I pre-arranged with them that if they saw it moved thus, then that means I had been along that way. Now the otherwise purely natural status of the situation suddenly became information … but only to the one person who knew to interpret it as such. There is something about information that prevents it from being such in the absence of any possible interpreters who know something of the encoder and the encoding so used.

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25

True, but to transfer those zeros and ones from one substrate to another must maintain the bit order, so that would be information. Actually, even transferring a bit order originally created by what is indeed noise to another medium is information, in that the arrangement is a particular one of a much larger set of possibilities. So intelligibility is something distinct from information.

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26

Yes! - thanks for adding that basic clarification.
And it seems to me that it is intelligibility that exists entirely in the minds of the communicators (transmitters and correspondingly-knowledgeable recipients).

Indeed, if you see the number 22 written by itself on a piece of paper, and know nothing of who wrote it or why, then it is not information to you of any meaningful kind. You may recognize the numerals and so share the vague concept of that quantity with somebody - so it may be “intelligible” to you in that sense. But not nearly so intelligible as to the person who had just asked the author how old he was. To that person, the arrangement of ink on the paper has a meaning and intelligibility that it can never have to the rest of us who know nothing of the context.

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27

Platonism tries to tell you what information is–Platonic Forms and all that they entail. The materialistic establishment has many other names for the mystery–qualia, memes, items in a superseded ontology, etc.

By contrast, I’m trying to avoid interpreting the facts and simply pointing to the facts. I’m just pointing out what information is not. It’s not physical. This is something that naturalistic establishment zealously insists cannot be true. Especially in the realms of neuroscience and psychology: they presuppose that we are our brains. But the brain obviously cannot perceive something immaterial (I have a separate post for this). Therefore, they will not tolerate challenges to the presuppositions of materialism.

28

But it makes no difference whether anyone can rightly interpret the information or not. It is still objective. For example, for many years we thought that much of the DNA sequence was static junk. Now we’ve realized that there is more there.

Similarly, space at first appeared to be full of mostly random, meaningless data. But then, all at once, the data was brought into focus, compressed, and translated into elegant sentences like “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”

29

Slow down there – you have shown that at all. It’s not at all clear to me what you mean by ‘information’, since you seem to be referring to very different things with the term. Information in the sense of a message is very much not objective: any string can code for any message, so that interpretation is inherently subjective.

Indeed.

Yeah, now we have even more reason to think that most of the DNA is meaningless junk. (Not ‘static’ though, since DNA keeps changing.)

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30

Intelligibility is an interesting discussion. But my main point is still simply that the information (the meaning behind the medium) is immaterial, regardless of how subjective or objective the interpretation of that information is, and regardless of how well we are able to understand it. Whether it is the objective information conveyed by the nucleic acid bumps on a DNA molecule (which I personally cannot translate at all), or the objective information carried by stellar light waves (which I only have a vague understanding of), or the both objective and subjective information carried in a wireless download of the Les Misérables song “J’avais rêvé d’une autre vie” (which I can certainly enjoy even though I don’t speak French)—all the information carried by those various media is likewise nonphysical.

As to how we comprehend it and debate the interpretation of it, that’s a whole other issue. (Which is why I tried starting another post on it.) But the simple evidence for an immaterial reality–that’s huge. That changes everything. If we acknowledge that, for example, pi (3.14…) is just as objective and useful as a chunk of iron ore, that changes everything.

31

The naturalistic establishment [ mainstream science ] obviously knows the difference between CD encoding and a song, or words transcribed from papyrus to stone. How is this a new insight that changes everything? How do you think that they missed something which has been blindingly obvious for thousands of years?

This would require that it is possible to have information without material. No paper, digital media, just the cold vacuum of empty dark space. Otherwise, as has been pointed out by Mitchell, information is material in a similar sense as heat is material phenomena.

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32

But it does if you want to translate from one form to another. The only way to do that is to understand how the original data is interpreted and how the changed data will be interpreted. Otherwise you get GIGO.

33

Exactly. If you translate the pattern of raised dots from one medium to another, it really matters whether it’s the shape of the dots or their color that represents the relevant information.

34

Regardless, the point is that it is objective. If part of it is random and meaningless (i.e. junk), it’s not because we have declared it to be so but because we have discovered it to be so. The information in DNA was there long before Watson and Crick et al discovered it.

35

Of course its not a new insight. Many are aghast that the establishment absolutely insists on the presupposition of materialism–on figuring out, for example, “How Matter Becomes Mind”, as the title of a recent Scientific American article put it.

No, you’ve made an entirely arbitrary statement there. My point is that if two different physical media can have exactly the same information in common without needing to have any physical qualities in common, then that information has no physical qualities.

However, since you bring it up, infinity is something that cannot have any material representation. By contrast, the number 5 can be imaged through 5 abacus beads, five knots in a rope, V apples, etc. But infinity is, literally unimaginable. Yet it is as necessary (via calculus and trig) for all our modern technology as is a power plant.

36

That only matters if you’re debating about the correct interpretation of the objective information. But it has no effect whatsoever on whether or not the information is there on the DVD or on the paper. Again, compare it to the DNA molecule: some of it may or may not be junk regardless of whether we interpret it correctly. What we interpret to be junk may not be junk. In which case, our interpretation of the objective facts would be incorrect.

37

Are you saying all ideas, realized and potential, are information? That each member of the real number line is a unit of information? A presupposition of materialism is compatible with accepting math as true. (BTW, I am a theist, not a materialist).

38

The same idea can be had apart from any physical qualities in common, not the same information.

Here is one reason why. You can alter the information in the copy, without that change being reflected in the original.

For instance, I make a copy of “Let’s eat Grandpa”

“Let’s eat Grandpa”

Then I see, that’s not right. So I edit the only the copy to “Let’s eat, Grandpa”.

Now, the idea, and the information, is clearly not the same. The duplicated information never was the same as the original. The information is independent for each instance.

If we are talking physics, making a copy is not the same information, it is duplicating information. If you are defining information in a domain other than physics, that would have no bearing on physics. Information is most definitely a material phenomena.

39

I think that discussions regarding information may be conflated with “meaning”. Information is usually regarded as verifiable facts (can be measured, tested etc) while meaning is often that which we comprehend, understand and involved in abstraction. When we communicate information, we use words that have meaning that is common to us.

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40

Well no, the exact same objective information can be in common regardless of interpretation. Whether it is the blueprints for a building or the human genome or The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, all that information can be stored:

  • on DVD’s (bumps in plastic)
  • on paper as binary (translate the binary on the DVD’s into a series of the black symbols 0 and 1)
  • as electromagnetic waves
  • etc.

Regardless of who is able to correctly read any of that information, it is there–just like the DNA code was there for Watson & Crick to discover.

Now when it comes to the question “What do these different media have in common?”, we might at first want to answer, “The human brain.” But no, there is no organic gray matter on any of those physical things. They don’t have human brains in common any more than they have livers or lungs in common. Whatever it is that they have in common is immaterial.

This conclusion is absolutely unacceptable to the modern establishment. They cannot tolerate acknowledging the existence of any immaterial phenomenon in the universe. After all, how would our brains be able to perceive it? In what extrasensory way would we perceive something that cannot be directly or indirectly seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled?

Now the prevailing response any of this is to say, “Oh, you’re talking philosophy. You’re not talking science.” But If there is anything new in my argument, it is that when I say that the presuppositions of materialism are wrong, I am saying that this is not a philosophical conclusion but rather a scientific fact. There is a famous old quote by mathematician Reuben Hersh:

“Most writers on the subject seem to agree that the typical ‘working mathematician’ is a Platonist on weekdays and a formalist on Sundays. That is, when he is doing mathematics, he is convinced that he is dealing with an objective reality whose properties he is attempting to determine. But then, when challenged to give a philosophical account of this reality, he finds it easiest to pretend that he does not believe in it after all.” (Advances in Mathematics)

Yes, modern scientists do this all the time! In the same books, in the same paragraphs, in the same breath they will switch back and forth. And if you point it out, they’ll say, “Oh, you’re talking philosophy.”

I’m talking facts–objective, testable, falsifiable facts.