I think I’m sympathetic with (largely in agreement - at least with the parts I understood on one reading) about your insistence on an immaterial existence of … something - be it information, or whatever. But then you say this:
Am I correct to infer from this last sentence above that you might think philosophical conclusions are always inferior to scientific facts? I.e. I’m inferring that you may want to elevate the status of nonmaterial things up into scientific facthood as a kind of necessary ‘promotion’ required for them to have legitimacy. If that is so, then I would part company with you on that point, as I see no path for the humble sciences, such as I think they should be known, to extend their empirical grasp into the (in my view) very real (on its own terms) realm of the immaterial. Science can see the bumps on the DVD. Mathematics can even tell us if the bumps are arranged in accidental or likely non-accidental patterns. What it can’t do is adjudicate the meaning of those bumps. That, I think, requires something possibly beyond science, or at the very least, on the same plane with science as it exists in our brains. I don’t think you can set science above it in any case.
Information absolutely can be copied from one media to another. I get it. Roger that. Despite this, I find your argument, that this demonstrates that information is immaterial, to be scientifically wrong and philosophically unjustified. As pointed out repeatedly above, you are erroneously basing it on a muddled equivalence of information and meaning. Information theory is compatible with materialism, just as the scientific “establishment” maintains.
I don’t think that’s right. It is the information that gets transferred, and it can be ‘automated’, as the information transferred in DNA is ‘automated’, not requiring a human brain. I do agree that information and meaning are getting confused.
Well, can you explain how the content of a DVD could just suddenly jump onto a printed page without the intervention of a human? It would require software that is written by a human, so yes it does require a human brain. DNA is an example of a self organizing biological system that doesn’t require a human brain but it is just copying the information and not translating it to a new form.
Information has a technical definition that most lay people confuse with meaning. There was a long discussion of this on another thread several months ago.
In concrete terms, I would agree, but conceptually and abstractly, a brain is not directly needed. The structure of proteins is a form of information that has been translated from DNA .
It does not therefore follow that the information content of one thing cannot move to something else without intervention of a person. All it takes is the usual physical causality which demonstrably has the capacity for unlimited complexity. Wind blows and leaf is moved. Wind moves in circle like a whirlwind and a leaf responds by moving in a circle. Or take a cloud with as complicated a shape as you like and the light from the sun makes a shadow which is also displays that complexity on the ground. Complex information thus moves from one medium to another all the time without any personal intervention.
Sure, the information in DNA is objective: given an appropriate context (sequence context, correct cell machinery), CTT generates a leucine – no brains or subjectivity involved. On the other hand, this information is cannot be transferred between mediums: if I write down ‘CTT’ or store the letters in a fasta file, it no longer generates leucine. It might do something else, to a human brain or a computer program, but as far as cellular machinery is concerned, it’s no longer information. This is one reason that I think you’re conflating more than one concept under the term ‘information’, which makes it hard to discuss your argument.
I doubt you really mean that. Suppose I record a movie on a DVD and hand you the DVD and ask you to copy the information, and you make a copy of the scratches on the surface, do you really think you’ve copied the information?
Information and data that can be gathered is understood and can be communicated. This is mainly due to an understanding of context and method. When we discuss complex systems, particularly as found in nature, the information regarding the systems is just as relevant to our understanding, as the specific data.
The immaterial aspect of all this may be summarised as the ‘intelligibility’ of nature’s systems by human (intelligence makes it meaningful/comprehensible) beings. This interesting aspect has been discussed for many decades and continues to fascinate us.
Is ‘meaning’ immaterial. (No double entendre intended. )
For instance, instances of God’s providence. There is no physical connection, but meaning is imparted due to similarities in context and timing – the world calls them coincidences. Affirmative answers to prayers are one (and only one) type.
Good word. God’s providence is transcendent, of course (I distracted from my question with that), but is meaning in general immaterial? (Materialists would object, obviously.)
I have a worldview, and in this I have faith in meaning which is beyond the material. I do not believe I can prove this from nature.
A materialist could rationally argue that meaning is emergent, and does not exist independently.
I’ve read discussion somewhere to the effect that math would still be true apart from the existence of the universe, and if true it must have an inherent and independent existence.
I do not really have a lot to offer on this question, and in general am a bit skeptical of the value of philosophy when it comes to metaphysics.
So now this has switched to “immaterial”? Is this to build a bridge from ideas to the spiritual? I think it only increases the confusion dramatically over the previous distinction of physical with non-physical.
unimportant under the circumstances; irrelevant.
“so long as the band kept the beat, what they played was immaterial”
Similar: irrelevant, unimportant, inconsequential, insignificant
PHILOSOPHY spiritual, rather than physical.
“we have immaterial souls”
More importantly is the general implication of not matter. And so by making this your link to the spiritual you are making an even better case for the naturalist that science has the better understanding of the non-matter portions of existence. This is ever the problem with trying to prove and push your way of thinking on others is that you typically reduce your own thinking to something far less than it was originally.
So I think this is the absolutely wrong direction for Christian apologetics to go. And I think the correct link to the spiritual is not information, ideas, mind, or immaterial but the subjective aspect of our existence. That is the real reason why I believe in this spiritual stuff because I don’t think the objective is the be all and end all limits of reality. Yes, this means you have to finally accept the inescapable reality that people are going to believe different things. But that is like paying for something with money that is already gone.
So I cut all the strings which tie spirituality to irrelevancy (immaterial) and products of the mind (just in your head kind of stuff), to say that the spiritual is made of the same stuff as everything else. It’s just not part of the space-time mathematical structure of the physical universe (which makes them all subject to death and decay frankly).
And where do I get such an idea? The Bible – more specifically Paul in 1 Cor 15.
If I gave any impression that I was building towards an apologetic, please be assured that is not my intention or interest. I trust in God, and beyond that I forswear any particular insight into metaphysics.
ONE. Information is objective regardless of whether we perceive it or comprehend what we’re perceiving. Even your average rock is cram-loaded with volumes of information regardless of whether we humans have comprehended or translated any of it—geological information, chemical information, subatomic physics, and quantum mechanics.
Or consider the following sentence (which I’m only giving about a tenth of, for the sake of space): 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000… 00101110 00100000. If you stumbled upon that you would say, “Objectively, there’s some kind of pattern there.” Now there is no way that you could comprehend that pattern without more context, but does that mean that the information does not exist? You’ll need a binary-English dictionary and a trigonometry textbook and then maybe you’ll begin to comprehend a different pattern of black symbols (i.e. the English translation): “The base of the natural logarithm, raised to the product of pi and the imaginary unit, plus one equals zero” (e^pi*i + 1 = 0). But if you don’t speak English, does that information not exist? Of course it does. Just like if you found a fuel line on the road, there’s no way you could know that it had served as a fuel line, but that is irrelevant to the objective fact that it had been attached to a vehicle and had gasoline flowing through it. Or just like if you found a portion of a DNA molecule and had no idea about the objective fact that it had been attached to a cell.
TWO. Information is objective regardless of its function. The above sentence is extremely useful as a tool for developing technology, but that is irrelevant to its objective use. Similarly, when the human genome is recorded on DVD’s, it is objective even if it not directing the functioning of an organism.
THREE. Information has no physical qualities that can be directly or indirectly seen, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled. The meaning of “The base of the natural logarithm, raised to the product of pi and the imaginary unit, plus one equals zero” doesn’t only exist for English speakers. Nor does it only exist for humans. For if we translate it through several different physical media, we can affirm that it does not even depend upon the physical human brain to exist.
A pattern of English symbols or a series of binary symbols.
A pattern of bumps on a DVD.
A pattern of air waves (such as if you read the sentence translated into Arabic)
A pattern of electromagnetic waves.
Yes, all those patterns have human authors in common. But they do not have the human brain in common.
No matter what you call it—author, source, entity, etc.—you can’t identify any physical things that they need to have in common. It is a mistake to presuppose that we are our brains. (Okay, yes, this is direct evidence that not only is information immaterial, so also are the authors of information. Am I suggesting that the sentence, “The base of the natural logarithm, raised to the product of pi and the imaginary unit, plus one equals zero”, is “spiritual”? Not necessarily. Are the perceivers/users of such a sentence “spiritual”? That’s an excellent question. Regardless, all I am saying is that both are immaterial.)
Now McKain made the excellent point somewhere that defining the words physical and material can be very tricky. That is why I have often preferred to distinguish between medium and meaning rather than between physical and nonphysical. My main argument is that medium and meaning are absolutely distinct: every physical thing in the universe is a medium for nonphysical meaning. Can such meaning exist apart from a medium? The only such meaning we know of is infinity. But we might make discover more if we ask, “When does information occur?”
And no, Bitikofer, I don’t want to elevate science above philosophy. (I’ve been reading an excellent book on the subject, The Territories of Science and Religion after I heard about it from Stump at the Biologos conference.)
What I take issue with is the arbitrary presupposition that science cannot address the immaterial (provided they take all of mathematics completely for granted!) and, by contrast, that belief in spirituality is purely mystical or even less rational than believing that the sun will rise tomorrow.
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God’s providence is transcendent, of course (I distracted from my question with that), but is meaning in general immaterial? (Materialists would object, obviously.)