Re: Where does information come from?

rnorman <rnorman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<many snippages throughout.

What about energy and entropy? Are they abstracta too? What in the so
called real world do you not consider an abstracta? What about DNA? Is
DNA a "thing" or an abstracta?

Neither of these things are abstracta, although "entropy" is an abstract
measure of an objective physical property. Shannon entropy and thermo
entropy do not map directly onto each other, despite Schrödinger's
"negentropy" claim (which is a fact not about the "code script" but
about dissipation in biological entropy).

From what I gather about physics, there are fundamental entities that
just exits -- mass (and energy), space (and time), charge, and a
variety of quantized or conserved things. Information relates to how
things are arranged rather than to what they are. It is not a "thing",
but an ordering. It is very much an abstraction that is useful but not
really necessary to explain what is happening in the world. That is
why I say it is an "emergent" property and why Wilkins can deny the
existence of such things and still have both of us right.

It is useful *in the context of our descriptions and models* to assign
an ordering so that we can then deal with that aspect of what exists
only. By describing the phenomena in a particular way, we bracket off
the rest of the phenomena (which are indefinitely big - you can pick out
a lot of different phenomena for any given system to explain and
describe) and explain those remaining in terms of formal models and
interpretations of those models (which is a fancy way of saying that we
decide what to identify as being a token of the variables in the
equation, and how to measure them, in this case).

I think the issue of emergent properties is irrelevant in this matter.

Biology doesn't use abstract mathematics that much. But isn't the
theory of evolution an abstracta as well? Perhaps less an abstracta
than "information", but a cognitive construct nonetheless.

Biology doesn't use abstract mathematics? Really? Then what abouty all
these books I lack the math to fully read? These biology books. And all
those damned papers? That is *such* a silly thing to say.


It is true the biology uses less abstract mathematics than some other
areas. But that is because biologists tend to be less trained in
mathematics. The same abstract ideas and derivations and relationships
are critically important. What are nested sets other than mathematical
abstractions? I will let our resident philosopher describe just what
is "abstract" as opposed to "concrete" -- that is distinctly a
philosophical notion, not a "scientific" one.

Some biology is markedly mathematical (for instance that which is
published in Theoretical Biology).

An abstract entity is one that does not exist in space and time (which,
for a radical nominalist like me, means nothing at all, but we can treat
semantic conceptions as abstract even if they exist in heads), while a
concrete object is one that does exist in a particular location in space
and time. Mathematical models, which are semantic objects, do not exist,
as such, in a given spot.



Information is intangible. It's carried along on the molecules that
interact with the DNA. Sort of like the packet communication taking
place along the Internet.


This is just dualism. Information doesn't "exist", it is invented.


In the same way, then, energy, entropy and momentum don't exist but are
invented?

The invention is of the representations of those properties. Information
is just the thing represented in the abstract. It has no causal power
unless it passes through an actual information processing system like a
head, a computer or a communication system.

In short, information is an (rnorman's going to like this) emergent
property of physical processes, physical processes aren't emergent
properties of information.

I like it very much. The only problem is that I am again away for a
few days and can only occasionally check in here, and then only using
this hideous Google interface where I can't easily read what is going
on.

I have repeatedly argued that the notion of "information" is intimately
concerned with how the receiver or processor of that information
responds. Underlying every 'processing' of information is a simple
physical process whereby energy and material flow from one object to
another causes the second object to respond according to known laws of
physics and chemistry. To say that the second object is "processing
information" is simply an enormously useful device to help us
understand the behavior at a higher level of organization that the
physical events. That is my notion of "emergent".

On this, we concur...
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

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