Re: DNA carries information


"Friar Broccoli" <EliasRK@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1156088418.946849.215670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[snip]
For me, only something which is possibly substantive can
have properties, I simply could not imagine what you were
describing without its being explicitly spelled out.

My future intentions:

That said, I BELIEVE (and will (sooner or later) have a shot at
proving (probably in a vague handwaving sort of way)) that
information is a physical property of matter via its connection
with entropy/eXergy. This in the same way that elements (like
hydrogen and aluminum) are properties of matter due entirely to
their physical organisation of elementary particles.

Some things to think about as you set off down this path:

John's paper begins with an epigraph from Weiner: "Information
is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which
does not admit this can survive at the present day." This is
true, of course, but it doesn't go far enough. Not only is
information different from mass, and extension, and Gibbs free
energy, and thermodynamic entropy, and other properties of
objects; it is 'contained in' objects in a completely different
way from those other kinds of properties. So, it seems to me
that the first step is to disentangle just how a claim that
a particular DNA molecule contains a certain amound of information
is different in kind from a claim that the DNA molecule has a
particular mass.

Another epigraph could probably be found to the effect that
observations and measurements are 'theory laden'. [Anyone
know a good original source for this epigraph?] And, from
relativity theory and other sources, we are aware that the
results of a measurement of even the most fundamental and
'physical' properties of an object may depend upon the
reference frame of the observer. Well, that is enough for
me to claim that there simply are no simple concrete properties
of objects. All properties are, in John's unfortunate words,
"in the head".

But information is even more "in the head" than is mass or
Gibbs free energy. Consider that to quantify information,
one first assigns a set of a priori probabilities, and then
computes a summation over an ensemble of 'alternate worlds'.
An information-theoretic quantity is not just dependent upon
our model of this reality, it is dependent upon a model of
a system of alternate realities.

And, as a final caution, I would urge you to be clear on
the distinction between three things, all of which are
sometimes called 'information'. One is information as
capacity, one is information as quantity of contents, one
as information as distinctive quality of contents. For
an analogy to a different concrete metric - volume - I
would invite you to consider the 0.5 liter pickle jar in
my refrigerator, which is currently half full, of used
cooking oil. What is the volume?

Lots of luck.

.

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