Re: Life has no intrinsic interest in information...

In article <3gsha5tm2nhdp4i82i7f831p5oa5eitfd6@xxxxxxx>, r norman
<r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:24:26 +0100, Burkhard <b.schafer@xxxxxxxx>
wrote:

r norman wrote:
On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:38:18 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article <avgfa5tt551umbbin7711fk9lhkhm3hpp7@xxxxxxx>, r norman
<r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:20:30 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article <kmbfa5t149tf210mced1vp9at5pis34hv6@xxxxxxx>, r norman
<r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:04:37 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article <lo8fa51krmcvc7eajasjfimf7aq3pf99h2@xxxxxxx>, r norman
<r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:14:27 +1000, John Wilkins <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

In article
<0a1caacc-3b34-49eb-b8aa-d08041993dfa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
odin <odinoodin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You can have a large amount of water, where it might have no
obvious
effect that is important or meaningful to you, like on another
planet.
Or you can have a small amount of water in your windpipe during a
water boarding session that is very important or meaningful to you.
Or
you could have a small amount of water in your canteen while you
are
lost in the Gobi desert that is very important or meaningful to
you.
Information is like water. The measurement of information is not is
not the same as the significance, meaningfulness or utility of that
information. And often information is meaningful to you when you
least
expect it, as demonstrated in the Chaos Theory. Where do people
like
SpinMeister get the idea that there is some magical force that
drives
evolution towards greater information content. If a mutation
resulted
in a reduction in information (what ever that might mean) made that
mutation would gain in frequency as a result of natural selection.
Life has no monopoly on information.

It is, I believe, a holdover of Aristotelian hylomorphism; which is
the
view that what makes things what they are is their form, impressed
on
the substance (hyle means matter and morphe means form).
Information is
just Aristotelian form (it "in-forms" matter).

This has been in retreat and redefinition for decades, at least
since
Dalton, but it is a pernicious philosophy that bolsters, among other
things, finalism, or the view that things are what they are for a
purpose or goal.

IMO there is no inherent information in anything; it's all an
artifact
of the observers.
Of course. Without an observer we all (along with the rest of the
universe) would be simply a mass of uncollapsed wave functions!

The notion of information is a convenient and exceptionally useful
way
of explaining why a specific pattern or organization of matter has
one
effect on a system (a receiver) whereas a different pattern or
organization of exactly the same physical matter with, to the best of
our knowledge, an exactly equal energy configuration has a very
different effect. This latter stipulation is to avoid your otherwise
inevitable rejoinder about the notion that everything is just a
configuration of quarks and leptons.

That many people write incredible nonsense about information and its
role in biological systems does not alter its place. Many people
write incredible nonsense about everything.

A lot of people say incredible nonsense about wave functions, too...
Kodaly explained why his Hary Janos suite begins with a musical
sneeze: it is an affirmation of the truth of the accompanying
material. Hence my rather whimsical and offhand "sneeze" to begin my
post.

You, as a philosopher, are rightly concerned with making careful
distinctions between what really goes on in the world we inhabit and
what we say about what really goes on to let us make some sense of it
all.

I, as a scientist, am only concerned with making some sense of it. If
"information" and "emergence" help in that task, then fine. Do they
really "exist"? I'll let you worry about that part.

Ta. It is my observation that most scientists will make use of anything
they can to pursue a problem, ranging from alchemy to algebra. This
doesn't mean the operational tools that have utility are representing
anything real. Information is a mathematical construct.
It seems like we have gone around on this a few dozen times before. It
seems to me that all of fundamental physics is a mathematical
construct. Or rather, different ideas about fundamental physics,
whether strings or wave functions or curved space-time are different
types of mathematical constructs. That is all we have.

In the past you also seemed to put some reality behind mathematical or
other forms of descriptive explanations relating to properties of
aggregate objects. Things like temperature or pressure or brittleness
or electrical conductivity. What about fitness? What about species?
Do these really exist in the objective universe or are they constructs
to help us understand what we observe? Or perhaps they are like what
we see in the mirror -- something that doesn't have any existence
whatsoever!

I am most fond of a view known as "structural realism", in which the
relations of observable entities in the best scientific model are
likely to be real relations, and the observable entities of a model are
likely to be real as well. However, it does not follow from this that
every bounded variable of the formal sentence of the model is real. The
older view, derived from Quine and Duhem, is that if the theory
requires it as a variable, it is real: "To be assumed as an entity is,
purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable." ("On
what there is" 1948; one of the seminal papers of the 20thC in
philosophy <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_What_There_Is>).

So yes, I think that the gross objects are real (but not that the
category of all objects are real categories or classes) and their
relations, as outlined in the most empirically adequate models, are
true.

But that doesn't imply that the math represents things that exist
beyond the empirically determinable objects or data sets. For example,
I think fitness is a constructed variable in population genetics. It
represents no physical reality (or rather, it is shorthand for a
heterogeneous collections of physical relations).

That leaves the most important point -- why do you accept that the
notion of fitness is a valid and important part of evolutionary theory
even though it has no physical reality whereas you reject the notion
of information which is in the same category? You do have to put
aside the inconsequential tiny little detail that nobody has yet put
forward a useful and meaningful theory that does incorporate
information. You seem to reject even the effort to do so. You also
seem to reject the notion that DNA "codes information" even about
protein primary structure although that admittedly is a quite trivial
application of information theory.

Information is not an ineliminable part of any theory. It is a
mathematical tool, rather like things like the use of the Shannon index
in biodiversity studies. It's a way of measuring what we are interested
in; it is not in itself substantive.

To return to the nature of reality, itself, if it relies on "the value
of a variable" in a model, by which of course you (and Willard) must
mean the worth or utility,

He went by the name Van, not Willard, for obvious reasons.

no, that is not what Quine means, it is a purely syntactic criteria for
existence. As soon as your theory allows you to derive sentences of the
form: Vx(Px)etc, whatever value X takes exists relative to that theory.

not the numerical value, then certainly the
observer -- the decider of what has worth -- play a role in
establishing the reality of things!

So once you have the notion, "there exists an x such that..." then x
must represent reality? So it doesn't matter on what "value" x takes
and it doesn't matter the utility of x, only that there exists such an
x.

That was Quine's view, yes. If the theory in which the logical
formalisation (sometimes called a Ramsay Sentence) is our best,
according to Quine we are required to think its posits exist (but only
for the value of that variable, as Burkhard points out).

OK. Let's look at the old saw "every rule has an exception". That
immediately leads to a proof that there exists a rule that has no
exception. For the saw must either be true or it must be false. If
it is true, then the saw itself must have an exception and that
exception is a rule with no exception. And if it is false, there
there is a rule with no exception. Either way that perfect rule must
exist. Therefore the rule must represent reality because it must
exist.

No, that certainly cannot be. OK, the take the statement about
elementary number theory that cannot be proved by axiomatic
mathematics, a statement demonstrated to exist by Godel. Certainly
that statement must represent reality, no?

You seem to be saying that Quine claims that all mathematical
constructs (those for which "there exists an x such that" holds) are
real. OK, as a once pure mathematician in my naive youth, I can
believe that. But Wilkins holds that " Information is a mathematical
construct" and therefore is not real??!!!

No, I'm saying that Quine holds that a *theory* (not all mathematical
constructs) that is our best effort (not all theories) has quantified
variables that must be taken to represent real things when they have
determinate values. Since those values are empirical, it is not simply
that they are mathematical.

.

Relevant Pages

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