The Centrality of information (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, June 22, 2014, 22:34 (3596 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I agree that there's no evidence of a blind mechanism, but how does this lead to what follows? Relationships between what? Information about what? The author seems to have forgotten her own earlier examples. Most of the time, we're establishing relationships between material things, and getting information about material things, so how does that make nature possibly non-material? Of course the process by which we do this is mental, but whether human intelligence has its source in materials or in something immaterial is a completely different issue. It has nothing to do with the fact that thought in the form of information or relationships is immaterial.-DAVID: I frankly don't know how to answer your objections. Information that we discover in life's processes is immaterial by definition. We understand it through consciousness. DNA codes transmit information, but how that information developed is not known to us. Darwin and the rest of us have made theoretical guesses, which don't explain at all the first living cell.-You would only be able to answer my objections if you could find the logical thread that binds the sections together. You recommended the article, but I found the thinking disjointed. The author appears to be arguing that because information is immaterial, somehow that provides evidence that the source of consciousness is also immaterial, nature may be immaterial, Darwinian evolution is wrong, and the watchmaker is not blind. What you yourself have written makes perfect sense, and there are powerful arguments in support of your own views, but in my opinion this author, by taking the immateriality of information as her basis, has not provided any. Maybe other readers will be able to follow her logic better than I can.