What makes life vital (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 07, 2015, 19:57 (3336 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Information is not material. It is concepts and instructions.
dhw: Information is also data which may be contained within materials but need not have been consciously created. 
DAVID: Your statement appears to be a pipe dream. [...] We can look at a stone and describe it and we have created data in the description. [...] I am talking about instructional information which DNA supplies. Horse of a very different color. Please describe the 'data' you are referring to.-You have already described it. Data (something given) are facts. The composition, age, provenance etc. of the stone is information which would be there with or without an observer, but it takes consciousness to perceive, name, analyse and use it. You are trying to restrict the term “information” to instructions, so that you can ask who gave the instructions (answer: God). But information does not consist only of instructions. An atheist can say that all the information needed for life was contained in unconscious materials which luckily assembled themselves into a life-giving form, and that, through time and experience, evolved its own increasingly complex "instructional information" - a hypothesis no less miraculous than that of a universal, eternal, self-aware, unified form of energy inexplicably possessed of all the “instructional information” needed to create life and the universe. You see the improbability of the one and refuse to see that of the other. -dhw: If the first cause is energy endlessly transmuting itself into matter, whether consciously (theistic) or unconsciously (atheistic), information will also constantly be appearing de novo.
DAVID: You are playing the something-from-nothing game. 
dhw: I think you are confusing de novo with ex nihilo. [...] 
DAVID: I'm not confused. I fully believe in a first cause, nothing ex nihilo, because nothing can come from nothing.-I believe that too. And so I don't understand why you think innovation proceeding from interaction between energy and matter constitutes something from nothing.-DAVID: Mindless energy and matter cannot produce instructional information. Yes, dogmatic, and supported by many philosophers.-Instructional information is a loaded term, as explained above, but if you mean that only a mind could produce the information necessary for life and the universe,your claim is rejected by all those philosophers who claim there is no such thing as a universal mind! So philosophy won't help us. But if you insist that “instructional information” requires a mind, then the instructional cooperation, communication and decision-making carried out by bacteria show that they have “minds”! You can't have it both ways.-DAVID: Much of our body works in a materialistic way. I've described that with my reference to the kidney and liver. My response is graded by the complexity of the evolutionary ladder. Bacteria do not think. Cambrian animals had a degree of mentation, primates more so, and humans a huge jump beyond. Progressive complexity of the nervous system and of brains.-Agreed, apart from your dogmatic refusal to acknowledge the possibility that bacteria do think. But if you attribute thought to progressive material complexity, what happened to your dualism?