Posted on 04/10/2009 8:59:39 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Information accosts us from all sides and presents itself over a wide range of manifestations:
—From messages pounded out by drums in the jungle to telephone conversations by means of communications satellites.
—From the computer-controlled processes for producing synthetic materials to the adaptive control of rolling mills.
—In printed form from telephone directories to the Bible.
—From the technical drawings which specify the construction of a gas-driven engine to the circuit diagram of a large scale integrated computer chip.
—From the hormonal system of an organism to the navigational instincts of migrating birds.
—From the genome of a bacterium to the genetic information inherited by humans.
In addition to the five essential levels of information mentioned in chapter 4 (statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics), it is also advantageous to consider a three-fold vertical division of types of information:
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature
Because information is required for all life processes, it can be stated unequivocally that information is an essential characteristic of all life. All efforts to explain life processes in terms of physics and chemistry only will always be unsuccessful. This is the fundamental problem confronting present-day biology, which is based on evolution.
Chapter 1: Preliminary Remarks about the Concept of Information
Chapter 2: Principles of Laws of Nature
Chapter 3: Information Is a Fundamental Entity
Chapter 4: The Five Levels of the Information Concept
Chapter 5: Delineation of the Information Concept
Chapter 6: Information in Living Organisms
(stay tuned for Chapter 8)
About the Author:
The retired Dr. Werner Gitt was a director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig) and head of the Department of Information Technology. He holds a diploma in engineering from the Technical University of Hanover and a doctorate in engineering summa cum laude together with Borchers Medal from the Technical University of Aachen. Dr. Gitt has published numerous research papers covering the fields of information science, numerical mathematics, and control engineering.
Ping!
Have a great Easter. HE IS RISEN!!!!
That is why his theory is not concerned with the content of a message but just that the message is known completely before it is sent so that the resulting message at the other end can be compared to see if there were any errors in transmission.
There is plenty of information in the universe without the need for intelligent beings. Van der Waals forces cause water to become lighter when it freezes while most other liquids become denser when they freeze. This is why water is such a key component of life. The fact that water is lighter when it is a solid is a piece of information which we discovered after the fact. It is also a piece of information that interacts with all of the other materially-derived pieces of information to create star systems, planets, plant life, animal life, humans, consciousness, etc.
Bacteria and viruses attach to specific cell sites because they are chemically or physically matched. This all happened before humans discovered bacteria or viruses. And these mechanisms occur, not necessarily because some intelligent force is actively causing the matching, but potentially just because of the chemical make-up of the bacteria, viruses, and the cells they attach to.
I believe that the universe itself requires an explanation outside itself to explain its existence. However, I also believe that the basic laws of physics are information enough to generate all of the resulting information. The properties of quarks ... or strings or branes or whatever we find out to be the eventually base stuff of reality ... will be found to be the basic axioms from which all valid theories about the universe can be derived. If quarks were slightly bigger or smaller or had different electrical charges or interacted differently than they do then the axioms would be different and we (or something else) would be living in a completely different universe.
God only needed to define the initial conditions and everything followed from there, QED.
He could very well be a part of every physical interaction. If so, then we are not measuring the results of the initial conditions, but the effect of His interaction with the universe. It appears that in the vast majority of cases, if He is actively involved in every physical intereaction, then He has chosen to involve Himself in invariable ways. Our theories about the universe may be a representation of the results of what God created in the beginning, or they may be a representation of how God is working continuously to make things the way they are.
In either case we can assume that information is purely the result of material processes and correctly describe how things worked in the past and how they will work in the future.
Lot's of things wrong here. First ice floats not because it is lighter, but because it is less dense than the water surrounding it(the water it displaces). You may think that is without distinction, but it is similar to the reason the battleship Bismarck floated for a while and why most common rocks don't. Water expands as it freezes as you can see when you freeze a full glass bottle of water. The bottle breaks. Energy in the form of heat has been removed from the water. Hydrogen bonding in ice causes the water to form structures which occupy more space than the water previously did. Thus it is less dense and consequently floats in non-ice water.
The final problem is that you do not define information while ruling out the necessity for intelligence. It would be as "informative", under your implied definition, if ice did not float. To top it all off, how is it established that anything is a solid piece of information without intelligence and give a useful description as to what information is?
All excellent points, AndrewC! The more and more I think about it, it appears that Universe was not only designed, but designed to be intelligible. As such, God’s creation is sending us intelligible information from just about every aspect of reality, from sub-atomic particles, all the way up to the cosmos. For instance, take H20 as an example. It sends us messages at the atomic level, the molecular level, and it sends us messages at the level we can perceive with the naked eye, such as steam, water, and ice (to include ponds, lakes, oceans, snow, icecubes, icebergs, etc, etc)!
Having said that, I am fascinated by Dr. Gitt’s book. I can’t say that I have read it as closely as I would like, but what I have read and digested has really got me thinking about “information” in a way that I have never conceived of before. Think about it, the Universe and everything in it is almost like God’s website, with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of bites of information, carried on a myriad of physical mediums, which are then picked up by our senses and sent to our minds, that have been specially designed to decode it! Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it!!!
Have a blessed Easter!
All the best—GGG
He is risen indeed!!!!
The world does not require information to run if by information you mean something that can necessarily be transformed into sentences or equations that can be understood by intelligent beings.
We are intelligent beings. We have language skills. We can express theories in sentences and equations. Just because we can use specific sentences and equations to describe the universe does not mean that the universe is guided by those sentences or equations.
One particular equation, F=mA, that some were certain acurately described how things worked in the universe turns out to be just a good approximation under certain conditions. What we know now to be true will almost certainly be shown in future to be approximations that are only valid under certain conditions.
If every intelligent being were wiped from the universe what was left would still continue to chug along without needing to be understood.
The universe is the way it is. We have the luxury of being able to describe many of its characteristics with simple sentences and formulas that we can use to explain past events and predict future ones. These sentences and formulas are abstract additions to the universe of all things and are not necessarily a description of how the universe actually is. If God is directly involved in every physical event that keeps the universe going then F=mA or E=mc^2 is totally off the mark.
Scientists tell us there was a Big Bang and that over time particles coalesced into atoms which coalesced into stars. The particles coalesced into stars ... rather than just dispersing into the empty void ... because of their characteristics. Different particles would have just dispersed. In order to describe this process to ourselves we identify the particular characteristics we believe to have caused the stars to form: masses, electric charges, forces, etc. We call this "information". The particles don't call it anything. In any case the stars formed and the characteristics we call out seem to support stars being created from such particles.
There is no difference between star formation and the formation of life with regards to this point: matter of different sorts intertacting in different ways resulting in different forms and organizations of matter. It may take us more complicated sentences to describe a sea urchin than to describe a star. We may say that a sea urchin requires more information to describe it than a star does. But in neither case do the particles care what we think or what information we need to use to explain what is going on to ourselves.
That we have intelligence may be evidence that our Creator is also intelligent. But it doesn't change the fact that our theorizing is just a way we use to help explain the universe to ourselves. It is not about finding the truth, but about finding something that is useful.
F=mA is definitely not the truth, but in most cases it is much more useful than Quantum Mechanics or Relativity. Developing the quantum mechanical model of a hydrogen atom is difficult enough. Try coming with the quantum mechanical model of a bridge and then using that model to determine how much load it can support.
Angels may very well intervene to cause the winds to blow and the rain to fall, but such an explanation is of no practical use.
However God is keeping this ship afloat He seems to be doing it in such a way that it appears that everything can be described by purely material phenomena. Until and unless we find a case where this is not so we might as well stick to the materialist model knowing full well that it is only a model.
I will watch the video tonight. God bless you and keep you!
Happy Easter to you also GGG!
No one said the world required information, since the world apparently functions spontaneously. Life does not work that way. Change something very slightly, imperceptibly, in life and it will cease to be life.
But in neither case do the particles care what we think or what information we need to use to explain what is going on to ourselves.
Have you ever heard of entanglement?
Amen. Thanks for the ping!
bump
Amen brother...I used to listen to that song ALL THE TIME, but then I misplaced the cassette tape(!) in one of my many moves. I had almost completely forgot about the song until you brought it to my attention again. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
Here’s a vid of the guy who wrote the song (Don Francisco). He gives a brief interview about how he came to write the song, followed by a rendition I had not heard before. What an inspiration!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIndrry40Ks&feature=related
HE IS RISEN!
All the best—GGG
PS Here’s another version with photomantage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbSnk1R31vg
Hi again GGG, and you can call me “sister” LOL. Have a blessed Easter and thank you for all these great Creation pings. God is awesome!
Change Planck's constant slightly or the gravitational coefficient or ... and suns would not form, planets would not exist, etc.
As far as entangled particles go your claim is that they communicate information to one another? Particles that are close by only require forces to interact, but when the particles get separated then somehow they magically can communicate information? That doesn't seem like a useful theory.
Nice attempt at a strawman, but changing concentrations of chemicals is nowhere near varying a fundamental constant of nature.
As far as entangled particles go your claim is that they communicate information to one another?
Another vain attempt at a strawman. All I did was ask you if you had heard of entanglement. And if you do know what entanglement is, how does the quantum eraser fit into your concept of knowledge? And don't try another strawman. It won't work.
Shannon didn't claim that his theory was about creating information, but about transmitting it correctly. That is why his theory is not concerned with the content of a message but just that the message is known completely before it is sent so that the resulting message at the other end can be compared to see if there were any errors in transmission.
True. Just as long we understand that words like "known" and "compared" imply intelligence as part of the information process.
There is plenty of information in the universe without the need for intelligent beings.
Not so.
Van der Waals forces cause water to become lighter when it freezes while most other liquids become denser when they freeze. This is why water is such a key component of life. The fact that water is lighter when it is a solid is a piece of information which we discovered after the fact.
"Facts" are not, per se, "information." And conversely, "Information" need not be "factual" to be information. There's lots of information in a fiction novel.
It is also a piece of information that interacts with all of the other materially-derived pieces of information to create star systems, planets, plant life, animal life, humans, consciousness, etc.
Bacteria and viruses attach to specific cell sites because they are chemically or physically matched. This all happened before humans discovered bacteria or viruses. And these mechanisms occur, not necessarily because some intelligent force is actively causing the matching, but potentially just because of the chemical make-up of the bacteria, viruses, and the cells they attach to.
Advocates of Intelligent Design do not say, nor have they ever said, that intelligently-designed entities are the ONLY things that exist in the universe. They recognize that things can be brought into (and out of) existence through (i) random processes, and (ii) strict determinative / mechanistic cause-and-effect processes. They merely recognize (along with all thinking people for thousands of years...until the scientific revolution starting around the 17th century) that there are entities and processes in the universe whose genesis and continued existence can only be explained by reference to concepts that have no analogue in the typical language of "chance" or of "determinism"; concepts such as "goal", "purpose", "intent", etc.
I believe that the universe itself requires an explanation outside itself to explain its existence. However, I also believe that the basic laws of physics are information enough to generate all of the resulting information.
No physicist or information theorist would accept that statement. The laws of physics are true but do not contain information. The laws of physics, chemistry, and probability can fully account for the characteristics of the wood chips, the ink, and the way in which Scrabble squares are randomly arranged in a box when you shake it. They have zero explanation for the organization those squares begin to assume when they are arranged in non-physical, non-chemical, non-probabilistic information-bearing strings called "words" on the Scrabble board. "Words" are referrable only to an intelligence with "goals", "purposes", "intents", "strategies", etc. "words" are not merely "patterns". "Sentences" are not simply "patterns." "Sentences" need NOT be true in order to be MEANINGFUL, INFORMATIVE SENTENCES.
"Truth" is not the same as "information"; "pattern" is not the same as "information."
The properties of quarks ... or strings or branes or whatever we find out to be the eventually base stuff of reality ... will be found to be the basic axioms from which all valid theories about the universe can be derived. If quarks were slightly bigger or smaller or had different electrical charges or interacted differently than they do then the axioms would be different and we (or something else) would be living in a completely different universe.
Thank you for proving my point. It is precisely the fact that you can predict with such accuracy what would happend IF some fact about reality were different from what it is that proves that these laws of physics contain NO information but are nevertheless true. Even a perfect knowledge of all possible laws of physics, chemistry, and probability will tell you nothing about what the NEXT fortune will be in a fortune cookie; it will be a complete surprise...and the more surprising it is, the more information it contains (notice this has nothing to do with whether the fortune is true or not). On the other hand, if the fortue were to say "It is either raining outside now, or it is not raining outside now," that would be a completely true statement but it would have zero information content.
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