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
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.