Biological organization is physical ordering. Both, which are physical ordering, are accompanied by an increase in entropy.
"Elitzur (1993) points out, “the most essential attribute of randomness is the absence of connection between the states of the system’s components.”
No, in reality, the idea of randomness is always associated with a particular interaction governed by physical laws. That is fundamental. The value of the variables in the interaction have a certain spread that depends the sensitivity of the interaction and other minor external effects. Absence of connection is trivial and means just that. In biology, physics, chemistry and structure are the connection.
" ...if you think that only material, physical, tangible entities are real." If it's not physical, then it doesn't exist. The tangible intellectual constructs of a sentient, conscious being have a physical basis as the machinery of the being. W/o that machinery, their is nothing tangible, or real. "then the physical laws must possess an informative content. And there’s another very interesting thing about the physical laws: They are in the main all laws of conservation. It has been observed that the amount of information required for conservation of a system seems not to be high, at least in comparison with the amount of information needed for a system to organize itself, modify its behavior, develop, evolve"
The amount of information needed for a physical system to organize itself is contained within the laws of physics. In particular the chemistry and structure that determine the interactions, rest entirely on the laws of physics. The paritculars of the chemistry of organic compounds allow life to emerge given the physics and chemistry of all else. The law of entropy includes. that if it can happen, it will.
"The laws of physics … are algorithmically very simple; they contain relatively little information."
Davies ignores too much of what information is contained in the physical world. Thus his conclusion, " Consequently they cannot on their own be responsible for creating informational macromolecules.", is NG. As is, "Life works its magic not by bowing to the directionality of chemistry, but by circumventing what is chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural.’ Of course, organisms must comply with the laws of physics and chemistry, but these laws are only incidental to biology.” Life circumvents none of it. The machine came about, because the laws of physics and chemistry were followed absolutely. THe laws are not incidental, they are absolutely how the machine came about and govern it's workings completely.
"There is a need to account for, not only the fact that life cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of what is “chemically and thermodynamically ‘natural’”; but even more importantly, that life seems to work to counter the outcomes predicted by the physical laws."
Life may seem counter to the physical laws, but only because of a failure to know and understand both. The fact that you can't exhaustively explain something means nothing as far as the reality of it goes. It only means you can't explain it, which says nothing about whether, or not you ever will be able to explain it.
"Boltzmann, whose hypothesis was that the second law is a law of disorder, of chaos."
Boltzman beleived in S=kln(omega), where omega is the number of states available. The concepts of disorder, or chaos have nothing to do with omega. They are qualitative concepts that have no validity, other than qualifying some particular reality. The reality itself is well ordered.
"But what if the sine qua non hallmark or signature of living organisms is that they work by converting thermodynamic entropy into Shannon entropy? This would mean that although the two entropies belong to non-isomorphic probability spaces, living organisms preeminently possess a mechanism to bring the two probability spaces into direct relations."
Shannon entropy refers to the state of some detector. It starts out huge and ends up small, or zero, when some input places it in a particular state. If the Shannon machine is working, Shannon's law says the entropy must decrease in an "interaction". Shannon's entropy is subjective, not objective, and as such they remain independent. Shannon's entropy depends on a sentient being's determination, based on his own qualification and choices-subjective. Physical entropy depends on physics-objective.
"“Living organisms do not tend towards the physical equilibrium related to their initial and boundary conditions, but [at all times] act in order to preserve their distances from the deathly physical equilibrium” predicted by the second law."
The at all times part is not true. The organism acts according to it's composition arranged machinery. A helper T-cell will engulf an AIDs particle and a smoker might continue. An engine will run as long as it's gassed up and oiled, until it wears out. The wears out part renders Bauers principle moot.
"All these results together show that the source of biological information is ultimately to be found in the Bauer principle, in the same manner as the source of physical information is to be found in the [least-]action principle of physics.”
The action principle applies to all biology.
"Grandpierre argues that, in addition to the other fields identified by science, there is also a “biofield” or an organic zero-point vacuum field that is the carrier of biological information. An analogy might help to explicate the theory. The Internet is a “universal” information field that can be accessed by anyone who has the proper equipment."
The internet and it's posters, observers ect all rely on physics. Nothing more needs to be supposed. There is no biofeild, because it can be shown that it is not independent of other fields. ie. QED, or those contained in the standard model. That is, because biochem accounts for life.
"DNA is “smart enough” to be a router for incoming information addressed specifically to a particular receiver. "
DNA is not even in the picture when someone's consciousness is tossed in the garbage with amphetamine.
I always remember the teaching, "remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." So many try to prove that God exists by grasping, pleading and handwaving. It's all for naught. Here's what God said about it in Matt 16:1- "The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.
He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Jesus then left them and went away."
The sign of Jonah is the Holy Spirit, the Bread(of life) prayed for in the Lord's prayer. There is nothing else to be found outside of what He taught when He came here to teach. When you look at man scientifically, all you will find is a machine made of dust. That's a machine made with the capacities of God, in the likeness of God.
Since God is real, He also has a physical makeup. That is hidden and will not be uncovered. That is the meaning of the churubim waving the flaming sword barring return to the garden and Matt16.
The spirit of one's life is not the machine, but the tangible principles, holdings, beleifs, ect of one's life. There is no spirit, or soul driving the physics and resulting in, or providing for consciousness. The physics is the dust that gives you the capacity to create and drive your spirit. Jesus recreated the Spirit of God within Him as a man. His soul came first and was the Father. A man's soul comes later and has the Spirit created by the man. In the image and likeness of God means man is also a trinity. That is, because He was created to have eternal life.
Another interpretation of the law of entropy states that if it can happen, it might happen.
Nobody here that I know of is arguing that living systems do not have a necessary physical basis that properly is subject to the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.
The proposal here is that life cannot be explained or accounted for at that level of physical or material description. Something other than or beyond the physical laws must be at work in order for the production of what we see all around us in nature to take place in the first place.
A work in progress, spunkets. Thanks truly for your collaboration.
Also, when uncertainty has been reduced in molecular machines going from a before state to an after state, there is a dissipation of energy in the local surroundings - paying the thermodynamic entropy "tab".
Information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in a receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state - the action, not the message. The DNA (message) is as good dead as alive. Personally, I like to use the term "successful communication" to describe information in biological systems to avoid confusion as many people have a tendency to think of information in terms of the message, its value or content. The value or content of a message is completely irrelevant to Shannon's mathematical theory of communications.
For Lurkers:
Information Theory and Molecular Biology