I’ve been having an interesting conversation in an email forum with some relatively well-known ID advocates. The question under discussion is whether “information” is an ontological category separate from matter. One person suggested that transferring computer data from one hard drive to another shows that information is separate from matter; another mentioned one person telling a story to another. Here are some thoughts I had (for convenience I use the names “Ed” and “Dave” here):
But the information on Ed’s PC does not exist apart from the hard drives on which it is stored. And while it is true that the amount of information was essentially (though probably not perfectly) conserved in the transfer, that’s because it was a relatively small amount of information transferred a relatively short distance over a relatively short period of time into an identical medium. The amount of information would not have been perfectly conserved, for example, if it had been sent over the internet, because the necessary compression technology is lossy to some degree.
The information in Dave’s “story” is a good example of why information cannot be thought of as an ontological category. Stories are always bound by time, language and culture. It is impossible for you to tell me a story that perfectly and losslessly transmits to me all the information you are trying to encode in the story because I am not you. Some information is always lost because of the imprecision of language, the differences in our personal cultural and historical experiences, etc. This lossiness becomes greater as time increases — as our struggles to understand many of the ancient Bible stories about origins bears out.
What happens, then, to the information lost in the telling of the story? Is there any way to extract it from you without loss? Can we calculate the amount of information lost? I don’t think Shannon Entropy really works here, unless you buy into the concept of memetics, which I don’t. If you want to apply Shannon Entropy to cultural transmission, it seems to me you’re buying into an evolutionary view of culture that ultimately contradicts any meaningful Christian perspective.
Further, the “story” example illustrates that true “information” involves transmission, reception, and change. As Gregory Bateson put it, information is “a difference that makes a difference.” The data on Ed’s hard drive really is reducible entirely to matter until it makes some difference — by making his computer work, say, or by issuing in a document that human beings can read and act on. And until Dave tells me the story and it alters how I think, act, etc., the story is nothing but a neural pattern in Dave’s brain. It seems better to me to say that information is not an ontic entity; it is rather a term we use to describe change in ontic entities.
I’ve never understood ID to be primarily based on an essentially Platonic metaphysics of information. If it is, it seems to me that ID has an extraordinarily tough row to hoe. But I also don’t see why this is necessary. We could just as well say that certain patterns of producing change reflect the activity of purposeful, self-aware agents — such as the pattern of the “story” you might tell me, the patterns of the computer programs on Ed’s hard drive — or maybe the patterns of the physical laws, DNA, etc.
2 replies on “Information and Design”
Something I used to think about when I was a young teeenager and had aspirations of becoming a musician (which, BTW, never came to fruition): Does a Beethoven symphony have ontological existence all to itself? It was a pattern of information (or perhaps, even a piece of Ludwig’s “soul”) put forth into sound in the air, and committed to paper on a musical score. It would have been performed thousands of times by now by orchestras around the world, and coming into the twentieth century has now been recorded on various types of recording media (including, up to current times, in MP3 or MIDI files and recorded on a computer hard drive as in the first example). (and for those unfamiliar with classical music, most classical musicians attempt to perform the music exactly as written in the score albeit through the filter of the musician’s interpretation, as opposed to the rather liberal and free improvisational methods employed in pop & folk music, so a classical work’s original form is preserved to a greater extend, which is one reason the pieces stick around for hundreds of years). Does the original pattern of thought/sound/emotion remain in existence even though Beethoven has been a decomposing composer now for a couple hundred years?
There is a line of theological thinking which has it that the Word of God indeed has an ontological existence. And by the Word, I’m not talking about just the Bible, but rather a piece of God which begins as his thoughts/speech/Word and takes on an existence which is either apart from God or still at once part of and distinct from God the Father. In the first instance one could think of creation being spoken into existence. In the second instance we can think of God’s Word (or Logos) becoming flesh and taking on human form in the person of Jesus Christ. Check out the first chapter of the Gospel of John.
Here is an interesting essay by Internet apologist J.P. Holding on how this relates to the concept of the trinity:
http://www.tektonics.org/jesusclaims/trinitydefense.html
Thanks Jared, and welcome. I think that line of thought about the Word of God and ontology is fascinating as well. I’ve been reading some stuff from the Radical Orthodoxy movement. One of the key aspects of RO thought is this question of ontology. In short, RO wants to develop the Augustinian theme that creation is dependent on God for its existence. This is in contrast to a modern ontology that would see nature as something having its own existence apart from and deity — ultimately leading to the move of excising God altogether. Hopefully as I read a little more on this I’ll be able to post about it.