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.
