On 14.01.2012 08:21 John Clark said the following:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 Craig Weinberg<[email protected]> wrote:
…
> For heavens sake, I went into quite a lot of detail about how the
> code is executed so that protein gets made, and it could not be more
> clear that the cell factory contains digital machines.
>
>> They are not information.
>>
>
> According to you nothing is information and that is one reason it is
> becoming increasingly difficult to take anything you say seriously.
I should say that I also have difficulty with the term information. A
question would for example if information belongs to physics or not.
Some physicists say that information is related to the entropy and as
such it is a basic physical quantity. I personally do not buy it, as
thermodynamics, as it has been designed, had nothing to do with
information and information as such brings nothing to help to solve
thermodynamics problem (more to this end in [1]).
Let us consider for example a conventional thermodynamic problem:
improving efficiency of a motor. Is the information concept is helpful
to solve this problem? If we look at modern motors, then we see that
nowadays they are working together with controllers that allows us to
drive the efficiency to the thermodynamic limit. The term information is
helpful indeed to develop a controller but what about the thermodynamic
limit of a motor? Does information helps here? In my view, not.
In the Gray's book on consciousness (Consciousness: Creeping up on the
Hard Problem.) there is an interesting statement on if physics is enough
to explain biology. Gray's answer is yes provided we add cybernetics
laws and evolution. Let me leave evolution aside and discuss the
cybernetics laws only as this is exactly where, I think, information
comes into play. A good short video from the Artificial Intelligence
Class that I have recently attended would be a good introduction (an
intelligent agent sensing external information and then acting):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx3lV07w-XE
Thus, the question would be about the relationship between physics and
cybernetics laws. When we consider the Equation of Everything, are the
cybernetics laws already there or we still need to introduce them
separately? One of possible answers would be that the cybernetics laws
emerge or supervene on the physics laws. I however does not understand
what this means. It probably has something to do with a transition
between quantity and quality, but I do not understand how it happens
either. For myself, it remains a magic.
Let me repeat a series from physical objects discussed already recently
(see also [2][3]):
1) A rock;
2) A ballcock in the toilet;
3) A self-driving car;
4) A living cell.
Where do we have the cybernetics laws (information) and where not? Can
physics describe these objects without the cybernetics laws? What
emergence and superveniece mean along this series? Any idea?
Evgenii
[1] http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/12/entropy-and-artificial-life.html
[2] http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/01/perception-feedback-and-qualia.html
[3] http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/02/rock-and-information.html
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