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Information Creates the Universe

book-being-as-communion-3d.jpgIn Being as Communion, William Dembski defends a new ontology: the most fundamental thing in the universe, he argues, is information. He calls this position “informational realism.” Dembski makes use of Shannon’s information theory, employing it as a springboard into the nature of message transmission and reception.

A book review in Nature reaches similar conclusions. Though it would be nice to see a leading journal like that give Being as Communion a thoughtful review, what is said about another book can be viewed as tantamount to an endorsement of some of Dembski’s concepts. It appears that something akin to informational realism is on the cutting edge of genomics and all of natural science.

In “Information theory: Knowledge and know-how,” Philip Ball gives good marks to C�sar Hidalgo’s Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. You have to get past the opening chapters about economics and politics for the meaty stuff. Here’s where it gets interesting:

Hidalgo wants to take his ideas about information and its productive exploitation beyond economics, especially into biology and ecology. In a nutshell, the task is to restore notions of meaning to information theory. The seminal text The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Univ. Illinois Press, 1949) by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver explicitly expunged the idea that information in itself has meaning, as Hidalgo reminds us. But we often persist in thinking otherwise, not least in the delusions that we can do science by mining big data without a guiding theory, or that genomes contain ‘instructions’ for making an organism.

The distinction between knowledge and know-how, which seems evident enough in economics, can be profitably made in the natural sciences too. A gene sequence is information; know-how refers to the ability to make something from it, and this cannot reside in the information itself. “DNA has no knowhow and cannot unpack itself; it is a slave to the machinery needed to unpack it,” says Hidalgo. This seems obvious, but it is worth restating, if only to remind us that this unpacking process (and not further sequencing per se) is now the most important unanswered question in genomics. [Emphasis added.]

Dembski argues that information is conserved but can be created by intelligence. It is not derived from matter; instead, matter is the medium by which intelligence communicates information.

The nature and source of information is a question that Hidalgo’s book addresses. Philip Ball’s ending paragraph supports the idea that information-centric thought goes beyond genomics, and extends into a fertile view of reality as a whole.

Whether all this really justifies Hidalgo’s claim to explain “what information is, where it comes from, and why it grows” is another matter. For one thing, with quantum mechanics being reframed as an information theory, it is unclear whether any classical arguments can give the whole picture. But that does not detract from the stimulating new perspectives on offer. Hidalgo has identified a fertile seam, and all his book really needs (apart from some prose-tightening) is for the title to be turned into a question.

“Forget Space-Time: Information May Create the Cosmos”

Meanwhile, if you enjoyed Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s interview with philosopher of mind David Chalmers that was posted here a while back, you may find his program “Does Information Create the Cosmos” equally intriguing. Host of Closer to Truth, Kuhn has a good understanding of deep philosophical issues as well as science that helps him ask probing questions in a winsome way.

In a 26-minute video, posted at Space.com (“Forget Space-Time: Information May Create the Cosmos“), he poses a question — “Is information fundamental to the cosmos?” — to leading cosmologists, including Seth Lloyd, Raphael Buosso, Stephen Wolfram, and Alan Guth. Like Dembski, he introduces the discussion with John Archibald Wheeler’s pithy expression, “It from bit.”

Unfortunately, each of the respondents takes the intelligence out of information. Some of them portray information as something just as impersonal as matter. It’s just a factor that we, as humans, glean from the properties of stuff, they say.

Nevertheless, Kuhn’s insightful questioning and open-ended conclusion illustrate how the idea of “the universe as information” is gaining traction among cosmologists who have long been committed to materialism.

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