Loudmouth writes:
Dshortt seems to have shied away from Shannon information. I can find it if you like...
Oh, no, no need to find it. I'm quite sure you're correct. Whenever Creationists raise the issue of information they're never talking about Shannon information.
...but he argues (IIRC) that Shannon info is incapable of producing meaning within biology.
And Shannon would agree with him 100%.
Shannon's landmark paper says this right up front in paragraph two. I quoted this already when replying to Nosy just now, but here it is again:
"Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."
Dshortt seems to be looking for dshortt information, a type of information that he alone knows the definition of but is unable to accurately define.
Like probably everyone else here, Dshortt does not possess the ability to develop his own theory of information. And neither does Dembski, if Dshortt is going that route.
I am trying to show that the environment gives mutations an objective "meaning" through selection. This may not be adequate for information theory, but I am hoping it is adequate for the type of information that dshortt is looking for.
I agree with your strategy. My only point was that the question of information increase/decrease is independent from meaning. I'll make this clear through an extremely informal (and extremely invalid for anyone who wants to be picky) illustration. What contains more information, a empty piece of paper or the picture of the periodic table of elements? That's easy, right? Obviously, the periodic table of elements contains far more information. But what if our encoding is a "one if by land, two if by sea" type of system. We agree that if I hold up a blank piece of paper it means open your cipher book to page 10, which contains a whole slew of instructions, while if I hold up the periodic table of elements it means "Please wait."
In other words a ton of meaning can be crammed into a single bit, or there can be billions of bits with no meaning at all. It's up to us to decide.
--Percy
™ Version 4.2
