Gitt categorized information into five levels:
1. Statistics: Symbol frequencies, channel capacity etc. See: Information Entropy, Shannon’s Theory
2. Syntax: All structural properties of setting up information.
3. Semantics: Meaning of symbols.
4. Pragmatics: Actions required by recipient to achieve sender’s purposes.
5. Apobetics: Sender’s purposes.
Gitt lists the sx most important of his 32 information theorems as:
1. There can be no information without a code.
2. Any code is the result of a free and deliberate convention.
3. There can be no information without a sender.
4. Any given chain of information points to a mental source.
5. There can be no information unless all five hierarchical levels are involved: statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics.
6. Information cannot originate in statistical processes.

Werner Gitt: ResearchID

These appear to provide guidance for developing top down ID/teological theories (in contrast to materialistic bottom up evolution or ateological theories). Are there any researchers who have seriously grappled with Gitt’s hierarchy and theorems or provided alternatives or publications you can refer to? (Apologies, I have read some but not most of your recommendations.)

What texts will you be using this Fall in the class you are teaching at Southwestern entitled “Christian Faith, Knowledge, Science”.

Thanks,

Kevin

http://www.arn.org/docs/orpage......htm#head1

Here is the link http://history.hanover.edu/tex.....athe1.html

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton’s intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence.

When we see a beautiful machine, we say that there is a good engineer, and that this engineer has excellent judgment. The world is assuredly an admirable machine; therefore there is in the world an admirable intelligence, wherever it may be. This argument is old, and none the worse for that.

All living bodies are composed of levers, of pulleys, which function according to the laws of mechanics; of liquids which the laws of hydrostatics cause to circulate perpetually; and when one thinks that all these beings have a perception quite unrelated to their organization, one is overwhelmed with surprise.

The movement of the heavenly bodies, that of our little earth round the sun, all operate by virtue of the most profound mathematical law. How Plato who was not aware of one of these laws, eloquent but visionary Plato, who said that the earth was erected on an equilateral triangle, and the water on a right-angled triangle; strange Plato, who says there can be only five worlds, because there are only five regular bodies: how, I say, did Plato, who did not know even spherical trigonometry, have nevertheless a genius sufficiently fine, an instinct sufficiently happy, to call God the “Eternal Geometer,” to feel the existence of a creative intelligence? Spinoza himself admits it. It is impossible to strive against this truth which surrounds us and which presses on us from all sides.

Me too. Arguments for design are very much alive and well (and considerably more potent than arguments for materialism in my humble opinion). People who scoff at them and claim that Hume demolished them are either in denial or suffer from some sort of cognitive pathology.

Thanks for the references, Bill. I, too, will like to look at these.

Now, unenlighted types might point out that the mousetrap was designed because James Henry Atkinson patented the “Little Nipper” back in 1897, but that’s merely stealth Creationism.

Feel free to add or modify recommendations.

URL:
http://www.researchintelligent.....aphy_of_ID