If you have a “request for clarity”, the I am all ears.

Your points are correct. But Abel’s point is that prescriptive information is completely different in form and properties from simple matter configurations that determine results.

Distinguishing the two main subsets of semiotic information as descriptive and prescriptive is very useful, but I agree with you that in some cases the distinction is not so clear cut. But for DNA, I have no doubts that it is essentially prescriptive information.

Moreover, DNA protein coding genes have all the characteristics of true semitoic prescriptive information: they are symbolic (based on a mapping based on a symbolic code), they are very complex (high dFSCI), they are pseudorandom in form and highly functional in meaning, and they are essentially the result of the functional setting of individual configurable switches (the individual nucleotides in the sequence), whose configuration cannot be detemined by any biochemical laws, but only by functional expectations.

I know what you will say: you will say that the neo darwinian algorithm can explain all those things. As you know, I strongly believe that that is false. We have discussed that many times in detail.

But here I would only want to emphasize that DNA information is, in form and substance, prescriptive information of the best kind. The weak attempts to explain it in a different way can be dealt separately.

Yes, indeed. That is a prerequisite of semiotic information processing. The receiver necessarily has some initial tuning, i.e. knowledge of the alphabet, the syntax, some initial vocabulary and the semantics. The receiver already anticipates some information input. E.g. if I say “tree”, this will mean a plant in English but the number 3 in Russian, for example. So context is crucial. And until such times as you resolve possible ambiguities, no semantic information is actually passed.

In practice, e.g. JPG format achieves a high compression rate without any noticeable image quality loss, so we can accurately enough say that the size of a JPG image file is a good measure of information complexity of the look of the portrayed object(s) with respect to the relevant alphabet (binary understandable by the relevant applications).

The fact that you’ll never be able to arrive at an objective value describing the CSI…

That is OK.

Getting an exact number isn’t important when dealing with objects.

All that needs to done is to show what is required to get it accomplished- for example to make the cake.