The Medium is Not the Message
| March 21, 2010 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
March madness is upon us. In that vein, I ask you to consider the following sentence: “A basketball is round and orange.”
You read this sentence through a medium, probably a computer screen. This means I had an idea, and I wrote out on my computer screen a representation of the idea in symbols (Latin letters forming English words arranged together into a sentence using the rules of English grammar and syntax). I uploaded these symbols onto the uncommondescent.com website. You downloaded the symbols to your computer and deciphered them. Now a representation of the idea that was once in my head is in your head. When you read my sentence you thought about a round orange basketball.
Now consider this. My computer, the UD server, and your computer all have physical properties that can be measured. These properties include mass, charge, etc. But the information in the sentence “A basketball is round and orange” is quite independent of the physical properties of the medium on which it is placed. Indeed, none of the physical properties of your computer changed when you downloaded the information. The physical properties of your computer were rearranged, but they did not change. Your computer had the same mass, the same charge, the same specific gravity, etc. after you downloaded the sentence that it did before you downloaded it.
Think of it this way. Suppose I wrote the same sentence (“A basketball is round and orange”) on a piece of paper and handed it to you and asked you to read and memorize it. You proceed to memorize the sentence. I take the paper back and burn it. Then I ask you to repeat the sentence into a tape recorder. You dictate “A basketball is round and orange” into the tape recorder. What just happened? The information was in my head. Then it was on the paper. Then it was in your head, but not the paper. Now it is on the tape of the tape recorder.
What is the point of all this? The point is that information may be transmitted on a physical medium, but it is not reducible to the medium on which it is carried, and it is independent of the medium upon which it is carried. Information has no mass. It has no charge. Indeed, it has no property that can be measured by the same means we measure matter and energy. We conclude, therefore, that information is not reducible to matter, and it is not reducible to energy, and it is not reducible to a combination of matter and energy. Yet we know that information exists in the universe. Therefore, we must conclude that the universe is more than matter and energy, that it is more than mere particles in motion.
If the existence of information cannot be reduced to the properties of matter and energy, where did it come from? Where indeed?
129 Responses to The Medium is Not the Message
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Frank Barfety in 111: ” I invite you or anyone else to scrutinize synapses, neuronal networks and dentrites and tell me what my breakfast tasted like. Let me know whether it was a disappointing meal or not. You may also tell me the reason I opted for that particular restaurant vs. another.”
An interesting argument. The human brain is the most complex entity we know of with 50 to 100 billion neurons and as many as 1000 trillion synapses, it’s hidden away inside the skull where it’s difficult to get at and you can’t do any experiment on it that would injure or destroy it. Therefore we can’t yet give you the exact location of your memories or thoughts, therefore, “Mental states are just in another realm altogether. A non-physical one.”
“Mind of the gaps” is the same type of argument as the “God of the gaps” and has the same weakness: gaps in our knowledge don’t prove anything and when the gaps are eventually filled, the claim is falsified.
I give this one maybe two decades before its conclusively falsified, at the most. In fact, it’s getting really, really hard for anybody watching oxygen use shift from one part of the brain to another as the test subject switches from doing mental math problems to imagining music to even take the “mental states are in another realm” argument seriously.
For example, I’m sure you’ve heard of the experiment where a person stares at a checkerboard pattern on a screen and a PET scan of the back of the head shows the checkerboard pattern, clear as day. But have you heard of the experiment where the human just imagines a checkerboard and a PET scan shows the pattern appearing in the same place? Pretty good for a disembodied mind. I wonder how it does that.
Franck #110
Me:
As far I can see you are saying that information is the same as facts. So while the round earth is definitely something material – the fact the earth is round is immaterial information?
You:
Correct. A thought, or mental content that can be expressed in a sentence, exists separate from the piece of paper it is written on. It makes no sense to say for example that the thought that the earth is round is the same as the particles that make up the round physical earth.
My response:
This is a different thing. I am not talking about thoughts. A fact is a fact whether anyone has believed it or even considered it or not. You were claiming that mathematical truths were immaterial. Some of those truths have never even occurred to anyone yet. So I come back to my point: does the fact that the earth is round somehow exist independently of the round earth?
warehuff you state:
“In fact, it’s getting really, really hard for anybody watching oxygen use shift from one part of the brain to another as the test subject switches from doing mental math problems to imagining music to even take the “mental states are in another realm” argument seriously.”
It is funny you would mention “oxygen use”, for oxygen use actually illuminates something very profound about brain/mind interaction that is very helpful to the Theistic position and very antagonistic to the atheistic position:
Appraising the brain’s energy budget:
Excerpt: In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body. This high rate of metabolism is remarkably constant despite widely varying mental and motoric activity. The metabolic activity of the brain is remarkably constant over time.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237.full
THE EFFECT OF MENTAL ARITHMETIC ON CEREBRAL CIRCULATION AND METABOLISM
Excerpt: Although Lennox considered the performance of mental arithmetic as “mental work”, it is not immediately apparent what the nature of that work in the physical sense might be if, indeed, there be any. If no work or energy transformation is involved in the process of thought, then it is not surprising that cerebral oxygen consumption is unaltered during mental arithmetic.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....4-0127.pdf
i.e. warehuff, If mind were merely a “secretion” of the material brain as you hold, should not this material basis of our being, which you are so convinced is true, manifest itself with increased oxygen use for increased mental activity? Why in the world should the oxygen use remain “remarkably constant” in the brain despite widely divergent mental activities. The evidence clearly indicates strong support for a “mind” that is separate from the brain.
bornagain77 in 107: Wigner was wrong. An assertion proves nothing, especially when it controverts or ignores established facts, such as those interactions with detectors your video forgets to mention.
Similarly, your assertion that consciousness is necessary to explain the (near) spherical symmetry of the CMB proves nothing. Those measurements (from only one position in the universe, but let that pass) were made by an unconscious machine.
I’d like to see you make a solid case in your own words for consciousness being involved in the double slit experiment.
Please spare us the videos, especially the ones about the Shroud.
Despite myself, I watched Intelligent Design – Conservation of Transcendent Information. Why did you make a 6:41 video of nothing but words and a few pictures of dead scientists? If you’d written it, I could’ve read it in a fraction of the time.
Was the Pacabel music necessary to your assertions? That’s all you have there. There is no argument presented. We get a couple of mentions of the First Law of Physics and the curious claim that because a photon traveling at light speed doesn’t experience time, “The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality” Is God a photon?
Then we’re told that because “all known material processes never create energy” and we’re expected to apply the first law to the creation of the universe. Pardon me, but we’re not even talking apples and oranges here. The creation of the universe is nothing like the operation of the universe.
Then comes what I think is the payload of this video, your “humble opinion” that “transcendent information” tells us where the Big Bang energy came from. Fine. What’s “transcendent information”?
As far as I can tell from your next remark on quantum teleportion, you’re talking about transmitting a quantum bit. Well, that’s neat and a bit mysterious, but to accomplish the feat you have to send two regular plain ordinary bits of information, at the speed of light or slower, from point a to point b. This is NOT done “instantaneously, completely transcendent of any known underlying material basis or even any known natural law” and until you send those two conventional bits, no teleportion takes place. That’s standard quantum physics. It’s hardly enough to justify any claims for the existence of any gods.
Then we get your opinion that information is more foundational to reality than energy is and that information is somehow “the only viable candidate” for what created the energy in the Big Bang.
Then suddenly your opinions become conclusive proof that information is transcendent and dominates any known energy/material combo.
I think you left a few hundred steps out between your opinion and that conclusive proof.
That’s all in the first 2:48 and I’m not going to take the time to comment on the rest of the video, except to say that William Thompson’s name is William Thompson, not William Thompson Kelvin and although he didn’t agree with Darwin, he’s also the man who said, “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” and “”I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning”. Prize winning physicists can be wrong too.
HouseStreetRoom: Regarding your problem in 92, suppose you record a story in Finnish (which I don’t understand) and also write it in Finnish.
You ask, “How does what you know, lead to what I know?” It doesn’t. You’re mistaking information and comprehension. I can detect the raw information in both your spoken and written story, but I can’t comprehend it because I don’t understand Finnish.
Comprehending your story, in either format, requires additional information – knowledge of written and spoken Finnish – which my brain doesn’t have.
Barry did his thinking and typing in English, which we all understand, so we can not only detect the information, we can comprehend it.
Warehuff;
Sorry to see you practice science in such a philosophically biased manner. The evidence I have presented is clear to the main points as postulated by Theism for a transcendent origin of the universe as well as information being transcendent and dominate of matter-energy, as well as consciousness being “primary” to any 3-D material basis. For you to merely ridicule minor flaws here and there, as well as ridicule my “video” method of presentation for some of the facts, all the while ignoring the meatier points of contention I brought up, is not very fair, and alas I will leave it to others with more patience than I to deal with your unreasonableness.
warehuff, of note:
the caveat of two bits of information having to travel along normal “speed of light” paths for us to “observe” the teleportation is a necessary condition for us to reside in this particular space time framework to begin with, and does not detract from the transcendent information framework that is established by quantum mechanics.
hypothetically traveling at the speed of light in this universe would be instantaneous travel for the person going at the speed of light. This is because time does not pass for them, but, and this is a big but; this “timeless” travel is still not instantaneous and transcendent to our temporal framework/dimension of time, i.e. Speed of light travel, to our temporal frame of reference, is still not completely transcendent of our framework since light appears to take time to travel from our perspective. In information teleportation though the “time not passing”, eternal, framework is not only achieved in the speed of light framework/dimension, but also in our temporal framework/dimension. That is to say, the instantaneous teleportation/travel of information is instantaneous to both the temporal and speed of light frameworks/dimensions, not just the speed of light framework. Information teleportation/travel is not limited by time, nor space, in any way, shape or form, in any frame of reference, as light is seemingly limited to us. Thus “pure information” is shown to be timeless (eternal) and completely transcendent of all material frameworks/dimensions. Moreover, concluding from all lines of evidence we have now examined; transcendent, eternal, infinite information is indeed real and the framework in which It resides is the primary reality (highest dimension) that can exist, (in so far as our limited perception of a primary reality, highest dimension, can be discerned). Logic also dictates “a decision” must have been made, by the “transcendent, eternal, infinite information” from the primary timeless (eternal) reality It inhabits, in order to purposely create a temporal reality with highly specified, irreducible complex, parameters from a infinite set of possibilities in the proper sequential order. Thus this infinite transcendent information, which is the primary reality of our reality, is shown to be alive. The restriction imposed by our physical limitations of us ever accessing complete infinite information to our temporal framework/dimension does not detract, in any way, from the primacy and dominion of the infinite, eternal, transcendent, information framework/dimension that is now established by the quantum teleportation experiment as the primary reality of our reality. Of note: All of this evidence meshes extremely well with the theistic postulation of God being infinite and perfect in knowledge.
“An illusion can never go faster than the speed limit of reality”
Akiane – Child Prodigy – Artwork homepage – http://www.artakiane.com/ – Music video – http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4204586
As a side light to this, leading quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger has followed in John Archibald Wheeler’s footsteps (1911-2008) by insisting reality, at its most foundational level, is “information”.
“It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom – at a very deep bottom, in most instances – an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that things physical are information-theoretic in origin.” John Archibald Wheeler
Why the Quantum? It from Bit? A Participatory Universe?
Excerpt: In conclusion, it may very well be said that information is the irreducible kernel from which everything else flows. Thence the question why nature appears quantized is simply a consequence of the fact that information itself is quantized by necessity. It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Anton Zeilinger – a leading expert in quantum teleportation:
http://www.metanexus.net/Magaz.....fault.aspx
ba77, leaving out the most important step in an experiment is hardly a “minor flaw here and there”. It falsifies the entire experiment and invalidates the conclusion. Consciousness has nothing to do with quantum effects and that kills half your claims.
I’m not ridiculing your use of videos, but I am complaining about how much time they waste compared to just writing it down and reading it.
Teleportion doesn’t send any useful information instantaneously. Useable information can’t travel any faster than those two bits and they have to travel at light speed or slower.
I do agree with you about the important of information. Without information, all you have is a pile of quarks, no protons, neutrons or carbon atoms. Without information, all you have is a pile of carbon atoms, not organisms.
Without information, the universe would be a cold dead place. That’s one of the reasons it hurts to see so many people misunderstand it.
Warehuff you state:
“Without information, the universe would be a cold dead place. That’s one of the reasons it hurts to see so many people misunderstand it.”
You have no idea how true what you just said is and I couldn’t agree with you more.