Breakthrough for Intelligent Design? (Part 4)

This is part 4 of a series of 7 posts by Lars Johan Erkell, with comments on each by Ola Hössjer and a reply by Erkell. Part 1 will be found here. They are translations of 2020 posts in Swedish from the Biolog(g) blog of the Department of Biology of Gothenburg University.

Breakthrough for Intelligent design? (part 4)

November 13, 2020

by Lars Johan Erkell

Non-physical information?

Towards the end of the article, the authors look ahead, towards a future Design Science. We read in the last paragraph:

Biologists need richer conceptual resources than the physical sciences until now have been able to initiate, in terms of complex structures having non-physical information as input (Ratzsch, 2010).

Thorvaldsen and Hössjer refer to a book chapter by philosopher Del Ratzsch, who discusses the epistemological question of whether science can in principle exclude non-material explanations¹. If you now open the book and look at what Del Ratzsch has actually written, you read on page 356:

Biologists need richer conceptual resources than the physical sciences have been able to generate. Historically, design-linked ideas have provided such resources and those resources have been, and continue to be, scientifically fruitful in biology.

This is deplorable. Thorvaldsen and Hössjer have distorted the quote so that it has come to mean something completely different. Del Ratzsch does not mention “non-physical information” in his text at all. Thorvaldsen and Hössjer have invented that.

The cheating is also revealing. Steinar Thorvaldsen is a professor of Information Science, and if “non-physical information” had been a term used in the field, he would of course have referred to the scientific literature. Instead, a quote attributed to a philosopher has been fabricated. It is an acknowledgement that “non-physical information” does not exist as an established scientific concept.

But what in the world could one imagine “non-physical information” to be? The information processing in any case I’ve heard of is always tied to matter of some kind: a brain or a computer. The information is always carried by some material medium, such as visible symbols, sound waves, patterns of magnetization, electromagnetic radiation or something else. The information itself consists, as far as I can understand, of a pattern or structure in the material medium. But how can there be pattern or structure in something that does not exist? Could “non-physical information” somehow float freely in space? Where does it come from? How could it affect matter? How do we even know it exists?

If Thorvaldsen and Hössjer now want to revolutionize biology as well as information theory, they can come up with some kind of argument. But not; that “non-physical information” would exist is an ad hoc claim, something they grabbed completely out of thin air.

Then I wonder about the claim that biologists would need “richer conceptual resources” than what the physical sciences can offer. I can reveal that as a biologist I have never felt such a need in my research. Nor can I recall any colleague ever expressing any desire to go outside the physical sciences, or the matter being discussed at all at conferences or in the scientific literature. These are fantasies.

Had this been a normal scientific article, the authors would have justified the sensational claims they make in the quote above, and discussed them in relation to the scientific literature. But this isn’t a normal scientific paper, so they don’t. It is not wrong to speculate, but Thorvaldsen and Hössjer have clearly lost touch with reality.

References:

1. Del Ratzsch: There is a place for intelligent design in the philosophy of biology: intelligent design in (philosophy of) biology: some legitimate roles. In: Ayala, F. J., Arp, R. (Eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology. Wiley-Blackwell (2010) pp. 343–363.

Comment by Ola Hössjer June 29, 2021 3:39 am

Part 4: What is information?

In his fourth article, Erkell discusses the concept of information, which has been a basis of telecommunications theory for over 70 years. In TH2020, we argue that information has great potential to also be used in biology, as well. This is much in line with what I wrote earlier, since information is closely related to our proposed method of demonstrating fine-tuning⁸. At the end of our article, we write that “non-physical information” is a concept that can make valuable contributions to biology, as one of several input parameters of biological models. In this context, we refer to an article by the American philosophy professor Del Ratzsch, who argues that design can make valuable contributions to biology. Erkell is very critical of our way of referring to Del Ratsch, and writes:

This is deplorable. Thorvaldsen and Hössjer have distorted the quote so that it has come to mean something completely different. Del Ratzsch does not mention “non-physical information” in his text at all. Thorvaldsen and Hössjer have invented that.

The cheating is also revealing. Steinar Thorvaldsen is a professor of Information Science, and if “non-physical information” had been a term used in the field, he would of course have referred to the scientific literature. Instead, a quote attributed to a philosopher has been fabricated. It is an acknowledgement that “non-physical information” does not exist as an established scientific concept.

But what in the world could one imagine “non-physical information” to be? The information processing in any case I’ve heard of is always tied to matter of some kind: a brain or a computer. The information is always carried by some material medium, such as visible symbols, sound waves, patterns of magnetization, electromagnetic radiation or something else. The information itself consists, as far as I can understand, of a pattern or structure in the material medium. But how can there be pattern or structure in something that does not exist? Could “non-physical information” somehow float freely in space? Where does it come from? How could it affect matter? How do we even know it exists?

In these paragraphs, Erkell mixes up two concepts, on one hand how information is conveyed and stored, and on the other hand how information arises. I completely agree with Erkell that information does not float in the air but it is rather stored in some physical medium. What we are referring to in TH2020 is the emergence of information, and this can either be physical and non-physical. A few sentences before we use the term non-physical information in TH2020, we write:

One rather needs a specificity function that, although of non-physical origin, can be quantified and measured empirically in terms of physical properties such as functionality.

Putting our introduced concept of non-physical information into context, it is thus clear that we refer to the emergence and not the storage of information. Erkell further claims that we invented the concept of non-physical information. But while information theorists may not use that exact term, it’s still not taken out of thin air. In this context I would like to especially mention the Italian philosophy professor Luciano Floridi’s division into different types of information. Floridi distinguishes between “environmental information” and “semantic information”, where only the former type of information has a physical origin (such as cloud formations that give us information about the weather an hour later).⁹ Semantic information, on the other hand, conveys a meaning to the recipient , and unless one has a reductionist worldview (which Del Ratzsch, by the way, does not have), it is natural to identify semantic information with non-physical information, even if Floridi does not use the latter term.

Semantic information can in turn be divided into instructions/algorithms and factual information (statements of fact). As far as I know, no one has succeeded in showing that semantic information can arise through purely material processes. Since biological systems (e.g., the DNA code) convey semantic information, it is hardly far-fetched to claim that this concept constitutes a valuable tool in biology. For this reason, semantic information that can be measured physically and quantified (so that it forms the basis of falsifiable hypotheses) constitutes a potentially important type of specification. In TH2020 we write that a very interesting future research area is to find different ways to quantify semantic (or non-physical) information.

At the end of Part 4, Erkell discusses whether biologists need to include non-physical explanatory hypotheses in their models:

Then I wonder about the claim that biologists would need “richer conceptual resources” than what the physical sciences can offer. I can reveal that as a biologist I have never felt such a need in my research. Nor can I recall any colleague ever expressing any desire to go outside the physical sciences, or the matter being discussed at all at conferences or in the scientific literature. These are fantasies.

I regard this as a very weak argument. Whether non-material processes are relevant in biology is not primarily determined by what the majority of biologists write about in their research papers or speak about at their conferences. First, it is mainly for those parts of biology that deal with questions of origin, that meaning and other non-material concepts have a great potential. Secondly, biology as a science is strongly governed by a secular way of thinking (see Part 5) and it is therefore hardly surprising that a large proportion of all biologists do not use non-material explanations as working tools. Third, many natural scientists have argued for long that information has a non-physical origin. The founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, believed that information cannot be attributed to matter or energy, and the well-known American physicist John Archibald Wheeler , in the same spirit, coined the concept “It from Bit”, that is, everything originates from information, measured in the unit of bits¹⁰. In addition, there are several biologists who point out that the concepts of meaning and codes are important tools in biology, something that Erkell does not seem to have noticed.¹¹

1. In more detail, if P=P(f(X)≥f(x), given M2) is the probability of randomly generating a system X that is at least as specified as the observed system x, given the naturalistic model M2, then I=-log₂(P) denotes the degree of functional information in the system, see Hazen, R.M. et al. (2007). Functional information and the emergence of bio-complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States 104 (suppl 1), 8574-8581. In order to demonstrate fine-tuning, it is required that the functional information I is large enough. This in turn requires that a function f, that quantifies the degree of specification is defined (step (b) of our fine-tuning definition) and that the probability P of achieving this specification by chance under model M2 is small (step a in our fine-tuning definition). If the specification function f also conveys a meaning to the recipient, then I corresponds to semantic (or non-physical) information. Note that functional and semantic information differ from syntactic information (or Shannon information) in that the probability P must be tied to a specification f.

2. Floridi, L. (2015). Semantic Conceptions of Information, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

3. Thorvaldsen, S. and Öhrström, P. (2019). Faith and information science. In Faith and faith, Öhrström P. (ed.). Forlaget CKT, 210-228.

4. Maynard Smith, J. (2000). The concept of information in biology. Philos. Sci. 67, 177–194. Kim, H. Davies P. and Walker, S.I. (2015). New scaling relation for information transfer in biological networks. J.R. Soc. Interface 12: 20150944. Wills, P.R. (2016). DNA as information. Philos. Trans. A. 2016, 374, 2063. Barbieri, M. (2016). What is information? (Review article). Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 2016 374 20150060. The latter two articles are part of a whole issue (Volume 374, Number 2063) of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., that is entitled “DNA as information”.

Reply by Lars Johan Erkell September 8, 2021 6:24 am

The concept of information constantly comes up in discussions about ID. You mean that I make a mistake when I do not distinguish between information and the origin of the information. But you yourselves don’t make that distinction in TH2020; it appeared in your comment above. The cause of the information could thus be non-physical, and that the information could then be transferred and stored in physical media. But how would that happen? How can something non-physical (whatever that would be) control physical processes? To get anywhere here, you need to solve the body-soul problem, a philosophical classic.

So it was interesting that you confirm that “non-physical” information does not exist as a concept within the established information theory. Instead, in your article you have referred to a philosopher who does not use the term. In your reply above, you now refer to another philosopher who also does not use the term. I maintain that you plucked the non-physical information out of thin air. Because what should one say when you write that “it [is] natural to identify semantic information with non-physical information”. Is it? Semantic information is interpreted in our material brains, and in that sense is physical, or at least associated with physical structures. From what I understand, it also cannot exist without physical structures. To me, it doesn’t feel natural at all to identify semantic information with non-physical information. That the thought feels natural to you, I suspect, is due to the fact that you, as a dualist, place the thinking in a non-material soul. In any case, mere emotion is not enough to establish revolutionary concepts such as “non-physical information”.

You also write that “biological systems (for example the DNA code) convey semantic information”. I want to question that. Semantic information conveys a meaning to the receiver, which presupposes a consciousness that interprets the information. Who/what interprets the DNA code in the cell? The ribosome, which would be the structure that “interprets” the DNA information during protein synthesis, does not think. Each step in the process occurs through chance and physical necessity. Protein synthesis is well studied, and we can see that its various steps consist of physical interactions between physical molecules. The same goes for every other cellular process I know of. Strictly speaking, we do not need information theory to understand the molecular processes in the cell. The fact that we still use the concept of information is due, I believe, to the fact that we are already familiar with it and that it makes it easier for us to understand how the cell works. Having said that, I still hope that information theory can be developed so that we get new tools to understand what happens in the cell.

You further write “Whether non-material processes are relevant in biology is not primarily determined by what the majority of biologists write about in research articles or speak about at conferences”. It is true that biologists, like everyone else, have their limitations, but who would be better placed to judge biology’s need for non-material explanations? Creationist statisticians?