Contradictory Points in ID and Information Theory Arguments?

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@Dan_Eastwood

For my part, I find a lot of equivocation about the meaning of Mutual Information, because MI is always a measure between two samples (strings) of information. Replication creates MI by definition , but it doesn’t create new information. The statement than MI cannot be created make no sense in general. Any regularity in nature also implies that some measures of MI must be non-negative.

I completely agree with this. The lack of precision in using the term Mutual Information verses just Information is frustrating and obfuscates the argument.

@Dan_Eastwood

• Parent population A spawns child sub-populations B and C with some random variation.
• B has slightly greater fitness than A, but not enough gain for fixation in the total population.
• C has slightly worse fitness than A. but not enough loss to decline in the population.
• BUT the difference between B and D can be enough to reach fixation relative to C. A and B will remain fixed in the population, but C will decline.

What is D? You have not defined it.

@Dan_Eastwood

THIS, if I understand correctly, is the Halting Oracle needed for the evolutionary computation. There is no conflict with LoING if we define the problem this way. If we want to think in terms of “The 2nd Law of Information Theory”, we have gained information in B at the expense of casting away C.

I do not yet have a clear understanding of how exactly a Halting Oracle (HO) comes into play. In the discussion, some people have been using it as a synonym for “intelligence” (something which we also debated in Intelligence and Halting Oracles), and ID argues that intelligence is needed to create information. However, it is not clear to me how the halting problem is relevant to information creation. (The gist I’ve been getting is that HOs have to be non-Turing machines to not result in a logical contradiction, so they are magical black boxes that can evade a bunch of information theory theorems, which is ID advocates’ idea of what intelligence is. )