Dembski: Building a Better Definition of Intelligent Design

[Dan_Eastwood]

@sfmatheson

However, the Wikipedia description of “Information content” aka “surprisal” or “self-information” does seem to describe increases in “information” resulting from the outcome of a “choice.” I’m not sure “choice” is at all appropriate here but there is an emphasis on probability…

These Wiki articles on Information seem to get completely rewritten every few years.

@sfmatheson

As a developmental biologist, Dembski’s discussion of “narrowing of possibilities” made me think of concepts of potency, fate, differentiation, and lineage. I tried to imagine how a cell fate decision (such as the decision to become a neuron as opposed to an epidermal cell) affects the “amount of information.” My mind went to the fact that the “decision” leads to a cascade of gene expression, effectively unlocking genetic/developmental information that was biologically unavailable. This is a tight and useful description of a developmental trajectory (i.e. it’s real biology) but I don’t know whether it’s relevant or valuable in a discussion of “information theory” especially when in the presence of a professional propaganda organization.

That cascade of gene expression has a great deal of biological meaning, but Information Theory does not deal with meaning. Information describes variability or bandwidth (Shannon). More variability could imply many different meanings, as in different ways a cell might develop. Or maybe not, if there are many different codings for the same sort of development.

How messages are encoded is something I’ve never seen addressed by Dembski. The only relevant “Coding” for DNA are the laws of chemistry*. I think Demski would like to claim he is measuring the complexity of the biological message that chemistry “decodes” from DNA, but this goes beyond Information theory.