Here's an abstract of an article by Carlos Gershenson on information in the biosphere. It's interesting that, though Gershenson is not, as far as I know, sympathetic to Intelligent Design, he finds it much easier to think of the world as information than as matter. Yet information (specified complexity) is invariably in our experience produced by minds, not physical forces.
ABSTRACT: This philosophical paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter difficulties because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms of matter and energy, falling into a dualist trap. However, if matter and energy, as well as life and cognition, are described in terms of information, evolution can be described consistently as information becoming more complex. Moreover, information theory is already well established and formalized. The paper presents five tentative laws of information, which are generalizations of Darwinian, cybernetic, thermodynamic, and complexity principles. These are further used to discuss the notions of life and cognition, including their origins and evolution.
Having in mind that we are using metaphors, this paper proposes to extend the concept of information to describe the world: from elementary particles to galaxies, with everything in between, particularly life and cognition. There is no suggestion on the nature of reality as information. This work only explores the advantages of describing the world as information.
He goes on to say in his paper that:
...the difference between biological and physical systems is given by the meaningful information content of the former ones. Not that information is not present in physical systems, but...information is passive in physics and active in biology. However, it becomes complicated to describe how this information came to be in terms of the physical laws of matter and energy. In other words, it is not obvious to describe information in terms of physics, as it requires an interpreter to "decode" the information.
...if we cannot relate properly matter and energy with life and cognition, we are forced to see these as separate categories. Once this breach is made, there is no clear way of studying or understanding how systems with life and cognition evolved from those without it. If we see matter and energy as particular, simple cases of information, the dualist trap is avoided by following a continuum in the evolution of the universe.
Unfortunately, the author defines information as any stimulus detected by any entity. Thus the negative charge of an electron is information when it is reacted to by another electron. Thus everything is information, and if everything is information then nothing is.
Even so, the important point in all this is to note that materialists are finding it more and more difficult to account for the world solely in terms of matter. The world has the aspect of that which is produced by minds even if the materialist recoils from so blunt a concession and even if he resists following the implications to their logical conclusion in a creative mind.
HT: Uncommon Descent
RLC
