I am not familiar with any definition of 'information' which would plug into R2's statements and result in truth. He asked me to provide a definition, and I said he should, as he's the one using the term.
It hasn't been all too long, but I see he's prioritized the task of cranking out anti-God propaganda over responding to my request. And that being the case, based on past observations, he's likely to devote a good deal of time to it. I can't blame him in this case. Jeanie's most eager, and such an audience must be hard to find.
Reviewing, I found this:
Hi Bex
Hang on, if no meaning is required, then where did information come from in the first place....out of thin air?
You have to be very careful when you talk about this not to confabulate meaning and information. Information is just ordered matter/energy, put three atoms together in a particular arrangement and you have information in its raw form and we know how this forms by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) in an expanding universe.
Looks like RAZD is rubbing off on someone. We all know all Laws of Thermodynamics are the bane of evolutionism, most especially the second.
But the asserted definition fails. The more "orderly" the matter, the less likely it is to contain information. Consider distilled water, or a solid brick. They're as orderly as can be. Do they contain as much information as even a first grade reading primer?
Neither will such examples fit the narrow constraints of his scheme for claiming reduced entropy, because they don't expand as he needs them to. Entropy always increases unless a mechanism is in place to reduce it locally in exchange for increasing it elsewhere. The known mechanisms that can accomplish this are life and created tools.
He mentions arrangement, and this is the key to information storage and interpretation. But arrangement alone is not information either. Does the moon say "Ooooooooo"? It has circular craters, and circles are o's, after all. (But I maintain the moon is numbered. The slash through the zero is optional.
)
Meaning on the other hand is assigned by minds to the information in the universe. Without minds there is no meaning but there is still information unless you subscribe to the view that the tree falling unobserved in the forest makes no sound.
More distraction. It would be difficult to get it so wrong by accident; one needs to know what's right in order to accomplish this.
Sound isn't information. Sound is a means of conveying information. Just as paper and ink are not information, but can be used to convey it.
...or did the ordered code evolve as time went on? Somehow shuffling itself until it hit the jackpot?
As far as we can tell that’s about it. The simplest self replicators are very simple indeed so the odds aren’t very long.
Without meaning, there is no information worth discussing; no information that can accomplish anything.
Most importantly, the genetic code contains meaningful information. (That's why it's called a 'code'.) If, AS STATED, a mind is required to assign meaning, the meaningful information in DNA requires a creator.
(I anticipate it's about time for you-know-who to accuse me of taking this quote out-of-context.)
Self replication is all that is required and the rest is up to evolution.
LOL! Some of this propaganda's pretty weak.
Put some man-made replicators in a vat & come back next week. Next century. Next billion years. According to the laws of chemistry, they won't evolve. Even the folks who make them & get the headlines as evoheros acknowledge this. They have faith that they'll someday discover the magic replicator that will pull it off, but not just any replicator will do. Far, far from it.
