DNA and the 'Code of Life'

i think you misunderstood me-that is exactly the point i was making, that the people now who are rebelling against the idea of there being intelligence or motivation behind the scenes are not considering the possibility that all the formulas and calculations etc are still valid and working as they believe, but ... oh, it always comes off sounding like the ghost in the machine, which isnt exactly what i meant...

did you mean to say materialist? you are definitely not a hard materialist!
and since nobody knows what is really real if anything at all, i am not sure anybody can be a hard realist...

QN, you have a very good way of defining words, by the way.

hmm...does an amoeba have dna/rna or anything comparable? does a virus?

Aha -- it's now "biological information". You've qualified it! So now you're agreeing with me that the use of "information" as pertains to DNA is different from other uses. There is information, and then there is biological information. So why must generalizations about information also pertain to the unique phenomenon of biological information?

How is this different than the ID argument about wristwatches -- "Wristwatches are complex and they were designed by man. Life is infinitely complex -- so it must have been designed by something infinitely intelligent"

Jeeprs, there can be no implications if your premise is based on a selective half-truth charicature about DNA. I think the 'implications' about authorship of DNA are not really worth the debate, because what this comes down to in the end is a very close variant of the intelligent design argument (we rationally MUST have been programmed by something intelligent). Just because something seems rationally true to you doesn't mean that it's actually true, and rhetoric is no substitute for evidence.


That's not my argument. My argument is that this code stuff is completely muddled in a grossly oversmplified presentation of genetics, and the argument based upon it is therefore sort of silly. So someone sat there and wrote a code -- for what? And then what? But he didn't also author what reads the code? What the code does when it has been read? How biological systems selectively inactivate part of the code? How the code is somewhat DIFFERENT in prokaryotes than in eukaryotes and grossly different in viruses? It all crumbles down into the familiar intelligent design argument.

There is nothing at all that negates the possibility of an author. But there is nothing that negates the possibility of the Tooth Fairy either.

And again, for the umpteenth time, the lack of an author does not of necessity make something random!!

science is actually claiming (whether it is recognised or not) that the medium is the message. If the dna information of its code is re written onto another medium, eg paper ....... nowt interesting is likely to happen to the paper. What happens to the reader of the paper? ...... oh potentially many weird and wonderful things But its not the same as when the information is written into a macro molecule.

If we believe that information is 'immaterial' and thus 'represented by matter', then of course dna is evidence of intelligent design. The information is neither pattern nor chaos, therefore it is design. As such the physical representation of the information cannot be responsible for the design, because a representation (matter) cannot be the cause of the thing in itself (immaterial information) by definition.

Such a view would similarly state that cause effect rules such as the conservation of momentum, are immaterial and therefore matter abiding by this rule represents it. If thats what people want to believe then fair enough. But for others it is the cart before the horse. The scientific observation of matter yields the representation of matter as a mathematical model, a component of which is the conservation of momentum.

However as salima points out, just because science is good at that kind of thing does not mean we have to believe in materialism over spiritual forces. There is room for both. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives.

Yes. The Tooth Fairy is one of many possible authors. If ever found as true, we'd more than likely call it something else, as its job description would be vastly increased.



Well yes, by the new definition of Random (unpredictable rather than uncaused). But Random in that sense would always be a temporary title, as continued observation would allow us to eventually predict outcome for repeatable phenomenon.

Erosion is not random. We can predict its presence and even take care to prevent it. But we cannot predict that which manifests erosion. Weather is random.

But this (erosion) is the result of random, not the initiating mechanism. We're looking for a predictable initiating mechanism for code, not the result of code. The only known, predictable, consistent, repeatable, falsifiable mechanism to produce code is sentient authorship.

Just so, nature has a determination. Nothing happens by accident.

Correct. That is actually the big conceptual leap that materialists cannot get past. The medium is never the message.



We cannot make such a claim without discovering a pre-existing code to make the claim upon. Code is the qualifier. We've never found a pre-existing code for the "Laws of the Universe". Those were instead written by humans to describe the universe. DNA is different. We don't write a code to describe it. We found a pre-existing code and are learning to read it.

,

Yes, a yield of observation and description.

---------- Post added 01-11-2010 at 11:51 AM ----------

The existence of code means that something is determined. We don't know if code is necessary, but we do know when we find one, that something has been determined. I personally believe that code is an absolute necessity for determination.

Without a code, we can say that something has a cause... cause/reaction. But we cannot say it is determined... only caused. Determination requires thought/action, not just cause/reaction. Chaos can produce cause/reaction. Mind produces thought/action. We know the difference when we find a code.

That's why this code theory actually resolves Paley's Watch Argument.

Originally Posted by pagan
Such a view would similarly state that cause effect rules such as the conservation of momentum, are immaterial and therefore matter abiding by this rule represents it.


The laws of the universe as conceived by cause effect chains are not a code. Therefore the discovery of a code is inaplicable to a non code. What cause effect rules posit are patterns. Therefore by analogy in order to make such a claim then a pattern has to be found in matter and energy. That pattern is found by science in the history and composition of matter and energy.

You've misread me again. I know that chaos has no code. That's why it is chaos. Code is the qualifier.

But... With all this talk about what is required for code to exist, does anyone here understand what is required for chaos to exist? It has baffled science eternally... and even moreso now in the computer age. Humans still have not come up with a sure fire way to produce pure randomness of unpredictability. Random chaos is no slouch. Encryption companies spend billions of dollars trying to protect your credit cards and personal data by investing in random number generators. Never a perfect one has been built, always at the mercy of the next hacker. Makes me wonder if random chaos is even possible at all. I mean... are we living in a random chaotic universe, or an extremely advanced random generator that just seems naturally random to our puny minds?

When people invoke the conundrum "what are the odds that life would just randomly form from chemicals in a primordial soup", they are talking about STATISTICAL randomness. Quite specifically! They're making an argument about likelihood and unlikelihood in the absence of a guiding hand.

But just because it's unfathomable doesn't make it random. In actuality the formation of organic macromolecules might have been exceedingly likely simply based on chemistry and abundance of substrate. The formation of early cells might have been exceedingly likely. This is not randomness -- but it sure is chaotic and it sure is unfathomable to us.

!!!! where did i say chaos? i said pattern. this is getting bizarre.

You said, "The laws of the universe as conceived by cause effect chains"

I call that Chaos. And if you speak of Patterns, you speak of a product of Chaos.

It is obvious to me now that we are not so distant in our thinking. We have vastly different ways of expressing ourselves. That will hurt this theory. For the meme to spread efficiently, it is important to develop a convention of terminology. Every cell needs the exact same data in order for a beneficial mutation to occur. Otherwise extinction.


---------- Post added 01-11-2010 at 12:42 PM ----------



My scrabble board might spell "cupcake". The more scrabble boards might make that exceedingly likely. But less likely is for there to be a receiver present at the same time.

As well, a word is one thing. I have "received" short words from cookie crumbs at the bottom of a bag. "Hey look at that! It spells ME".

But instructions do not manifest at the word level. Instructions can only be present at the sentence level. We're not talking about a simple word that happens to appear out of exceedingly likely hood. We're talking about a 6 billion letter epic that instructs something to happen before it happens.

What likely hood?

! lol oh believe me we are miles apart but thats ok.

you believe that information is immaterial and the material represents it with physical codes.
I believe that information is never independent of a medium that it is encoded in. It can be usefully abstracted, mathematically modelled, but that goes for aspects of most material things.

You believe the medium is never the message.
I believe that the medium can be (and often is) intrinsic to the message. ie The power of a message can be changed radically by the medium.

...... and needless to say i similarly take a directly opposing stance to the opening quote.
and we know there are other major differences too. re language for example.

Information, codes, chaos, patterns, language, media, materiality and representation. Crikey how much further apart could we be?

we even disagree on how far apart we are! lolol

ace

Im inclined to remove myself from this Melee as my education is not sufficient but have to say I still see many strange anomalies being put forward as facts. I dont accept the idea of chaos being relevant in any way , could someone tell me what they imagine chaos to actually be and how if it exists how it has any influence?

hi QuinticNon
well i return to our first recent encounter, but with a different level of experience. We are so far apart in our understanding of the world and the way we use language that it would be tortuous for us to explore something together. Nevertheless we have clarified the differences, which i am glad to have done and shared with you ....... and without insulting each other which i must admit i thought would happen without any intention by either of us.

In a wider context to others in this thread i think there may be an interesting observation to ponder. If dna is a code, and that a code cannot exist without language ..... then what of wittgensteins assertion that there is no such thing as a private language? Does this relate to the dna/rna interaction for example?

If W is correct, then the creation of a non private phenomena exponentially increases the probability of its unlikelyhood as compared to phenomena that are outside privacy. This is because non private requires at least more than one entity to spontaneously appear, and for each to be symbiotic with the other. ie at least two codes must arise not one. In fact one code in the universe makes no sense in terms of wittgenstein's assertion re language. In a universe where all dna/rna molecules have been destroyed except one ..... then such a 'code' has already disappeared from the universe.

I cant conceive of chaos. If chaos appears to reign its because we dont understand what is causing the event we are observing. The more complex , the more we are inclined to say it is chaotic. Chaos to me infers an action without any cause, in fact it is an event without a conceived cause, conceived by us.

Evolution of life , the formula, new that it would encounter varied and extremes of environmental nature, chaos . As long as it stayed within the perimeters of sustainability it would by its formula overcome them. Everyone appears not to want to answer my question, was there an initial formula? a formula that created these codes? You are so intent on understanding. Was there the most simple of equations that allowed the codes to become more and more complex. The codes are a result of this formula , we never started with them so they must have progressed with evolution , they mark evolutions journey.

If that is not Chaos, then what is? You did not say, "as conceived by human observation and description". You said "as conceived by cause effect chains".

So when you spoke of "laws, conceived by cause effect", I gave you the benefit of the doubt, understanding that you were not speaking of actual written laws, but rather the phenomenon that the laws were describing.

The actual written "Laws of the Universe" were written by humans, describing the observable phenomenon. Those "Laws" were conceived by humans through description, and not conceived by "cause effect chains".



Yes I do.



Where is the information concerning this discussion? Is it on your monitor or mine? Is it on Xris, Salima, Aedes or Jeeprs too? Is it at the hub servers that our computers talk too, or in the ROM of one of our hard drives?

Point being, that by your standards, all of these mediums are "carrying" their own unique versions of information. I reject that. I claim they are all representing one singular source of immaterial information.



Correct. I believe the medium is never the message.

I also claim that believing the contrary is the incarnation of Evil made manifest. Yes, that one errant belief is the core foundation of Evil.



Only in the sense that we need a medium to know the message. Humans may require their linkage to view information, but that does not demand they are one in the same.

Sunday Bloody Sunday is represented by Live U2, sheet music, MP3, CD, DVD, Television... which one of these mediums is equal to the message? Material code allows the message to be shared. But the source message they all refer to is in the mind of Bono.



By power do you mean "meaning"? Yes, the medium can present a message in many different ways and different people will respond accordingly to their personal inclinations. But the different mediums never change the original transmitted message unless the medium has corrupted... copying errors. Changing the original message is a form of entropy... a lie, deception, noise on the line which prevents precise communication from taking place.

A broken CD player does not change the original message from Bono. It fails the original message. The original message is still intact somewhere else and completely independent of the medium that butchers it.



What opening quote do you refer to? Where does the information of that quote reside, my computer screen or yours? Or do our monitors represent the same information that is immaterial?

---------- Post added 01-11-2010 at 01:43 PM ----------



I agree with you completely. But we cannot call it determined until we discover a code that determined it with.

Some believe they've found that code within Pi. If this proves to be true, then we can claim that the universe was also determined and not chaotic at all.
We are in the Digits of Pi and Live Forever

I don't personally believe that Pi holds a secret code explaining everything in the chaotic realm. But it doesn't mean there isn't another one, and it doesn't mean I'm wrong or right. I don't want to see codes where there are none.

---------- Post added 01-11-2010 at 01:54 PM ----------

Code points to a thought from a mind. A thousand billion trillion codes all point the the very same thought from the very same single mind. It is not a thousand billion trillion different thoughts.

Codified Information (thought) transcends space and time. The code you all are reading currently is representing the thoughts from me in St. Louis Missouri. Those thoughts are accessible tomorrow and the next day just as much as an ancient manuscript represents the thoughts of a mind from a thousand years ago in a land far far away.

If we can still access that thought, from a thousand years ago, then the thought does not die. Thoughts need mind, so the mind cannot die either. Go figure.

---------- Post added 01-11-2010 at 02:12 PM ----------



The formal definition of code is a process of which probability space A is mapped to probability space B. Code (encoding) is always a process involving transmission and reception.

Yet, if I am the only man left alive, and scream "Help", then I am both the encoder and the decoder. The original code A came from my mind. The second code B was enunciated verbally and received by my hear.

I talk to myself too much these days.

QuinticNon

honestly we would be going around in circles here. Each of us has clearly outlined and explained our position. We have identified where we use the same english words differently. I now understand key aspects of your narrative of understanding, but i have an alternative narrative. Information, media, code, representation. Enough said, we relate and understand these terms entirely differently ....... and consistently within our own schemes. With respect.

hi xris

yeh thats an interesting way of putting it. The word 'action' is charged though. I would distinguish between a machine action (reaction?) and a consciously willed action.
well thats where the relationship between formula and code comes in. Is the formula (abstract immaterial) represented by the physical code? Or, can the code be abstracted into medium and formula seperately, whereby the abstractions are the representations of the code. And if so, which (if either exclusively) is the mover of the other?

Personally i think the formula (code) can move matter differently to uncoded matter, but its medium (matter) can radically effect how the formula (code) can move matter. In fact the wrong medium for the formula can easily reduce the code to ineffective uncoded matter in some cases. So the medium is important.

The actual physical code however (if it exists!) cannot be modelled completely by any abstraction (representation). The problem arises here of course re the nature of consciousness. Is the dna molecule an actual physical object? Or is it an abstracted representation by science and consciousness? (or yet again, it may be that what we conceive of as an immaterial abstraction may in actual fact be a material medium representation of the information.) It all gets very recursive.

But did the original and for me physical formula exist? Well i don't know. Hence my question re wittgenstein? But also for me science is useful but incomplete. I see life as a physical force (within the context of the scientific narrative) that arose in the universe like gravity did, but is radically different to gravity and the other three physical forces because it involves language. Language emerged. How? I don't know. Science may or may not shed light on this and evolutionary chemistry is a likely candidate for revealing something profound. But even if they find something, the materialist evolutionists like dawkins are missing out on the crucial and radical influence of language/information/communication/media as part of the emergent force in life.

Yeah, but that assumes that association of letters is entirely random, which it is not. We know that if you take a vat of synthetic fatty acids and dump them in water, they form micelles. Do the same with synthetic phospholipids and put them into water, and they form bilayers. The word "cupcake" is a contraction of two words, cup and cake. There are linguistic rules that our words are based upon, and if you imposed English etymologic rules on a scrabble board, then over time the formation of "cup" and "cake" would be more likely than "ckp" and "cpke". These rules are analagous to chemical properties like electronegativity, hydrophobicity, hydrophilicity, zwitterions, etc, that characterize organic macromolecules.

Take a scrabble board that can fill up the ocean, impose English linguistic rules, and wait a billion years. You'll get cupcakes.

BTW, that would be a very interesting modeling experiment.

hi aedes

but don't you agree that analogy when it comes to dna/rna and such may be missing a crucial point simply because it is an analogy? I am thinking of course re the medium. If the medium is scrabble board and letters and english rules, but the medium more generally is intrinsic to what can develope ..... then such an analogy let alone experiment would most likely to be meaningless until the medium itself in the analogy was understood to have some essential characteristic that enabled something meaningful to develope. ie it may be that to abstract away from the dna/rna molecule is to abstract out an essential quality that allows life to evolve.

Where if any do you see the relevance of media, especially dna/rna etc?