Posted: Jun 08, 2014 5:57 am
theropod wrote:Information isn't physical? Really? I suppose that shelf of books at my side are mere figments.
Hello theropod. Consider this way of understanding that information is not physical. (There are a hundred ways to understand this.) We (human beings) can accelerate some bits of subatomic particles to significant fractions of the speed of light, but we can't accelerate anything to light speed (in a vacuum). However, we can transmit gigabytes of data, entire novels, in a millisecond, at the speed of light. That is a rudimentary way of showing that information is not physical. [EDIT: The point being that if information were physical, we could not transport it at the speed of light. Ask a physicist if we can transport an atom at the speed of light? We can't. We can't transport carbon at the speed of light, not even hydrogen, in fact, not even protons. Because we *can* transport information at the speed of light, that is one way to demonstrate that it is not made of matter. You can't piggyback matter on photons and send them across the solar system. <end transmission>]
The ink on the pages in your books theropod represent the information that those books contain; but the ink itself is *not* the information itself. The information encoded on a DNA molecule has nothing to do with the chemistry of the nucleotides, just as the plot of a novel is fully independent of the chemistry of the ink, the electrons in the Kindle, the sound waves in the air, etc.
Perhaps you have already considered Einstein's insight on such matters as referenced over at AmericanRTL.org/einstein. Math does not have mass, nor temperature, nor electrical charge, nor angular momentum, etc. Neither do ideas. Neither do the laws of logic. Even Michael Shermer admitted (not that he's an authority, it's just that his admission, to us, is the testimony of a hostile witness) that the laws of logic are not physical. If you believe that they are physical, theropod, then you believe that by blind faith without an iota of evidence.
You've probably noticed Therapod that at first, atheists claim that information is physical, and before you know it, they are denying even the existence of truth. That's another one of those cliches in fact.
It goes like this: There is no truth! to which we ask, Is that true? That's a fun one too, no? We've got a ton of 'em!
It's like: Truth is unknowable! And we ask, How do you know?
And then there's, There are no absolutes! And we ask, Absolutely? And: only your five senses provide real knowledge! And I ask, Says which of the five?
Thanks Theropod for making a clear statement. That gives us something to grab on to to demonstrate the differences in our ability to describe reality.
- Bob Enyart
Real Science Radio