The Meaning Code
Perry Marshall, author of Evolution 2.0 and founder of the $10 million prize for the origin of a spontaneously arising communication system joins Glen and Karen to discuss the fundamental nature of information, choice and the observer. Links to videos mentioned will follow timestamps.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:45 Origin of Life v. Origin of Species
05:14 Is something missing in the Intelligent Design argument?
07:35 Where does the idea come from in the first place? Information must become physical.
11:00 How many divine interventions are there supposed to be?
16:00 The limitations of the God of the Gaps argument. Information shows up. There has to be a mechanism, a chunk of hardware. This problem is not addressed by Intelligent Design
18:30 Does Code = Information? Many definitions of information. Shannon, for example.
22:00 Definition of code is symbolic information exchanged between a sender and a receiver, Between an encoder and a decoder, and it’s a digital communication system
27:25 Science v. Religion is a proxy battle for something deeper, perhaps what it means to be human.
33:30 Does Maxwell’s demon actually exist?
41:00 John Torday, A systems approach to physiologic evolution
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcp.25820
45:00 Information capacity is a capacity for choice. Freedom to select a one or a zero.
53:00 Maxwell’s demon lives on symbolic info, not bits and bytes. It’s what the 1’s and 0’s represent symbolically.
What is the sender looking at and the receiver sending onto? A bigger more holistic landscape than science can look at.
1:00:22 Free choice in quantum mechanics. The observer has free choice in what experiment to do.
1:05:45 Time acts on the rocks. The rocks do not act on time. We act on time
1:11:14 If you want to push choice down to the level of Quantum physics, you have to acknowledge that there are multiple pathways into the future which are all consistent with the past history of the universe, so you can’t have perfect determinism. Choice breaks that.
1:15:25 Following the question of the observer is a fruitful path.
Glen’s suggestion: perhaps replace consciousness with agency. Consciousness is how WE experience agency, so it takes US out of the theoretical pathway.
Reluctance to recast definitions into formal, mathematical statements hinders progress in the search for Origin of Life.
1:17:00 Stuart Kaufman and Set Theory
1:24:00 Heuristics leads to an outcome that is good enough. Inductive reasoning is a powerful skill set.
The Meaning Code videos related to
The Physics of Life:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4
The Observer:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZTm9ZRgC9OQINsbC1BxsPy
Perry Marshall and Stephen Meyer on Unbelievable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RHUEXn2upI&t=1s
Perry Marshall, Denis Noble and Lee Cronin on Unbelievable
https://youtu.be/Njuso5A2jts
The Prize website: https://evo2.org
The book:
Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design
by Perry Marshall
Source
Biology is all about engineering. Period.
Is there an argument against the following strong statement; subjectivity is necessary for the existence of information. (In terms of modern information theory with codes, symbols, decoding etc.)
With increased informational storage capacity via successive revolutions; Proteins << RNA << DNA.
What kind of choice/observation do We have with the next phenotypic revolution, à la CRISPR and associated techne?
I do love ❤️ 🥧 🍰 🍮
This will be difficult to put into words, but I will try. We are the union, the relationship of heaven and earth.
Ascendants: From the perspective of the earth (science), we have physically emerged from what is below. Our genes determine our bodies. We are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors.
Descendants: The river of life flows downhill. Love emanates from above. We are descendants of our ancestors’ choices.
There are two separate yet completely dependent and integrated processes at work.
Love creates the arena, and the physical world fills it.
The "Observer"…
I was just listening Dr Carol Hooven (on the Modern Wisdom podcast) "observe" the sex traits between male versus female and on the one hand saying we're driven by our hormones yet she and the host are observing the behavior while precluding what scenario would be where a line is crossed, thereby "judging" when said behaviors are maligned or evil. I was wondering if they'd take it to the next level and try to say that even judgment is the result of chemistry.
Good conversation! Stimulates the realization that multiple dimensions of reality are interconnected. (Design, law, meaning, principles)
Where do bad ideas come from? Asking for a friend.
©️1:05:45
I'm just going to leave this here for now till I have an opportunity to listen 💓.
Human as a Holobiont Organism.