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17 Aug 08
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Calling everything information is massive projection, or even anthropomorphism. It takes something that exists as a semantic or cognitive property and projects it out to all that exists. It makes observers the sole reality.
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nobody thinks that genes rationally assess their interests and then make choices in interactions with other genes. It just happens that the math is useful to model the evolution of fitnesses irrespective of the cognitive abilities of genes and organisms.
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a human-abacus system is an IPS (and indeed, human-most thing systems can be, potentially, because of the ways humans can act as Turing machines), while a set of beads on strings in a frame on its own is not.
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where would I say that information becomes a property of biological systems? What is the threshold? That's a little tricky.
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if we say the information exists in the organisms/genes/other biological locus irrespective of our recognition, then we lose our privileging of genes as an information system
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Information is only information relative to a model of it. Information is an interpretation, it is not an inherent quality of DNA, or computers, or even the entire universe. Cells don't "process data" through their actions any more than rocks "process data" by getting warm in the sun, or balls "process data" when they are thrown. We can model these behaviours (of cells, and of rocks and balls), but it is we who provide those models with "information", not the natural systems themselves.
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