Creation-in-Depth- "Information Theory—part 2: weaknesses in current conceptual frameworks"

Information Theory—part 2: weaknesses in current conceptual frameworks by Royal Truman

The origin of information is a problem for the theory of evolution. But the wide, and often inconsistent, use of the word information often leads to incompatible statements among Intelligent Design and creation science advocates. This hinders fruitful discussion. Most information theoreticians base their work on Shannon’s Information Theory. One conclusion is that the larger genomes of higher organisms require more information, and raises the question whether this could arise naturalistically. Lee Spetner claims no examples of information-increasing mutations are known, whereas most ID advocates only claim that not enough bits of information could have arisen during evolutionary timescales. It has also been proposed that nature reflects the intention of the Creator, and therefore all lifeforms might have the same information content. Gitt claims information can’t be measured. The underlying concepts of these theoreticians were discussed in part 1 of this series. In part 3 a solution will be offered for the difficulties documented here.

Something I was thinking about earlier today...

There is really no way to prove that the entire universe was not created 10 minutes ago. The evidence of your senses and memory may well tell you that you've been around for longer than that, but there is no way to actually prove it.

I'm a computer nerd by trade. In the past decade the concept of 'virtualization has really made a big splash in the tech fields. The reasons for this are many and various, but one of the interesting things about having a 'virtual machine" (VM), is that you can actually make use of the ability to save the state of a system at a fixed point in time. The VM itself essentially becomes a bunch of files on a disk. Files that can be edited and changed. If you know enough about the way the data is organized, you can do some really interesting things with it, including changing the state of that VM that is not actually running. Or, you can make a copy of that state, and then 'resume' the computer. The VM itself has no way of knowing that it has been 2 weeks since it was executing its last instructions, or that it is now running on completely different hardware on the other side of the world. It just 'wakes up' and continues executing its processes right where it left off.

So, let's say you know enough to build a VM from scratch. You could load into it every last bit of information that it would require to 'resume' executing once you fired it up. The VM itself wouldn't know that it had been built up into its existing environment from nothing. It could have an internal history, memory, logfiles, and anything else required to make it appear to any inspector that the VM has, in fact, been running for the past 2 years, though it hadn't even existed a few days previous.

What we see around us could be a similar construct and there would be know way to tell any different. Only if one can stand outside our construct of time and space, as God does, would one even begin to have a clue to the nature of the reality.

The downside of this line of thinking of course, is that there isn't any way to falsify it. Being with the construct, we are bound and constrained in what we might know by the very nature of our existance, which makes the entire line of inquiry essentially useless. :-)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.