Well this is certainly true insofar as you have to have some positive Kolmogorov complexity for any kind of computation to occur. Quite a bit more if you want something interesting to happen.
That said, one could question your hypothesis by questioning your assumption that our universe and/or whatever is outside our universe ever had a null information substrate. We have no reason to believe this was the case (or the opposite for that matter), and the very fact that you can't bootstrap machinery from a null Kolmogorov complexity makes it doubtful. I see no reason to invoke another degree of freedom by positing a bootstrap from a null substrate (remembering that timeline causality in the conventional sense is merely an artifact of our cozy corner of the universe), since positing a non-null substrate is just as reasonable and doesn't make mathematicians do the monkey dance. My weapon of choice here would be Occam's Razor.
For the purpose of the analogy, I can assume that the contents of my hard drive are an extension of the memory of my computer. Taken altogether, the genetic code looks like that memory. If I were to print it out, it would be a huge string of numbers and letters.
I could analyze the huge string and see that portions of it are programs (algorithms) which created other programs. In this analogy, these programs self-organized - wrote their own programs, leaving data behind, including “failed” programs, like an archive - and symbols to “stand for” larger chunks of program or data.
By using analytical techniques, I set out to account for everything in the string and ultimately, am able to reduce the huge string into a single program which spawned all of it. That program would look something like a particularly smart BIOS.
The BIOS is the bootstrap program that is hard-wired into the computer, so that when you apply power, it loads the operating system (e.g. Windows) and so forth. In the case of the genetic code, that BIOS is already “juiced” and is self-organizing. It writes its own programs, remembers what did and didn’t work, and replicates itself. But I digress. Back to the BIOS.
I can see by looking at the BIOS that it is a program (algorithm) in itself. So I ask myself “how did that program get written?” By looking around at all the raw ingredients available (e.g. periodic table of elements) - I can see that it would have to become autonomous, write a line of code, become non-autonomous and gather ingredients, become autonomous again, write another line of code, and so forth.
At that point, I scratch my head and say “Hey, that process is an algorithm itself – a finite state machine – that exists separate and apart from the BIOS of our genetic code. Logic couldn’t have come from nothing.” And from that I conclude there was an intelligent designer.
I summed all this up as succinctly as possible by saying that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design. And I offered two methods of falsifying it:
Show that the information content at inception contains no algorithm, e.g. that the BIOS in my example is truly random information.
IMHO, tortoise’s argument is a variation of the plenitude argument, i.e. “all things that can exist, do exist.” That is basically the position that Doctor Stochastic took earlier.
I’m with Dallaporta on that one, the plenitude argument is metaphysics. For that reason, I don’t think it ought to be a basis for falsification. But I’d appreciate any input on the subject.
In summary, science is at a very interesting point in a thought experiment trying to tackle John von Neumann’s challenge The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut. With such great thinkers in physics, information theory and mathematics pursuing the challenge – it promises a fascinating ride for all of us.