Thank you and I was going to ask if it was past your bedtime when I realized I am the one on the East Coast and it is past MY bedtime (I have been traveling coast to coast for 10 years on and off and I still haven’t adjusted!)
I will address just a few points, if you don’t mind.
>>Moreover, some of the non-physical causations of which we speak are already being applied, e.g. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications (information theory) in pharmaceutical and cancer research.<<
Being in the information processing business, I am certainly familiar with most aspects of information theory. But when asking the underlying question “how much data are needed to ascertain information?” there are no non-physical aspects. There may be gaps that require inference, but no model contains “this gap bridged by God.” A representation of an object (e.g. a relational variable versus a relation) is far from a non-physical entity. It has what we call “informational heft” — meaning from a physical Universe in a physical Universe.
>>It seems that betty boop and I are ever standing in the gap. Of a truth, science is rooted in philosophy. <<
Indeed you do and I enjoy and learn from your posts. But I don’t think we are standing at the gap you think we are. The Universe is made up of rules and those rules have result sets. The result sets are: known true, known false, unknown. If we set aside the first two, then we end up dealing with the unknowns (also known as null in a 3VL [3 value: {1,0,null}] analysis).
Now, any rule applied against an unknown results in an unknown — IRRESPECTIVE OF THE KNOWN QUALITY OF THE RULE BEING APPLIED.
I provide emphasis because I want to point out that any path that leads to an unknown ends up in the same place no matter what led it there.
So, now that we are left with only unknown, we can begin to try to classify the nature of the unknown: never instantiated (we never asked), known to be unknown (we asked and got no answer), axiomatic (we supply an answer when there is no ability to ask), etc. There can be quite a few classifications to unknown data before you end up with a truly null result (Chris Date says proper analysis will never result in a wholly null (”unknown”) result, E.F. Codd says it is irrelevant — go figger).
Now, the interesting part is each of these classifications remove our rule from the “unknown” (3VL: null) category to the identified (2VL) category and can be applied to the rule we are examining. I could go into the entire substructure of why 3VL has no applicability (maybe this is where we “leave the path”?) but I would have to restate a lot of Boolean algebra and that would be pedantic, boring and irrelevant).
So where does that leave us?
Well, it means that in the physical Universe we inhabit, even the most esoteric information theories do not obviate physical answers. The milieu demands exactly the opposite. There is not nor can there ever be a “God in the gaps.” If you wish to rely on an information theory model, then application of that which is not know would result in “God is in all gaps” (again, I refer you to Boolean algebra, substituting God or an ID to the null element).
Bottom line: there are no non-physical causations and they can not be created out of whole cloth from argumentation.
Lord have mercy! Did I write all that? Now it is I who is leading the cast down the primrose path! Remember to bring your boogie board and a wet suit!
Sorry not to have gotten back sooner, Freedumb2003; I spent yesterday with my folks.
I have some questions regarding the passages in the above italics. It's good to know you're in the information processing business, since that makes you a good "go-to guy" for answers.
Do you consider data as physical quantities? It seems to me data are outputs of inputs that must be in "computable" form in the first place. Where you seem to see the "physical" here, I see only the formalism of input, output, and computability. Plus the thought occurs to me that not all problems within the human sphere are reducible to "computable" form.
How does data get translated into information, absent a subjective mind to do it? Is this the "God of the gaps" to which you were referring? But we're not even speaking of God here. We are speaking of subjective human intelligence, and whether or to what extent it has any right to be present in "science" today.
If that sounds silly, just consider: Science has relentlessly been purging the "subjective" ever since Francis Bacon. No science that is not completely "objective" can pass muster as science under this regime.
And yet the transition from data to information would seem to require a mind to effect it, the outcome of which Shannon referred to as "the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver." How can one have a model of information without taking the receiver into account? Or the sender, for that matter?
It seems to me that to say that something has "informational heft" is to speak analogically. It does not confer actual physicality on anything; it is little more than a figure of speech.
Just sending my questions/observations along to you, dear Freedumb2003, in this fit of "amorphous musing" I seem to be having....
Thank you ever so much for writing!