[LiteKeeper]

According to professor Werner Gitt, Professor Emeritus of Information Technology, there are five properties necessary to have information

• Symbols, whether nucleotides or letters, there are mutually understood.
• Rules for employing those symbols, again mutually agreed upon by sender and receiver
• Meaning associated with the symbols assembled according to the rules, again mutually agreed upon
• Action...elicited by the assembled symbols
• Purpose for the action

Here is the important part: only a mind can produce those properties. They can not be accounted for by chemistry, nor physics...there is no straight line path from matter to information. This is Polanyi's Impossibility.

[tacticalogic]

Here is the important part: only a mind can produce those properties.

We've been discussing precisely that. Once it is understood that information is an abstraction, it is axiomatic that only a mind can produce it.

The conversation started with an assertion that the science of studying things like DNA is different than a science like metallurgy, because the molecular structure of DNA "contains information" while the the molecular structure of something like a metal alloy does not.

What say you?