Thank y’all so much for all your posts!!! This thread is a treasure trove of knowledge.
tortoise: Of all these people listed, the only ones that can reasonably be considered theoretical experts in information theory are Schmidhuber and Chaitin. These two guys are among the half dozen that actually author the theory and who I know for a fact understand it as well as anyone else does. A couple of the other guys are physicists, but have no special understanding of information theory (e.g. Tegmark and Penrose). Most of these folks have an undergrad CS level of understanding by my reckoning.
The irony of this is that I ran into Schmidhuber and a British mathematician/physicist whose name I have since forgotten precisely because of research I was doing on Tegmark’s “theory of everything”. Not surprisingly, Schmidhuber leans math and Tegmark leans physics but they were headed to the same target … something like “Brownian motion” among the investigators. LOL! It seems to me the common thread between Jurgen Schmidhuber, Ming Li and Paul Vitanyi is Kolmogorov Complexity. Please let me know if I have the right guys. Here’s the homepage for Paul Vitanyi and for Ming Li.
StJacques: Of the four examples you gave I think the "Brownian motion" one is the best applicable to what we're dealing with here, since most of the explanation for abiogenesis will be rooted in chemistry, biochemistry, electromagnetism, and geophysics. The example of the die, which I know gets into frequencies, appears much too simplistic for application to a situation such as a "theoretical pre-biotic earth." Quantum mechanics does not appear suitable to chemistry and "relative independence" would seem applicable if we were dealing with "panspermia" as an explanation for the origins of life on earth, but not abiogenesis in its usual form.
You say that ”quantum mechanics does not appear suitable to chemistry” but observed Brownian motion (in a physical sense) may be a manifestation of the underlying geometry of strings. Here’s a link for Lurkers wanting to know more about Brownian motion
I am very glad to see that we have put panspermia on the back burner for now, because it makes sense to deal with the pre-biotic earth first before considering any new variables which might be involved in cosmic ancestry.
However, I must insist that we not dismiss information theory – especially communications and semiosis – in discussing the origins of biological life. It is not enough to say the chemicals were present and catalytic; for abiogenesis to be viable, there must also be a mechanism for the rise of autonomy, symbolization (Rocha, Pattee) and very importantly – successful communication (Shannon). Even that much is weak without agreeing first that biological systems are capable of self-organizing complexity once all of these are functioning.
tortoise: The ID theory needs to be worked at the level of the people at IDSIA in Switzerland (Schmidhuber, Hutter, and Legg), or who at least have the level of understanding of Merhav and his crew.
I'm not sure which flavor of ID theory you are speaking to, but if it is "intelligent design theory" - AFAIK, defending such is not the object here (abiogenesis) or on the "Atheist" thread (complexity in biological systems). Also, I gathered from your discussion of Shannon and modern theoretical constructs - that using Shannon in the narrow sense that Schneider et al have concerning molecular machines is not necessarily short-sighted concerning the contributions of Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, Li, Vitanyi and Schmidhuber. If that is incorrect, please let me know.