[[Another even more fundamental example was brought up on this thread by Diamond as I recall. Namely that coding itself requires agreement on language between sender and receiver. The receiver must be able to decode an encoded transmission. Again, this is inversely causal (or as I prefer, temporally non-local.)]]
Excellent point- I must have missed this- this shows predesigned compliance between the two- one can not exist without being predesigned to recieve from the other. Not sure htough if an argument can be made that this agreement ‘could arise’ in stepwise fashion- I strongly doubt it, but mym ind is too tired today to noodle this over much.
[[And at the very bottom of the abiogenesis ladder is the issue of where autonomy came from in the first place. At that theoretical level it is all a “soup.” Any message sent in its direction would be a broadcast to the soup. Things would have to become autonomous within that theoretical soup for successful communications to occur as we observe it today – otherwise there would still only be that theoretical soup.]]
Rhis rules out biological (which didn’t exist in the first place) to chemical comunication for sure- and although we have chemical to biolgical ‘creation’, what was created had nothign needed for sucessful comunication within itself in order to move to more complexity via billions of years of mutations.
[[But the bottom line for me, is that no matter what message is being sent – the organism is alive while it is successfully communicating. Once communication comes to an end, the organism is physically dead.]]
I fully agree withhtis- the sideargument though is that ID says everythign is subject to entropy, and since htere are organisms that prolong this loss of comunicaiton for very long times, then apparently not everythign is subject to effects of entropy (although they would have to prove these organisms are eternal) But again, I aghree, the issues of htis thread are abotu whether complex cominicatiosn can arise naturally, and not abotu how species vary in resisting cell comunicaiton death timelines.
The only theory I've heard of how information [Shannon, successful communications] might have evolved disclosed upfront the difficulty of autonomy and the physics of symbols [Rocha, Pattee.] It proposed an RNA world in which the organism must toggle between autonomous to communicate internally and non-autonomous to gather messages. But it was very sketchy and had no theories for the rise of an RNA world where the messages are floating around to be cherry-picked nor how the organism would achieve autonomy much less toggle back and forth. And of course there was no theory for the origin of the messages.
Even so, the issue of inverse causality remains, how it can know of something which has not yet happened, e.g. the need for maintenance and repair, especially autonomously. The messages floating around would have to be quite "informed."
Getting back to that single celled organism, the amoeba...
Like every "thing" in space/time, it is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It must pay the thermodynamic tab.
So naturally we might ask how it accomplishes this feat to delay the inevitable?
And for the answer, we again turn to successful communication - as long as the amoeba is successfully communicating it is paying the thermodynamic tab.