[continued from previous message]   
      
   empirical observation is an epistemologically valid source of knowledge.   
   Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;   
   instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into   
   occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily, magicking   
   new species into existence is not occasionalist.   
      
   Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is supernatural;   
   occasionalism is the position that everything is supernatural. Most   
   religious views lie somewhere between those two extremes.   
   >   
   > The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you   
   > mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of   
   > the historical environment", or something else?   
   >   
   > ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find   
   > intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this   
   > have yet to land it seems.   
   >   
      
   My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators   
   create information out of "nothing".   
      
   If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal then   
   information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-violation has not   
   been observed, physicists believe that the laws of physics are   
   CPT-invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed this implies that   
   T-violation also occurs. There is also the black-hole information   
   paradox, wherein black holes appear not to conserve information.   
      
   Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible   
   because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does not   
   preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT was true,   
   life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an analogous law of   
   information existed it would not preclude evolution (and life); just as   
   life (and evolution) exports entropy into the environment, they could   
   import information from the environment. Dembski et al could retreat to   
   the question of the ultimate source of the information, but that is just   
   the cosmological argument redux, and not an argument against the   
   factuality of evolution.   
      
   For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections between   
   neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as containing   
   information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception) this is not   
   fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the information in the   
   connectome must be imported from the environment (whether sensory inputs   
   or biochemical noise).   
      
   Turning again to the question of conservation of information. AlphaZero,   
   starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped itself to   
   superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. Did that process   
   increase information? In that case where did the information come from?   
      
   (AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in that   
   case one could appeal to import from environment as the source of the   
   information in the trained model.)   
      
   --   
   alias Ernest Major   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)