Chapter 6 of Dembski’s Intelligent Design presents a theory of information. It is surprising at how many points Dembski says just what Chalmers said, for instance, about reductionism not being able to explain complex things, the irreducibility of brute things like information, and so on. I sense that Chalmers is not one to let an ideology push him against his better scientific sense. He shows this same good sense in his essay Consciousness and its Place in Nature (http://consc.net/papers/nature.html). Dembski is similarly straightforward about the hard questions.

Anyway, let me try to summarize Dembski on information theory.



He says that to determine how life began it is necessary to understand the origin of information. Neither algorithms nor natural laws are capable of producing information. The great myth of modern evolutionary biology, he says, is that information can be gotten on the cheap without recourse to intelligence.

He then goes into the nature of information and employs signals as illustrations. What enables signals to convey information is that they admit multiple alternative possibilities or are contingent. To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. This contingency is the heart of information. And smaller probabilities signify more information not less.

There is a lot of dense mathematics here- Dembski holds a doctorate in math.

He looks next at complexity theory and that information is both complex and specified. For instance, your Visa card number is complex which ensures it won’t be dialed randomly and specified in that it ensures it is your number only (there is much more on complexity and specificity which is at the heart of Dembski’s arguments). This quality of complex and specified is called complex specified information of CSI. This has been the great fuss in science in general in recent years.

“It is CSI that for Manfred Eigen constitutes the great mystery of life’s origin, and one he hopes eventually to unravel in terms of algorithms and natural laws. It is CSI that Michael Behe has uncovered with his irreducibly complex biochemical machines. It is CSI that for cosmologists underlies the fine-tuning of the universe and that the various anthropic principles attempt to understand. It is CSI that David Bohm’s quantum potentials are extracting when they scour the microworld for what Bohm calls ‘active information’. It is CSI that enables Maxwell’s demon to outsmart a thermodynamic system tending toward thermal equilibrium. It is CSI that for Roy Frieden unifies the whole of physics. It is CSI on which David Chalmers hopes to base a comprehensive theory of human consciousness. It is CSI that within the Kolmogorov-Chaitin theory of algorithmic information identifies the highly compressible, nonrandom string of digits. How CSI gets from an organism’s environment into an organism’s genome is one of the long standing questions addressed by the Sante Fe Institute”.

Dembski notes that algorithms and natural laws are incapable of explaining the origin of information. They can explain the flow of information and are suited to transmit already existing information. But they can not originate information. Again, lots of dense math explaining algorithms and natural laws and how they function. Including the fractal patterns of Mandelbrot sets. The illusion after this he says, that information has been generated, disappears.

Laws can not generate information because they are deterministic and can not yield contingency without which there is no information. They invariably yield only a single live possibility.

This leaves only two possibilities for generating information- either the contingency is a blind, purposeless contingency (chance) or it is purposeful contingency which is intelligent causation. Here he gets into the probability bound of Borel and his own more generous bound. He goes on, “Most biologists reject pure chance as an adequate explanation of CSI. This is no more instructive than pleading ignorance or mystery”.

Then a section on generating information from law and chance. Again, chance and laws working in tandem cannot generate information. “Nevertheless, the sense that laws can sift chance and thereby generate information is deep seated in the scientific community”. The trial and error method of problem solving has so risen in the estimation of scientists that it is now regarded as the fount of wisdom, he says. Again, lots of math including genetic algorithms to illustrate the mutation/selection arguments. A comment here that noted just what Kellor noted in the Century of the Gene: “Nonetheless, programmers have to carefully adapt genetic algorithms to the problems at hand (thereby introducing plenty of novel CSI at the hands of the programmers)”. All these require front loaded intelligent input to work.

Conclusion- the only known source for generating CSI is intelligence.

Then a section on the Law of conservation of information. Implications? 1. The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. 2. CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins of life research). 3. The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system, though now closed, was not always closed).

Further, CSI cannot be explained in terms other than itself. It cannot be reduced to self-organizational properties of matter for these would be just natural causes and the law of conservation of information discounts natural causes as sufficient for generating information. The CSI was always present or was inserted.

Reductive explanation does not help. Dawkins and Dennet and many others are convinced proper scientific explanations must be reductive, moving from the complex to the simple. CSI cannot be explained reductively because an instance of CSI requires at least as much CSI as we started with. An author is more complicated than the books she writes (among other illustrations). Chalmers makes similar arguments.

Lots more but I skip over….more on mutation and selection. “Selection and mutation operate with no memory of the past or knowledge of the future”. The Darwinian mechanism is nonteleological and cannot specify in advance the adaptations it will produce. Mutation and selection cannot sustain a specification over multiple generations until the adaptation that was specified comes to fruition. This is teleology and is utterly inconsistent with the Darwinian mechanism.

Other alternatives are covered- that CSI is abundant in the universe and was placed there with the Big Bang. If so, then what was the informational pathway that takes the CSI and translates it into the first organism? How is it translated into an organism of still greater complexity? Even if the origin of CSI admits of no scientific explanation surely its flow does.

And so much more detail. Now surprisingly he later admits a place for mutation and selection. He says it will continue to occupy a significant place in evolutionary theory. But it can no longer dominate. It does not account for the full diversity of life. It can be useful as a mechanism for conserving, adapting and honing already existing biological structures- for this it is suited. But it can never get to the root question of how information came to exist in the first place.

Then some musings, in the same vein as Chalmers, on possible ways forward theoretically. No more just so stories a la Dawkins. But empirical evidence of informational pathways that conform to biological reality, not metaphysical prejudice or aesthetic preference. Reductionist attempts will have to be abandoned. “Only information begets information”.

Great summary of many issues around information theory. And like Chalmers, not letting people slide around the hard questions