Guy writes:

>While there is value in a theory of signal detection and data
>interpretation, IMHO it should be clearly distinguished from theories of
>objective information content. 

While the notion that "objective information" might be present in
the universe,
in the absence of a subjective viewer, is a somewhat appealing idea, it only
takes a moment's thought to realize that searching for such a quality is a
fool's errand..

Beyond the fact that such an "objective information" measure
would completely
corrupt any definitional sense of the word "information" in the
absence of a
receiver, the best you could hope for would be some means of calculating the
average entropy of an alphabet of symbols as presented by the universe. But
therein lies the rub. In the absence of an observer, who is going to say what
is a symbol and what is not?

Symbols are defined by the receiver, not the sender, and Inman's point is that
information, like beauty, lies wholly in the eye of the beholder.

The thrust of this discussion is very reminscent of the kinds of discussion
that the creationists seemed to enjoy engaging in a few years ago, saying that
the evolutionary process was not, and could not be, creative. The comments
rendered here are very similar, but clearly neither is true.

Evolutionary optimization is not characterized by simple combinatorial
optimizations. Rather, it is intrinsically composed of problems which minimize
the costs of mispredicting sequences of environmental stimuli. Misprediction of
a forthcoming event (surprise) is generally costly, if not occasionally lethal.
The syntactical relationship that must inevitably evolve between the
increasingly acute perception of strings of external stimuli and the evolution
of appropriate responses assumes the nature of a language, even when
implemented only as a simple reactor to such stimuli. 

Behavioral competence rapidly evolves as a matter of two distinct phenomena:
not merely as a matter of predicting the next symbol as a simple conditional
probability, Pr(it+1 | it), dependent only upon the previous symbol, but on the
previous m+1 symbols as a Markov process: 

     Pr(it+1 | it, it-1, it-2, it-3, ..., it-m)

but also as a constant refinement within the phyletic lineage of what is and
what is not a useful, perceivable symbol.

The environment inherently presents itself as an mth order Markov chain, where
the previous m symbols influence the probability of occurrence of the next
symbol. Should the probability of certain symbol strings be high, then it is
expected that the evolving phyletic lineage will come to predict these highly
correlated strings.  

It is however the nature of the physical universe that certain symbols strongly
portend subsequent symbols, and strings of specific signals are often quite
specific in their portent and the language-like nature of environmental symbols
becomes apparent. The segregation of such strings from random noise and the
subsequent increase in the length of these predictive strings is the essence of
evolutionary adaptation. Nicklas (1997) wrote in a recent issue of Science
("How cells get the right chromosomes." Science, 275:632-637),
"Selection
extracts order from disorder, music from noise." The sentence is worth
repeating: "Selection extracts order from disorder, music from noise." The
increasingly accurate extraction of that constantly refined music underlies
much of the directional bias in the increasing complexity of life on this
planet.

Wirt Atmar
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 8/19/04 10:26:28 AM