Language

[Deleted member 619]

The Map is Not the Terrain.
What's in a Name?

 

[mechtheist]

​

Thanks, I love that kind of stuff. The first one discussers something that made English such a powerful language, it's been built by being rather ravenous at importation from other languages with the result that lots of words have been imported more than once, these variations evolved to give us ranges of subtle variations in meaning. Crystal's works are full of info along those lines.

 

[mechtheist]

The Map is Not the Terrain.
What's in a Name?

Interesting stuff. I've seen a lot of debates with yahoos yammering about information, usually I think about its creation being impossible by evolution or maybe by anything unguided, I think that's what you're saying with your 'no new information in DNA'. I don't recall their arguments, mostly I remember they all sounded incoherent. Maybe I can't see the forest for the trees or it's too bloody obvious, are you saying there's no information in DNA, you only get the information when you're looking at it as a code when in reality it's just a molecule doing chemistry? I guess I'm not seeing where the 'new' fits in.

I think Dawkins should have used 'discreet' instead of 'digital', maybe he thought more folks would get digital.

Mentioning 'memetics' made me think how that would necessarily involve a lot of emetics, I clearly have a warped map.

In your "Who Put it There? Information in DNA." you mention Kolmogorov complexity, there's a guy who is also associated with that work, Gregory Chaitin, have you heard of him, he's done a lot of stuff on incompleteness and information etc? He's really fascinating and has a fair number of youtube videos available, I really enjoy listening to him, they're well worth watching and I read a great book of his Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega, can't say I understood all of it but it was still a great read.

 

[Deleted member 619]

Interesting stuff. I've seen a lot of debates with yahoos yammering about information, usually I think about its creation being impossible by evolution or maybe by anything unguided, I think that's what you're saying with your 'no new information in DNA'. I don't recall their arguments, mostly I remember they all sounded incoherent. Maybe I can't see the forest for the trees or it's too bloody obvious, are you saying there's no information in DNA, you only get the information when you're looking at it as a code when in reality it's just a molecule doing chemistry? I guess I'm not seeing where the 'new' fits in.

Yes, there's information in DNA but no, this doesn't mean it contains a message. I treat this in another post, which a scan forward tells me you've read.

I think Dawkins should have used 'discreet' instead of 'digital', maybe he thought more folks would get digital.

I think too much focus on the label is dangerous. Digital is a good word for something that can exist only in a well-specified range of discrete states.

Mentioning 'memetics' made me think how that would necessarily involve a lot of emetics, I clearly have a warped map.

In your "Who Put it There? Information in DNA." you mention Kolmogorov complexity, there's a guy who is also associated with that work, Gregory Chaitin, have you heard of him, he's done a lot of stuff on incompleteness and information etc? He's really fascinating and has a fair number of youtube videos available, I really enjoy listening to him, they're well worth watching and I read a great book of his Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega, can't say I understood all of it but it was still a great read.

I've read some of Chaitin's work, yes. Some fascinating stuff.

 

[mechtheist]

Yes, there's information in DNA but no, this doesn't mean it contains a message. I treat this in another post, which a scan forward tells me you've read.

I think too much focus on the label is dangerous. Digital is a good word for something that can exist only in a well-specified range of discrete states.

I've read some of Chaitin's work, yes. Some fascinating stuff.

Maybe I'm missing something. I would have to disagree pretty adamantly that there's not a message in DNA, it's a medium for storage of information which is in part how it gets transferred, there's even lots of error correction involved. I think the creationists' problem involves whether there's meaning in the message and god I sure as hell don't want to get into 'meaning', it's a rabbit-hole quagmire too deep for my poor brain. Are you taking 'message; as something that requires meaning, or intent or agency or teleology? Bacteria seem to signal to or communicate with each other, is that a message, can a bacteria mean something? And this could veer off into semiotics which is also a brain-hurting rabbit hole with many shared tunnels "There is nobody trying to tell us anything here", and you can start getting bogged down with 'trying'. Isn't Dawkin's 'designoid' idea useful against the 'who put it there' arguments? I see evolution, really natural selection, as basically blind trial and error, no intent or agency, which is kinda how we've learned, or created new information, a big chunk of the stuff we know.

 

[Deleted member 42253]

Its similiar to us turning the lights on and off in a city.
Sure, thats code(binary), sure, thats information and of course there are reasons for turning the light on and off, but if you try to translate what a city is trying to tell you, you are either a maniac or terminally bored cryptologist on speed.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Maybe I'm missing something. I would have to disagree pretty adamantly that there's not a message in DNA, ...

So what's the message?

 

[Deleted member 619]

I would have to disagree pretty adamantly that there's not a message in DNA, it's a medium for storage of information which is in part how it gets transferred, there's even lots of error correction involved.

Except that it isn't. It's a molecule, and it responds chemically to its environment commensurate with the laws of chemistry. That it exists in well-defined states means that we can use it to store information in the same way that we do with 1s and 0s, and for exactly the same reason. That doesn't mean the 1s and 0s themselves are a message, nor does it mean that of DNA. There's no meaning, just chemistry.

To the extent that there is really such thing as the genetic code, it's all the stuff we glom onto the molecule to aid our understanding. DNA itself isn't a code, and it contains no messages. It doesn't tell the body how to develop, it simply reacts commensurate with global rules of chemistry to its environment, which includes the way other codons are reacting in the vicinity, all of which adds up to a process resulting in a body. This doesn't require the sending and receiving of messages, it just happens, in exactly the same way that the foam volcano just happens when you introduce a mento to a bottle of diet coke.

 

[Led Zeppelin]

To the extent that there is really such thing as the genetic code, it's all the stuff we glom onto the molecule to aid our understanding. DNA itself isn't a code, and it contains no messages. It doesn't tell the body how to develop, it simply reacts commensurate with global rules of chemistry to its environment, which includes the way other codons are reacting in the vicinity, all of which adds up to a process resulting in a body. This doesn't require the sending and receiving of messages, it just happens, in exactly the same way that the foam volcano just happens when you introduce a mento to a bottle of diet coke.

What would it look like if DNA was a code then? What would be the difference?

 

[Greg the Grouper]

I just wanted to say that, while I was at the store, I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues came on the loudspeaker, and I realized that it could certainly be a blue balls reference, and the realization made me happy. Carry on with your discussion.

 

[Deleted member 619]

What would it look like if DNA was a code then? What would be the difference?

That's a lovely question.

You caught me in an overstatement. I should have said that there's no good reason even to think it could be a code.

 

[mechtheist]

So what's the message?

See below please.

 

[Sparhafoc]

See below please.

I read the whole paragraph before asking.

Maybe I'm missing something. I would have to disagree pretty adamantly that there's not a message in DNA, it's a medium for storage of information which is in part how it gets transferred, there's even lots of error correction involved. I think the creationists' problem involves whether there's meaning in the message and god I sure as hell don't want to get into 'meaning', it's a rabbit-hole quagmire too deep for my poor brain. Are you taking 'message; as something that requires meaning, or intent or agency or teleology? Bacteria seem to signal to or communicate with each other, is that a message, can a bacteria mean something? And this could veer off into semiotics which is also a brain-hurting rabbit hole with many shared tunnels "There is nobody trying to tell us anything here", and you can start getting bogged down with 'trying'. Isn't Dawkin's 'designoid' idea useful against the 'who put it there' arguments? I see evolution, really natural selection, as basically blind trial and error, no intent or agency, which is kinda how we've learned, or created new information, a big chunk of the stuff we know.

I've read it again twice, but I see no answer to my question: what's the message in DNA?

 

[Sparhafoc]

What would it look like if DNA was a code then? What would be the difference?

Well, for a start there would need to be a system of substitution, where one thing is intended to indicate another 'hidden' meaning. Secondly, codes are designed systems where both the signaler and receiver need to both be able to understand the code and what it truly signifies.

This just doesn't really bear out metaphorically with respect to DNA.

You can say X gene codes for Y protein, but that meaning is meant metaphorically to be like the way a programmer writes out instructions in order to arrive at an output, so not a code in the first sense of the word.

Really, metaphors are useful and help us envision something that's otherwise not immediately in front of us by likening it to something we are more familiar with. But one has to understand the remit of the metaphor - no one's employing a metaphor with the intent of suggesting they're identical. Maps and terrains.

 

[mechtheist]

Except that it isn't. It's a molecule, and it responds chemically to its environment commensurate with the laws of chemistry. That it exists in well-defined states means that we can use it to store information in the same way that we do with 1s and 0s, and for exactly the same reason. That doesn't mean the 1s and 0s themselves are a message, nor does it mean that of DNA. There's no meaning, just chemistry.

To the extent that there is really such thing as the genetic code, it's all the stuff we glom onto the molecule to aid our understanding. DNA itself isn't a code, and it contains no messages. It doesn't tell the body how to develop, it simply reacts commensurate with global rules of chemistry to its environment, which includes the way other codons are reacting in the vicinity, all of which adds up to a process resulting in a body. This doesn't require the sending and receiving of messages, it just happens, in exactly the same way that the foam volcano just happens when you introduce a mento to a bottle of diet coke.

This is going to lead into things that get messy, where what is metaphor and what is literal can confuse. Questions like what do genes do as in how are they used, and is a message something more than transmission of information. The information in DNA is transferred to mitochondria so they can make proteins. and also it's used to transfer the information from mommy and daddy to create a junior. Is that a message? It seems like it to me, but what do I know, I'm from Texas.

Breaking it down to the molecular level and you have a bunch of molecules doing chemistry, a long line of them, where, in the past, selection led to certain arrangements getting created more than others, yadda yadda yadda, where the set of molecules around at any time is largely due to this long line of molecules, chemical reactions, the environment, and selection pressures. What got created depended on this information transfer, no meaning, no intention, no design, or teleology, just chemical reactions. But information transfers were a huge part of it all, it's what allowed selection to work. "There is nobody trying to tell us anything here" It's just the case that selection resulted in a set of collections of molecules that behaved in such way that certain molecules became information storage and transfer mechanisms. No code, no meaning. That's why I asked about whether you take 'message' to be something that has meaning behind it or is it just a store of information and its transfer.

 

[mechtheist]

I read the whole paragraph before asking.




I've read it again twice, but I see no answer to my question: what's the message in DNA?

The right up there ^^^ the above below.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Are we playing Cluedo or something?

Can you just answer my question? If you feel like you've answered it in that paragraph and I am not seeing it, then can you extract the part which answers my question so I can see what it is you want me to take from that paragraph?

 

[Deleted member 619]

...snip...

I think the real problem here is in the way you're using 'information', which I think you're treating as something intrinsic. Information is in many cases entirely extrinsic. That is, information is something we take away from it, not something it has in and of itself.

Even designed signals heavily loaded with message can give different information depending on who's receiving the information. That's not the real danger, though. The danger in such a treatment of information is that it almost can't help leading to teleological thinking, and there's no need to go there.

DNA is not information. It's a molecule. There is information we can take from it, but that's a qualitatively different statement. Dogshit contains oodles of information, does that mean there's a message in it? That would be silly.

 

[Sparhafoc]

I think the real problem here is in the way you're using 'information', which I think you're treating as something intrinsic. Information is in many cases entirely extrinsic. That is, information is something we take away from it, not something it has in and of itself.

Very nice way of explaining it.

The thing doesn't 'contain' information. rather the information is the thing as received by something else.

I really like blunt expressions for these ideas as they seem to fit the scale and simplicity of the systems, and 'thing' is such a very useful word that all by itself justifies the Angles and Saxons having invaded the British isles! Dank du fur der words.

But anyway, so a dog's rectum allows, among other things, gases to escape. Gases waft around in air doing nothing, they are not information - they are just gases. Other dog wanders by and from the traces of chemicals, and from within whatever cognitive context a dog possesses, senses various characteristics about the state of the other dog - it becomes information the moment another system (dog) receives some 'thing' about the other system which causes this system (dog's brain) to react to it in some directional way.

So the sniffing dog senses what the other had for breakfast, whether it's healthy, if it wants to fuck or fight - and who knows... maybe there's an as yet untapped by humans rich olfactory fecal world available only to other dogs with sophisticated and nuanced exchanges of culture and history communicated with wafts of intestinally cultivated gases (but that would be an example of a message,). One bacteria emits some chemical which transmits to another bacteria producing a response there, the second bacteria having acquired some information directing a response. Cells, etc. scaled up and down.

Information is a transition state, where senses (or simpler molecular reactions) are cued by another system to respond in some way to it. Thought is not required here, even molecule to molecule this explanation of information works.

 

[mechtheist]

Are we playing Cluedo or something?

Can you just answer my question? If you feel like you've answered it in that paragraph and I am not seeing it, then can you extract the part which answers my question so I can see what it is you want me to take from that paragraph?

Your first reply was too soon, I hadn't written it yet so there wasn't a 'below' yet, so I think you looked up. The message is in the arrangement of ACTGs that get's transferred via mRNA, which is 'messenger' RNA There may be disconnects here, I don't know if we have a definition of what constitutes a message. I've said it's information and its transfer, but maybe that's incorrect. What's the difference between information and message?