What about information?

By Massimo Pigliucci

“Information,” in some quarters, seems to be a magical word. Creationist Bill Dembski, for instance, keeps repeating that evolutionary theory cannot explain the production of new information; dualists of every stripe declare the death of “materialism” based on the idea that, you see, information is neither matter nor energy, so there; and of course “singularitarians” and transhumanists think that the key to immortality is to “upload” our consciousness to a computer because, after all, what is human consciousness except information?

There are many technical definitions of information, perhaps the most commonly cited being Shannon’s, which is related to the physical concept of entropy. At bottom, though, in order to meaningfully talk about information there has to be either an organism or a (human made) device involved. For instance, when we say that plants act on information about the position of the sun to orient their leaves, or that DNA carries information from one generation to another, or that a satellite in orbit around earth is gathering information about the weather, we mean that there is a causal input of some sort that interacts with a receiver of a given type.

Another way to put it is that information is any type of pattern of matter/energy that causes (or contributes to cause) the formation or transformation of other patterns. Again, think of the examples given above: the light coming to the plant (energy) causes the alteration of the pattern of orientation of the leaves (matter); the DNA carried by germ cells (matter) contributes to the formation of a new organism in the next generation (matter); and the photographs (energy/matter, depending on the medium) taken by a satellite influence whether you’ll pick up an umbrella (matter) on your way out the door.

Notice that if we see information this way, there is no requirement for the presence of a conscious mind. Plants are not conscious (yeah, yeah, that we know of, but we have no reason at all to believe they are, and every reason to believe they aren’t), and of course neither are segments of DNA. The satellite too isn’t conscious, but of course it was put together by conscious beings.

What, then, is the difference between having or not having consciousness involved in the process? If consciousness is involved, we don’t just have information (in the above defined neutral sense of the term), but knowledge. Plants and pieces of DNA don’t have knowledge of things, only human beings (and of course any other relevantly similar conscious being) have knowledge. (Of course, one can say that plants “know” where to turn their leaves for light, but my point is that they don’t, they are simply using information in a way that was structured by natural selection to increase their chances to survive and reproduce.)

While Shannon-type information theory tells us that information cannot be destroyed without increasing the entropy of a given system, the analysis above suggests the philosophical point that information is a type of energy/matter. That being the case, there is nothing mystical about information, and the concept cannot therefore be brought up as a way to defeat materialism.

As for Dembski’s and co.’s claims about evolutionary theory, it is well understood that biological information of the type stored in DNA is created (and destroyed) all the time. The destruction comes, for instance, with the death of a given organism (which, accordingly, corresponds to a sudden increase in that organism’s entropy level), while creation/change occurs every time there is a mutation, i.e. a chemical alteration in the structure of DNA. Again, nothing magical going on, and certainly no need for conscious agents to get involved — be they of the supernatural type or whatever. (It is, of course, perfectly possible for a conscious agent to alter genetic information, it’s called genetic engineering, and we do it all the time.)

What about the possibility to “upload” one’s consciousness to a computer? My objections to that notion have been detailed elsewhere. Briefly, though, I think the burden of proof is on the singularitarians / transhumanists to show that consciousness is just a matter of logical inputs and outputs of the type that can be simulated — at least in principle — in a computer. Like Searle, I think it more reasonable to consider consciousness a biological phenomenon akin to, say, photosynthesis: something that does have a logical structure, but that also requires certain kinds of substrates to actually work (you can simulate photosynthesis in a computer, but you ain’t getting no sugar out of it). I would note in passing that, as Searle pointed out, if one thinks that consciousness can be “uploaded”, one is committed to a type of dualism (something that singularitarians profess to abhor), because one is assuming that the “stuff” of thought is independent from the stuff of brains. (And before the flood of critical comments gets started, let me make crystal clear that this is absolutely not an argument against artificial intelligence tout court, only against a particular type of artificial intelligence represented by the strong AI program.)

To recap: information is not a third type of thing outside of matter and energy (which are, of course, just two aspects of the same type of thing), and it therefore poses no problem to materialism. Also, talk of information does not require the presence or involvement of conscious minds, unless one wishes to talk about knowledge — the latter being a fairly uncontroversial and utterly non-mystical concept.