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{"id":17154,"date":"2015-04-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1979"},"modified":"2015-04-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T00:00:00","slug":"informative-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/04\/informative-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"Informative Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

William Dembski\u2019s latest,\u00a0Being As Communion<\/a>, sets out a metaphysics of information, and argues for what he calls \u201cinformational realism.\u201d Reality is information all the way down, but that information is real. It is reality.<\/p>\n

What is information? Dembski says it\u2019s \u201cabout realizing possibilities by ruling out others. Unless possibilities are ruled out, no information can be conveyed\u201d (19). \u201cIt\u2019s raining or it\u2019s not\u201d doesn\u2019t convey information because nothing is ruled out. \u201cIt\u2019s raining\u201d rules out the possibility that it\u2019s not, and so is (minimally) informative; \u201cit\u2019s raining at a rate of more than an inch per hour\u201d is information-rich because it excludes all manner of other possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On this definition, nature itself is informative. That \u201cthe moon assumes a stable orbit around the earth\u201d rules out the hypothetical possibility of an unstable orbit. That it has the orbit it does thus conveys information.\u00a0This is also the fundamental basis for Dembski\u2019s claim that reality is relational, also all the way down. If things convey information, and that information is of a not-X quality, then a things information is defined by its difference from X. A thing is what it is at least by its distinction from a possible thing that it could have been.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(I register a an objection to the suggestion that the relationality of things is negative at the foundation, actualizations in opposition to possibilities. This is not, for Dembski, the only relation in which thing stands to thing, but it is a basic one.)<\/p>\n

Natural selection itself is a communicative process: \u201cNatural selection does not so much select for adaptive advantages as rule out maladaptive disadvantages, excluding the latter from survival and reproduction and thus eliminating them from the evolutionary tree. Natural selection is in the business of ruling out possibilities, thereby producing information in the structures and organisms it has retained\u201d (19).\u00a0<\/p>\n

A clever twist, that, turning natural selection into an important illustration of nature\u2019s capacity to generate information.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"