Information, Knowledge, Evolution and Self

To understand this subject in relation to the overarching narrative of evolution, one must first understand a simple scientific fact, one that is generally hidden by imprecise language: Material storage devices, irrespective of whether they be synthetic or organic, do NOT and CANNOT store information. The same is to be said for communications of any form, through any media. I realise that this may be difficult to accept, so let me explain. Firstly, the word “information” is the noun equivalent of the verb “to inform”, and thus if a communication does not inform you, it is not information to you. It may be information to somebody else, but that is irrelevant in the context of an individual’s cognitive processing and knowledge. In the context of evolution, we must always consider the individual organism, for that is where the mechanisms of evolution are said to occur before impacting a wider group. Examining what are loosely termed, communications, we should understand that the letters on this page are symbols devised for a specific coding system. To decode them, the reader must have pre-loaded data relating to language, alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, punctuation, and knowledge of the subject matter. If the symbol set (alphabet) is familiar to you but the language is not, no useful communication occurs. If the symbol set is unfamiliar, such as the Hebrew or Cyrillic script, or even worse, Oriental pictograms, then again no communication can occur. I appreciate that this is so basic that it hardly needs restating, but we need to keep these basics in mind when examining how the acquisition of knowledge could have occurred through evolutionary processes for the very first time. What may not be immediately obvious is that every one of these terms used above are “concepts”, absent of understanding of which no useful communication can occur. A dictionary is useful for building one’s vocabulary, but no dictionary can convey foundational concepts: these the reader must bring with them to the book. For example, my dictionary defines an elephant as a: “large pachyderm with proboscis and long ivory tusks”. That hardly helps in understanding what an elephant is because there are at least four concepts which must be preloaded: pachyderm, proboscis, ivory, and tusks. My point, on which we will elaborate as we proceed through the study is this: data only becomes cognitive information when intelligently processed through preloaded concepts which provide context. Now let us have a closer look at “data”. Material storage devices do not even store data - they store symbols – of a type appropriate to the method of storage. The storage and retrieval of such symbols must be based upon a coding system, itself several levels removed from the data that is intended to be represented. Examine any material storage device in terms of physical properties and the truth of this should be self-evident. Examine a printed page and in terms of physical properties, all you will find are ink-stains in what appear to be regulated patterns, but keep in mind that for you to comprehend that, you had to pre-know concepts such as ink and patterns. Examine a computer hard disk – with what? The only properties that you will discover are variations in magnetic regions which in themselves are meaningless. Examine a music CD and you will not find music, or pictures on a DVD. Examine the human brain and all you will discover are organic substances subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, but nothing that you can comprehend externally as information content. Activity can be sensed, but not the informational content or context of that activity. As with reading the symbols on this page, the physical or chemical symbols need to be processed through a hierarchical framework of concepts and contexts before information can be presented in a human cognitive form. Repeating the earlier observation by Dr. Oller regarding Pragmatic Information: it is a “simple mathematical fact that the number of possible strings at any given level in any natural language, or any language-like biological signaling system, grows exponentially as we progress up the hierarchy of information layers.” Note the reference to “hierarchy of information layers” [emphasis mine]. We will come back to that concept a little later. Dr. Oller was speaking of genomic information, but the same holds true for cognitive information: given the exponential growth of possible paths as we proceed from raw data to cognitive information, the probability that this occurred by undirected evolution clearly approximates zero. In this study, I will begin with data and information processing principles as I contend that irrespective of the medium in which such processes occur, the principles do still hold. The human brain is often compared to a computer, but I will later argue that it is much more than any computer that humans can devise, the principal reason why I believe that artificial intelligence will never achieve the reality espoused by science fiction writers and some researchers and prophets of science. When scientists discuss information in the context of evolution, they invariably refer to the biological information in DNA, but such information is substantively different to the cognitive information seemingly processed in the mind or brain. Biological information is both stored and processed using the same physical medium - chemicals, but if indeed the brain does store information, the processing of it is several levels abstracted from the storage process. The genome is chemical in nature: in a sense, the intrinsic properties of the genome allow it to “know” what it is on about. In cognitive processing, there is no natural chemical relationship between the properties of the storage medium and the abstract relationships represented by the symbols: in that sense, the stored information does not know what it means. In cell development, genetic instructions are encoded in the chemical medium itself: absent of mutation or other errors, the genome can only do what it does. Cognitive processing is entirely different: for unlike the genome, the mind can do much more than it is.