Has anyone ever given you some useless information? What does it even mean for information to be meaningful? This week, on Mind Matters News, guest host Dr. Michael Egnor interviews our own Robert J. Marks about information, as well as the creative limits of artificial intelligence, and why evolutionary algorithms aren’t the magic bullet they’re often presented to be.

Show Notes

• 00:00:09 | Introducing Dr. Robert J. Marks
• 00:01:02 | What is information?
• 00:06:42 | Exact representations of data
• 00:08:22 | A system with minimal information
• 00:09:31 | Information in nature
• 00:10:46 | Comparing biological information and information in non-living things
• 00:11:32 | Creation of information
• 00:12:53 | Will artificial intelligence ever be creative?
• 00:17:40 | Correlation vs. causation
• 00:24:22 | Mount Rushmore vs. Mount Fuji
• 00:26:32 | Specified complexity
• 00:29:49 | How does a statue of Abraham Lincoln differ from Abraham Lincoln himself?
• 00:37:21 | Achieving goals
• 00:38:26 | Robots improving themselves
• 00:43:13 | Bias and concealment in artificial intelligence
• 00:44:42 | Mimetic contagion
• 00:50:14 | Dangers of artificial intelligence
• 00:54:01| The role of information in AI evolutionary computing
• 01:00:15| The Dead Man Syndrome
• 01:02:46 | Randomness requires information and intelligence
• 01:08:58 | Scientific critics of Intelligent Design
• 01:09:40 | The controversy between Darwinian theory and ID theory
• 01:15:07 | The Anthropic Principle

Additional Resources

• Robert J. Marks at Discovery.org
• Michael Egnor at Discovery.org
• Claude Shannon at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Andrey Kolmogorov at Wikipedia
• Spurious Correlations website
• Chapter 7 of: R.J. Marks II, W.A. Dembski, W. Ewert, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, (World Scientific, Singapore, 2017).
• Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II “Algorithmic Specified Complexity in the Game of Life,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems, Volume 45, Issue 4, April 2015, pp. 584-594.
• Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II “On the Improbability of Algorithmically Specified Complexity,” Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 45th Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory (SSST), March 11, 2013, pp. 68-70
• Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II “Measuring meaningful information in images: algorithmic specified complexity,” IET Computer Vision, 2015, Vol. 9, #6, pp. 884-894