Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagLife vs nonlife (inner purposefulness)

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A small building among the rocks

How Do We Know Lincoln Contained More Information Than His Bust?

Life forms strive to be more of what they are. Grains of sand don’t. You need more information to strive than to just exist.

In Define information before you talk about it, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed engineering prof Robert J. Marks on the way information, not matter, shapes our world (October 28, 2021). In the first portion, Egnor and Marks discussed questions like: Why do two identical snowflakes seem more meaningful than one snowflake. Then they turned to the relationship between information and creativity. Is creativity a function of more information? Or is there more to it? And human intervention make any difference? Does Mount Rushmore have no more information than Mount Fuji? Does human intervention make a measurable difference? That’s specified complexity. Putting the idea of specified complexity to work, how do we measure meaningful information? What if an information-rich entity were scattered Read More ›