Since I haven’t finished thinking about my position on this, let’s do a thought experiment:
Consider rolling three 27-sided dice in an otherwise empty universe, and having it spell CAT. As HH rightly identified, “to those who don’t understand english, it’s junk.” Chance has not produced any information, yet. But then another 21 dice are rolled, and it spells “what does a dog chase” If we apply this to CAT, “What does a dog chase?” “CAT”, do we have information yet? No, it is still true that “to those who don’t understand english, it’s junk.”
Now, what happens if you rolled billions of dice, and it just happened to spell out the oxford dictionary and an english grammar. Now do you have information?
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I think you’re asking for things with too low a probability and applying to strict a definition to it.
It would have been better to probably say that to someone who doesn’t understand English it’s still information, they just haven’t figured it out yet.
I don’t mind the probability – let’s assume that it happened.
Is it information?
Interesting Christian article: The necessity of God in the acquisition of knowledge
Read the article jpj and it’s bullshit.
Hi. First time posting here but TCA, HH and I are pursuing this very interesting line of thought on our site too.
Regardless of the quality of that article (and in the end, it’s another version of the Transcendental Argument, as you can first notice the moment they bring up Van Til) the acquisition of knowledge is a step above what we’re working on here. Let’s sort out information before we try and tackle knowledge. Perhaps eventually we’ll work up to wisdom.
fair point smarkLX
Hi SmartLX! Good to see you!