Can Chance Produce Information (II)
May 11th, 2008 by hayesy
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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Comments
May 12th, 2008 at 9:37 am
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.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I don’t mind the probability - let’s assume that it happened.
Is it information?
May 13th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Interesting Christian article: The necessity of God in the acquisition of knowledge
May 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Read the article jpj and it’s bullshit.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:35 am
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.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
fair point smarkLX
May 15th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Hi SmartLX! Good to see you!