Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the eighth post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
Two insights about information that I gained as a philosophy graduate student proved hugely influential on my subsequent thinking about information. They came from two books by epistemologists, MIT’s Robert Stalnaker (Inquiry) and Stanford’s Fred Dretske (Logic and the Flow of Information). I read the Stalnaker book in a philosophy seminar; I read the Dretske book on my own. Whenever I need to give an elevator pitch about what information is, I quote Stalnaker. And when I need to go slightly deeper, I cite Dretske.
In his book Inquiry, Stalnaker writes about information, “To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth.” This remains for me to this day as good a definition of information as exists. It avoids the reduction of information to linguistic symbol conventions (Shannon information). It also avoids tying information entirely to the meaning of communications (semantic information).
Both of these are in fact special cases of Stalnaker’s definition as the excluding or ruling out of possibilities. A string of symbols sent across a communication channel rules out the other strings that could have been sent. A communication with a certain semantic content rules out other communications with different semantic content.
Ruling Out Possibilities
The conception of information as ruling out possibilities allows for teleological as well as non-teleological processes to generate information. Thus information does not automatically bias discussions in favor of intelligent design, as though talk about information automatically presupposes teleology or mind. Natural processes, to the extent that they rule out possibilities — which they can and do — thus generate information. This puts teleology and non-teleology on an equal footing vis-a-vis information, and thus allows information to fairly adjudicate between them.
Problems arise when people go with a narrower definition of information than the general one by Stalnaker. Take science writer John Horgan, who was attracted to the idea of information being the basis of reality (an idea that every now and again captures the imagination of some big-name scientist, such as John Archibald Wheeler). Yet in a 2011 Scientific American article, Horgan rejects this view for the following reason:
The concept of information makes no sense in the absence of something to be informed — that is, a conscious observer capable of choice, or free will (sorry, I can’t help it, free will is an obsession). If all the humans in the world vanished tomorrow, all the information would vanish, too. Lacking minds to surprise and change, books and televisions and computers would be as dumb as stumps and stones. This fact may seem crushingly obvious, but it seems to be overlooked by many information enthusiasts.
Horgan would be right if information were inherently semantic and presupposed minds. But by Stalnaker’s account of information, it is about contingency — ruling out some possibilities and realizing others. And this can happen without minds thinking about those possibilities or meanings assigned to them.
A Deep Impression
Fred Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information confirmed Stalnaker’s definition of information. As Dretske wrote in the opening of his book, “Information theory identifies the amount of information associated with, or generated by, the occurrence of an event (or the realization of a state of affairs) with the reduction in uncertainty, the elimination of possibilities, represented by that event or state of affairs.” By the time I read this, I had already internalized Stalnaker, so I learned nothing new here. But later in Dretske’s book, I read the following, which made a deep impression on me:
It may seem as though the transmission of information … is a process that depends on the causal inter-relatedness of source and receiver. The way one gets a message from s [source] to r [receiver] is by initiating a sequence of events at s that culminates in a corresponding sequence at r. In abstract terms, the message is borne from s to r by a causal process which determines what happens at r in terms of what happens at s. The flow of information may, and in most familiar instances obviously does, depend on underlying causal processes. Nevertheless, the information relationships between s and r must be distinguished from the system of [material] causal relationships existing between these points.
Design and Information
The crucial insight for me, as a proponent of intelligent design, was that the information relationships made sense in the absence of any known physical causal process connecting the two ends of the communication channel. This meant that information relationships were more fundamental than the physical-causal relationships and could obtain and be knowable even in the absence of our knowledge of a physical-causal relationship and, more radically still, even in the absence of any such physical-causal relationship existing at all. A naturalist would, of course, be committed to there being such a relationship. But intelligent design, as it was coming to understand information, saw it as nonreducible to physical causality. Dretske’s distinction here was thus crucial to intelligent design’s emerging conceptual infrastructure.
Next, “Philosophy, Theology, and an Inference to Design.”