The original definition of a code, as communication from an encoder to a decoder, was IMO correct. But, put it this way: Information is informative only to the informed. Ya gotta know the territory. Only momma knows baby's squeak. A CAD/CAM factory grinding out products means nothing but to the consumer (if any). DNA is meaningless but to the process of reproduction of replicates, and to the molecules waiting to fit into place in the daughter string during mitosis. Biology is just another CAD/CAM factory, devoid of meaning but to - - well, to whom, or what? To you, my present reader, than whom there is (for you) no higher authority.
Information, then, is informative only to a self-aware and other-aware entity, like me and I suppose like you, on the inside looking out at experienced and remembered existence. Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and you are your only beholder, aside from reasonable surmises.
The original question was thus just a teaser (and a good one). But in figuring out reality, it seems to help to believe that causes and effects cascade: of two successive experiences, the first may have made the second happen. Not always, but with close attention it often works. That’s pragmatic causality.
And it works at least bottom-up. Effects accumulate, and we can trace the causality backwards. Back to sheer existence, if we wish; that something rather than nothing exists. That’s Bottom-up Causation, of which the Darwinian explanation is a prime example. Chance variation of the simple, caught in the net of survival on its merits, becomes emergent life form. Eventually, you and me.
Can we trace causality (and evolution) upward, to something always more complex, to a First Cause? But hey, one good inquiry deserves another; what caused the First Cause? No answer? Then there was no First Cause.
Tracing back along Bottom-up Causation works, whereas tracing back along Top-Down Causation does not work. And that is the basic problem with Intelligent Design. It sets foot on the imagined but nonexistent path to ever-higher explanations.
It also, not necessarily but typically, uses “immaterial” causes; matter being pushed around (as in the free DNA molecules falling into place) not randomly but cleverly, yet without a means to that end. How do it do dat? It does not do dat. Newton said that only matter affects matter, and I choose to believe him. The whole idea of ID is an amateurish fairy tale. Intelligent Design is not only a cart on a road which leads nowhere, but a cart which lacks even the wheels to go there with.
Intelligent Design is a revived fragment of the Great Chain of Being which preceded Darwinism. Darwin, shocked by his own dawning theory, said "it is like confessing to a murder.” Armed by Newton, Darwin did “commit a murder” ” the murder of the great chain of being. ID was dead when it was dragged on-stage. The sooner it is dragged back off, the better.
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