NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology?

The object and the information humans have created about the object are separate and independent.The daffodil is the national flower of Wales and is worn on St David's day which is the 1st March. How did the daffodil have that information about itself?Different people have different names for the same plants. The word 'cilantro' would convey no information to most UK people but the word 'coriander' would. Yet they describe the same plant.I know that the terms cilantro and coriander refer to the same plant. This gives me more information than those that don't, yet the plant is the same. The man that counts the onions in the field has more information than the man that just sees the onions. Counting the onions creates the information.All this should tell you that the information is not the same as the object. Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

What you're saying is that humans manufacture information. They don't "discover" it.

As you start off that sentence I see you getting it right. We gather information. It is there to be gathered. Our minds perceive and then process the information gathered.

The name we assign to a plant or anything else is simply putting a name to the information we receive.

I'm saying that humans interpret the information they discover.

You keep mentioning humans. Without humans there is no information.

Correct, we create the name of the plant and that becomes information about that plant. Of course without the plant I can't create information about it but the plant is not the information, it's the object of the information.A host of golden daffodils was the creation of a human mind that was wandering as lonely as a cloud, not the creation of the object that Wordworth's mind came upon.

I was quoting your use of humans. Are you saying that prior to human existence nothing existed?

It is object of the information that we perceive. That's not the same thing though as something physical like a daffodil. Certainly we as sentient beings can create new information.

Of course not. I'm saying that prior to human existence no information existed. Just like no limericks existed.It's the same argument as saying that DNA contains no mystical code. All it is is an arrangement of atoms that behaves in certain ways depending on the arrangement. "Information" is just the spin that humans put on it.

It is where to be gathered? In what form is this information before it is gathered?

Yup. Exactly. Our perception creates the information about the daffodil. We perceive daffodils as a yellow flower on a green stem. That's the daffodil's basic information.Now suppose that the observer is colour blind and sees daffodils as uniform grey. What has happened to the daffodil's information, has it changed? Or has the observer created different information about the daffodil?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Why humans only? Are you saying that for other non-human minds there is nothing akin to information? * - unnecessary word"depending on the arrangement" is another way of saying "information"."information" happens to be the word humans speaking English refer to it, but if humans were not around to think it, the effect that "information" has would still have a specific effect. The parts/matter is still there, but the (purposeful) arrangement of those parts has an effect independent of the properties of the matter itself. That is why information is said to be independent from the matter it is transmitted on.

My confuzzled attempt:Let's take colour blindness as an example.We'll start with basic grass (like on a normal lawn in the suburbs.)
-The colour of the grass is what it is (whatever that is...)
-Most will see this as green
-Some with colour blindness might say it's blue
-both use their eyes as created to their human body by nature
-what if the "most people seeing it as green" is also incorrect?
-what part of this is the "information"?My points:
-it doesn't matter if most see it as green
-it doesn't matter if some see it as blue
-it doesn't matter what we call information
-the grass still is whatever colour it is... regardless of whether we recognize it correctly (either as a whole or in parts.)If the grass's "colour" can be converted to an objective measurement:
Say "530nm" (the measureable wavelength of "green" light.)
Then... this can be observed and measured by all.
This is what the grass is, under the conditions of the measurement
Some might call 530nm green, others may call 530nm blue... but everyone agrees that the measurement is 530nm.If we take multiple measurements across vast amounts of time, and the grass is always 530nm... this lends confidence to the following assumptions:
The grass "was 530nm" before we measured it
The grass "will remain 530nm" after we measure it
The grass "was always" 530nm and we only identified it at some point and became aware of it-whatever part of that you want to call "information" doesn't really matter
-the grass is what it is
-our measurement of the grass is what it is
-our perception of the grass (individually or in groups) is what it is
-our perceptions and measurements always include certain assumptions and it's wise for us to not confuse such assumptions with the grass "being whatever it is."Not sure if this is applicable to math/information/reality-of-the-universe-as-studied-by-physicists (they're so quirky!)... but it should be applicable to GDR/Tangle's conversation, I think.

..but if the information wasn't there we couldn't perceive it. Our perception interprets the information. Once again, it is that the observer perceived or interpreted the information differently.