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Author Topic:   NvC-3: What is life made of?
Richard L. Wang
Member (Idle past 1598 days)
Posts: 104
From: Ottawa, ON, Canada
Joined: 04-27-2020


Message 1 of 2 (876028)
05-11-2020 6:47 PM


In Naturalism’s opinion, life consists only of matter.
In fact, life consists of matter and information. Every cell has genetic information. In addition, we humans also have multiple forms of information: language, memory, knowledge, etc. Life consists of matter & information is a testable and observable fact.
From NvC-1-32, information here represents all Non-physical or quasi-physical substance, such as information, ideas, values, logic, mathematics, intellect, and other emergent phenomena. How do biological processes describe ideas, values, logic? We know very little. Therefore, from now on, in our discussion, I will limit information to the information consisting of a sequence of symbols, and it is enough to reach conclusions. Genetic information in biological cells and text, image, sound and other information in cellphones are such information.

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by Admin, posted 05-12-2020 8:40 AM Richard L. Wang has not replied

  
Admin
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Message 2 of 2 (876042)
05-12-2020 8:40 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Richard L. Wang
05-11-2020 6:47 PM


Richard L. Wang writes:
In Naturalism’s opinion, life consists only of matter.
A number of people have already disagreed with this. Opening a new thread with this point of disagreement as an axiom could drag your thread off-topic right from the outset. Better to use a definition of naturalism that people agree with.
If I could mention my own way of defining naturalism (lowercase n, by the way), it's that the universe consists of what we can observe, either directly or indirectly. In the case of life we observe matter and energy (not just matter) following known physical laws. Is a definition somewhat along those lines amenable to you? Or you could draw upon the Wikipedia definition of naturalism, which covers both methodological and metaphysical naturalism.
From NvC-1-32, information here represents all Non-physical or quasi-physical substance, such as information, ideas, values, logic, mathematics, intellect, and other emergent phenomena. How do biological processes describe ideas, values, logic? We know very little. Therefore, from now on, in our discussion, I will limit information to the information consisting of a sequence of symbols, and it is enough to reach conclusions. Genetic information in biological cells and text, image, sound and other information in cellphones are such information.
You seem to be leaning toward an information theoretic view of information, which I'm glad to see since I was going to suggest that anyway.
Most all words already have definitions. We can't assign our own personal definitions to them. We wouldn't let an atheist start a thread that defined evangelicalism as the irrational belief in a being that doesn't exist and based upon a book of fiction, because that's a biased distortion of the word's meaning. In the same way, we can't allow people to make up or distort the definitions for words that already have clear definitions, like naturalism and information.
Edited by Admin, : Typo.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Richard L. Wang, posted 05-11-2020 6:47 PM Richard L. Wang has not replied

  
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