Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is John west for id the future. I'm associate director of the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, and I am delighted again to be here talking with mathematician and philosopher Bill Dempsky, one of our senior fellows, who has a new book out being as communion and metaphysics of information. And, Bill, thank you for joining us again.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Good to be with you.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: And in our last conversation, we talked about the overall point of your book and challenging sort of just basic materialism with all that we're learning about information theory and sort of an information first view of the world. In this conversation, I thought maybe we could just focus on maybe three, what I call tidbits. You have a great way of turning a phrase and having things that stick out in your mind, at least when I was reading the book that I very much enjoyed. And so I thought maybe I'd highlight just three of those and allow you to sort of talk about those. The first one is something that you call the Tang problem. What is the tang problem?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Well, tang is that famous breakfast drink that tastes like orange juice, but cannot be confused with orange juice. If you look at the ingredients, it says something like orange juice solids, along with other things. But what tang does is it basically takes fresh orange juice and then strips it down to a powder, and then you add water, and then it gets reconstituted. Now, what you get reconstituted there is not and cannot be confused with fresh orange juice. Now, the tang problem, as I articulated, I'm relating it to materialism. I see. What materialism tries to do is take the world as it is corresponding to fresh orange juice, then strip it down to material particles and the interactions of those particles according to various laws of physics and chemistry, and then try to reconstitute the world and tell us what the world is like in those terms. So we try to explain evolution in terms of some sort of mechanistic, darwinian process. We try to explain neurophysiology, or explain human person in terms of a neurophysiology that's purely materialistic, things like that. And the problem that I always find is that when you do this, you analyze it down to the material constituents and then try to reconstitute the reality is that you don't get back the full reality. You get back something that is a pale shadow of the original reality. And so that's what the Tang problem is. Tang is nowhere near as good as real orange juice, and material reality is nowhere near as good as real reality.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: I think that's a very visual, very graphic example thank you for that. In another part of the book, you have a discussion of free will, and you actually call it the power of no. And I think free will is one of those issues that people debate, and sometimes it's hard to understand. I just thought your discussion was particularly insightful, and I wonder if you could tell us what is the power of no? And also, how does actually connect with an information way of understanding things? How does that actually, how is that compatible with that?
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Well, I think what got me thinking of free will as the power of no was Jeffrey Schwartz in his book the Mind and the brain, and he described some experiments of Benjamin Libbay or Libet. I'm not sure how it's pronounced even. But anyway, those experiments, what Benjamin was looking at was a readiness potential that would fire when a human was doing an action, and then that action would happen. But the thing is, the conscious experience of actually willing for the action to happen would come after the readiness potential. And so that was interpreted as saying that basically our conscious will is just following our body, that consciousness and free will then become illusions, because really, the body is doing whatever it wants to do, the brain is doing whatever it does, and then it's just this illusion of that our free will is that we're actually willing something.
Turns out Benjamin Le Bay doesn't even interpret it that way because he holds to free will. And what he's found, though, is that even when that readiness potential fires, you can still negate, you can stop the action from happening. And so that got me thinking in terms of, well, what is thinking in terms of free will as negation? And that seemed to match up very nicely with what I was doing with information theory, because with information, the fundamental intuition there is ruling out possibilities to realize others. So for information to happen, you have to say no to something. And that it seemed that there was a great resonance there. And that also tied in, actually, with a lot of moral conceptions of if you're going to be free, if you're going to follow Jesus, you have to deny yourself, you have to say no to some things in order to say yes to other things. And so it seemed that this negation was crucial to our understanding of free will.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: That's really fascinating. And of course, there's a lot more on this in your book. In fact, you have an entire chapter about the power of no. But this is just a little tidbit to whet people's appetite. Another one of the really, I think, fascinating concept that you talked about and has implications also for people who happen to be theists of one sort or another. It was this idea of transposition. And so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what you mean by that and how information theory even helps us understand how that might happen.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Well, turns out that whenever you're talking about information, there's this medium and the message. And so information ends up being embodied. I mean, this is what happens now to say that information is embodied. I'm going to say that the embodiment is itself informational, because for me, as an informational realist, it's information all the way down. It's not messed all the way down. So we have this embodiment of information. The embodiment can either constrain, restrict, or allow that information to flourish. And so the embodiment can work for you or against you. And so transposition is the idea of we take this embodiment and transform it in a way that will then enhance the information. And so this has deep resonances with, for instance, the christian doctrine of resurrection. Here we are in this body, but our bodies constrain us, do not allow us to be who we are meant to be fully, but we see this also in other contexts. I give the example in the book of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
To have it properly embodied, it needs a full orchestra. Now, you can embody it also by having it on the piano. You could have Vladimir Ashkenazi playing it. That would be pretty good. But you can also embody it by having a third grader play it with one finger. Now, the thing is, that would be an impoverished form of the symphony, and yet it would still that there's an embodiment there. So transposition speaks to how that information is housed, how it's embodied, and how that information then is allowed to flourish or constricted and impoverished.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: And that the same information can be expressed in different mediums. Right?
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Well, that's more a notion of a multiple realizability. That you can get the same information in different forms, and then its transposition speaks to that multiple realizability. But then saying it can be realized in ways that enhance it, empower it in unsuspected ways.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Well, these are big issues, big ideas. And those are the sorts of things that are actually at the heart of Bill's new book being as communion. So I would like to encourage, if you are interested in issues like freedom of the will, like materialism versus view of reality that is open to things more than just matter, I would encourage you to get being as communion, or at least go to the website for the book beingascommunion.com dot. We will be continuing this conversation at a future time with even more from Bill's new book. But for right now, for id the future, this is John west. Thanks for listening.
[00:08:19] Speaker C: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. Id the Future is Copyright Discovery Institute 2014. For more information, visit www.intelligentdesign.org or www.idthefuture.com.
