Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is John west, associate director of the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. I'm very pleased today to be talking with mathematician and philosopher William Demski, one of the founding fathers of the modern intelligent design movement. He's a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. And, in fact, he's one of our original senior fellows. I have to say I'm a bit envious of him because I only have one doctorate. Bill has not one, but two phds. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and another PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He's done postdoctoral work in math at MIT and physics at the University of Chicago and in computer science at Princeton. He has a master's degree in statistics and another one in theology. He's held National Science foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. And he's the author or editor of a myriad of influential and path breaking books, starting with design inference with Cambridge University Press, and including no free lunch. The design revolution, debating design from Darwin to DNA, intelligent design, the bridge between science and theology, and the nature of nature. We're talking today because he has just come out with a new mind stretching book titled being as the Metaphysics of Information.
Bill, welcome to id of the future, and let's talk about your new book. First of all, what is the message or the theme of this new book?
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Good to be with you, John. Yeah, the book is subtitled Metaphysics of Information. And so what I'm trying to do is make sense of the world. If matter is not the most fundamental thing, but information is, so what would the world look like if at its heart, information is the basic stuff of reality? A lot of people have been talking about this over the years. Paul Davies, John Wheeler. But trying to make this a proposal where it really holds up, where the devil is in the details and filling in those details. That's what I try to do in this book.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Great. How does this book build on some of your other books?
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Well, in my other books, I'm trying to lay out a scientific program for intelligent design, which I understand is the. The study of patterns in nature best explained as the product of intelligence. So I'm looking at various patterns in nature and seeing, do they provide evidence for an intelligence or purposive cause in nature? But there's a more fundamental question which is, well, what does nature have to be like to even allow an intelligence to interact and operate in it? From the vantage of materialism, if at base, nature is just matter in motion, there is really no intrinsic purpose or teleology built into nature? Teleology. Intelligence is something that comes as a byproduct of a material process. So it's not built in in a fundamental way. And so what I'm trying to say is, well, what does nature have to be like for intelligence to have free play? And an informational world is one where I argue intelligence can, in fact, have free play. So, in a sense, it's providing a metaphysical framework or a worldview that will accommodate intelligent design. That said, it doesn't require that intelligent design succeed as a scientific program. It's broader than that. So, as it were, the fate of this book doesn't hinge on the fate of intelligent design. But insofar as I'm successful in this book being as communion, I think it lends credence to intelligent design.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Okay.
In the book, you make some provocative statements. One of them that I think may attract some attention is that matter is a myth. So I wondered if you want to explain a little bit about that and about what you mean by saying that matter is a myth.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Right. Well, when you look at matter, I mean, I think matter always comes to you not as just a sort of generic schmoo, but it's always particular, concrete manifestations of matter. You know, it can be a human person, it can be a blackboard, a tree, or whatever. But matter, material objects, interact with us in characteristic ways. What identifies them is a pattern, or if we want to call it that, information. So, matter always reveals itself through information. And, in fact, at this time in the last year or two, the big hubbub in physics was the finding of the Higgs boson at CERN. So, with this particle accelerator, how did these physicists know that they had found the Higgs boson? It wasn't that just the Higgs boson showed up at their door and said, hi, I'm here. The Higgs boson is real. What they did was they smashed some matter. They got certain material particles up to certain levels of energy, and then they saw that there was a characteristic pattern predicted on the standard model of what should be there if the Higgs boson was real. So what you're seeing is not a particle, as it were, presenting itself to you, but rather a scatter plot, a diagram, a signature of this particle. And so what I argue is that really everything that we call matter reveals itself through patterns, through information. And if that's the case, why do we, in a sense, if we're saying there's something below that, there's still something material that's not informational.
It seems to me that that's a useless addendum in a sense. It's a violation of Occam's razor. All we ever find in particle physics is patterns of interaction information. We don't get to some sort of rock bottom brute material substrate where we can say, okay, this is brute matter without information. It always presents itself to us with information, so there's no need for matter. So that's why I say it's a myth. It's enough to deal with the information, and that's all we really have empirical evidence for.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: So you really seem to be saying, if I. If I'm not misunderstanding you, that you're turning on its head. The whole 19th century and even before that conceit, that you go down and deconstruct everything, you get blind matter and motion, and you're turning that on its head. And you saying that, in fact, matter itself depends on information, right?
[00:06:26] Speaker B: That matter is always inherently informational.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: So it's an information first view, not a matter first view. Then that sort of raises the question, what is information? And I know there's huge debates about that. You talk about it in your book, in several chapters. See if you can condense it down just to tease out for people who want to read the book of what they can expect. What is information?
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Let me speak to that. What is information? But I do want to pick up on something that you just said, that you never get down to a brute ground level of matter. And it's interesting, when materialism takes its start. It takes its start before the rise of modern science. It goes back to the ancient greeks, democritus, leucippus, epicurus. And it's an atomistic conception. Atomos, you can't divide it. That you get to a level of particle where it's indivisible. And that's just it. Now, if matter could take that form, if there was evidence for it, then I think you would get down to a brute level of matter. But that's what never seems to happen. Whenever you try to get to rock bottom levels of matter, you find that there's a proliferation of new types of material entities, new types of interactions, new information that reveals itself. So that's why it seems to me that there's reason to think that information is more basic. Now, what is information?
There are lots of definitions out there about information, but the one that I go with, which I regard as also the most general, and I think every form of information that's out there, especially when you try to deal with it scientifically. Information theory conforms to this definition. Information is principally about what I would call contingency. Contingency is the occurrence of something which could happen but didn't have to happen. Okay? So I flip a coin, comes up heads, but it could have come up tails. Okay? In life, there are lots of things where there are lots of possibilities. One gets realized, or a whole range of other possibilities don't get realized. So you think, for instance, an example I give in the book is somebody tells you it's raining outside by telling you it's raining outside, it's ruling out that it's not raining outside. If I tell you it's raining outside or it's not raining outside, I haven't really conveyed anything to you because that's a tautology. I haven't ruled anything out. So information is always about realizing or actualizing one thing to the exclusion of others, ruling out other things. And when that happens, then you have information. I like to say that information is more a verb than a noun. It's that information happens when something gets ruled out and when something then gets realized. So that's the basic idea with information. Now, how does that apply to our ordinary intuitions about information? Well, here I am speaking to you. There are lots of different sound combinations that could be coming out of my vocal cords, but it's English appropriate to this conversation. So it's a very narrow, constrained communication among all the possible communications that could be coming out of my mouth, that's information.
If the only thing that could come out of my mouth is the repetition of some vowel or consonant, I could convey no information to you because I'd be determined that's the only thing that could come out. There have to be a range of possibilities, and then things have to be narrowed down. Now, what I've just described to you is our communication right now. But you think of bit strings that are sent over, communication channels, Internet or whatever. That's also information.
If a bit string is sent out, that means others are ruled out. So you have a website. Discovery Institute has a website. There's a program. There's data there. It's this, not that. So there's information there.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Speaking of websites, your book has a website, beingascommunion.com. And we'd encourage people to actually go to that, and we're going to continue this conversation in a future episode. But I hope that this has been enough to at least pique your interest to go out and purchase being as communion, this new book by Bill Demski that deals with the impact of information theory and our understanding of information and how that can really transform our view of the world and transform our view of matter. Certainly. And so, Bill, thank you for being with us on this episode of ID the future. My pleasure. And we will be continuing this conversation in a future episode again, beingascommunion.com dot go there and get this great new book for ID the future. This is John west. Thanks for listening.
[00:10:58] Speaker C: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the Future is Copyright Discovery Institute 2014. For more information, visit www.intelligentdesign.org or www.idthefuture.com.
