BradCube
Active Member
Yes and no. I'm still kind of lost. Is there anywhere you can direct me for further reading on the topic? At the moment, I feel like I'm just wasting your time asking you to re-iterate again and again.KFunk said:But reiterating the catch once again, the meaning/information is not intrinsic to the DNA. The structure of DNA on which we hang our meaning is, of course, intrinsic but the meaning we lay upon this is not. Humans are exceptionally skilled at finding isomorphisms in their environment, and this is exactly what we find in the case of DNA: a rough structural mapping of DNA onto amino-acids/proteins. There is no abstract/logical feature of the DNA molecule itself which tells us about amino acids and proteins, it is simply that we have learnt that the latter are generated by the former in the right kind of environment and have learnt to 'interpret' DNA in terms of its functional biological products and to translate between the two 'languages'.
We have to be careful, however, not to take the 'language'/'code'/'blueprint' metaphor too far because, at the end of the day, it is we who imbued the molecule with this added meaning (even if it is molecular biological processes that account for why DNA has the structural and chemical features that it does). It is important to note that not all forms of information have to be created by someone intelligent. Take, for example, electromagnetic radiation that we interpret as bearing information about distant galaxies or other stellar objects. There is no space demon out there sending us these coded messages (that is, unless the astrophysicists are keeping me in the dark on this issue). Rather, we have learnt to relate patterns in electromagnetic radiation with certain facts about stellar objects. In this case, as with DNA, it is our human capacity to identify isomorphisms and thus to establish meaningful relationships between different concepts that creates information (that is, of the meaningful sort... the structural aspects will of course remain independent of us).
Does this help you make sense of what I'm trying to say?
The message I think I'm getting from is is that since we are the meaning ascribers, we cannot hold that what we recognize as information actually is meaningful at all (since by definition, that meaning comes from us). On one hand I can understand this, but on the other I am left at odds since if I doubt my own meaning has any value, then I can essentially doubt everything I know or have come to learn. Does this follow?
Also, "electromagnetic radiation that we interpret as bearing information" is a different form of information than that of language which I am proposing.
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