>
>Another query is whether ID is falsifiable. Sure it is: "Experience will show
>that only intelligent agency gives rise to functional information. All that is
>necessary to falsify the hypothesis of intelligent design is to show confirmed
>instances of purely physcial or chemical antecedents producing such
>information."
>
Unfortunately, our library doesn't have oPaP so I put in a request
with interlibrary loan to get a copy. It'll probably be about a
week before I get it, in the mean time could you tell me precisely
what is meant by "functional information"? I've run into a related
concept in the complexity literature, i.e. "functional complexity".
The problem as I see it is that if "information" takes on the precise
meaning it has in information theory then "functional" is _ad-hoc_. In
information theory one can measure the "information content" but one
cannot address functionality.
I think what is really needed is an objective measure of
complexity that isn't associated with such things as functionality,
value, meaning, purpose etc. The term I like is organized complexity.
This certainly carries with it an implication of functionality and
purpose. The question is whether it can be defined objectively
in terms of structure only. I read a paper by Chaitin (one of the
founders of algorithmic information theory) which proposes a number
of tentative objective definitions of organized complexity in terms
of the so-called algorithmic or Kolmogorov complexity. It will be
interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this.