You’re underestimating the broadness of the concept a little here – information and informational complexity are not something limited to computers (and neither is computer science, at least not anymore); indeed, I can’t really think of any domain where they aren’t important in some way. Some people go as far as claiming that information is what the world is made of – i.e. that it’s the truly fundamental quantity. Whenever a thing is distinct from another, or can exist in distinct states, there’s information in that distinction, so, any properties a thing has are carriers of information. Information is, it would seem to me, even carried in the distinction between existence and non-existence; so I’m a bit hard pressed to see something existing without any relation to information theoretical concepts.
It’s an entirely reasonable position to say that this isn’t possible, and whenever you think you’re doing this, you’re merely deceiving yourself – after all, the existence of something ‘beyond’ the physical laws and the material is kind off the topic of this thread, so to claim that one must expand one’s thinking to contemplate this ‘beyond’ seems highly question-begging (just as one cannot meaningfully contemplate four-sided triangles – something beyond the physical might be as impossible and illogical, a possibility which at least can’t be discounted off-hand).
I’ve not been paying too close attention to all the back and forth in this thread, but why don’t you just present/point me towards some stronger versions of this argument – so far, all I’ve actually seen in support of it is that ‘either existence popped into being out of nothingness, or else there is something eternal’, which I believe poses a false dichotomy (I’ve addressed it here, in case you missed it).
Well, they don’t – the religious institutions they devote themselves to, the causes they take up, the social structures of belief, worship etc. are all very real, it’s just that they are constructed by people, that what’s claimed to exist behind those structures doesn’t necessarily.
Compare it with money – it exists as a social construct without the need of any central value-giver, but is instead determined by market variables, which are a proxy for social beliefs. Money ‘isn’t real’ in the sense that absent the belief in its value, it is meaningless, much like religious structures (for a concrete example, just look at all the ruined temples to gods nobody even remembers the names of anymore), yet there are certainly people (some of them even sane) who devote their lives to it.
Actually, ITR, can you just remind me what your answer was to Mangetout’s question immediately below your OP ont he very first page? I don’t feel you’ve answered it at all, and it cuts right though everything you’ve said for the past 6 pages.
And if you’re going to have a go at Dennett, you might as well get the full picture. I’ve already recommended Boyer’s Religion Explained, so you might as well try Dennett’s Consciousness Explained also. (Not very imaginative with their titles, these sciencey types!)
They will take a few weeks (or even months) to read carefully, but these two books are literally perhaps the best $15 I’ve every spent.