Do you think nature values an organism over another? — Bradskii

seems to me the manifest purpose of this site. Says a famously "God-intoxicated" thinker:
Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
~Spinoza — 180 Proof

I do not think it necessary for salvation to know Christ according to the flesh: but with regard to the Eternal Son of God, that is the Eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things and especially in the human mind, and above all in Christ Jesus, the case is far otherwise. For without this no one can come to a state of blessedness, inasmuch as it alone teaches, what is true or false, good or evil. — Letter 21 (73) to Henry Oldenburg, November (1675)

Darwin and Wallace both used the term "survival of the fittest" to describe natural selection. — T Clark

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced - strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory - will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed....

As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d'être of the world--with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the ultimate appearance of man--was the development of the human spirit in association with the human body. — Darwinism Applied to Man, Alfred Russel Wallace

If I add heat to the water, it is heated and the water molecule increase in kinetic energy. Since it is confined by air pressure, it's pressure increases (PV=NRT) and it's entropy decreases. — T Clark

Entropy increases as temperature increases. An increase in temperature means that the particles of the substance have greater kinetic energy. The faster-moving particles have more disorder than particles that are moving slowly at a lower temperature.

'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution'. Theodosius Dobzhansky. — Bradskii

Some writers restrict the word "evolution" to biological evolution only. This seems to me gratuitous. The universe has had a historical development; so had life, and so had mankind. This historical development did advance to life from absence of life, and did ascend to man from non-human ancestors. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

When you add energy to a system, you decrease it's entropy — T Clark

So at the risk of being on topic, is there a coherent, sound argument that can be made that is sympathetic to the intuition so poorly expressed in the OP? A way to rescue teleology? — Banno

What more do we need? — Tom Storm

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then...you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. — Michael Ruse, Is Evolution a Secular Religion?

However, for philosophical purposes, you have a valid point. Information, as used by those physical scientists, is not a "metaphysical primitive"*3 or even a physical object. Instead, it's the creative process of enforming : giving form to the formless; meaning to the meaningless. — Gnomon

Did the Greek understanding of reason generally identify this faculty as human or divine in origin? — Tom Storm

We generally build our ideas and reasoning upon their perceived results and this in itself is an interpretative act. This same impulse might include human sacrifice to keep the crops healthy, or COVID vaccinations to keep us well. — Tom Storm

Would you consider this a useful refinement of Plato's idea of instantiation? Does Aristotle still propose a realm of forms? — Tom Storm

Notice that they're all artefacts.
— Wayfarer
DNA is not an "artefact" — 180 Proof

I thought at Gnomon was using information as a kid of secular analogue for essence. — Tom Storm

A stone sculpture is informational. It's not merely a stone. DNA self-replicates because it is informational. It's not just organic compounds. An origami unicorn is informational. It's not simply paper. Etc. — 180 Proof

DNA is the medium (paper), the message (information is in the sequence of nucleotides) — Agent Smith

Are you attempting to relate the traditional meanings to form/substance in Kant? Connect them somehow? See how an investigation of the one would get you to the other? — Mww

.'...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual "I".'

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism

Consequently, in its physical forms (e.g. energy/matter) Information must obey physical laws, but in its metaphysical forms (e.g. mind/ideas) information must obey logical laws. — Gnomon

One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... Unless Reason is an absolute – all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. — Wikipedia, The Argument from Reason

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

Don't get the last bit. It would seem that if you measured something's location, it is the location possibility which gets reduced to some much smaller deviation, and the others (momentum say) which are still just probabilities of what will be measured. — noAxioms

Q: Does that mean that, as Arthur Eddington put it, the stuff of the world is mind stuff?

QBism would say, it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all.

So I guess I need to ask what you mean by an act of observation being considered 'causal'. — noAxioms

I don't hold to the premise that there should be only one world, especially in the absence of evidence supporting that premise. — noAxioms

With some (original Copenhagen for instance), the wave function is epistemological, describing only what one knows about a system. You take a measurement and your knowledge of the system changes, but the system is not affected by your acquisition of this knowledge. — noAxioms

Ernst Mayr: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of non-living material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history ...’

The idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ implies that information is ontologically different from chemistry, but can we prove it? Perhaps the strongest argument in support of this claim has come from Hubert Yockey, one of the organizers of the first congress dedicated to the introduction of Shannon's information in biology. In a long series of articles and books, Yockey has underlined that heredity is transmitted by factors that are ‘segregated, linear and digital’ whereas the compounds of chemistry are ‘blended, three-dimensional and analogue’.

Yockey underlined that: ‘Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences’.

Yockey has tirelessly pointed out that no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life, and concluded from this that the origin of life cannot have been the result of chemical evolution. This is therefore, according to Yockey, what divides life from matter: information is ontologically different from chemistry because linear and digital sequences cannot be generated by the analogue reactions of chemistry.

At this point, one would expect to hear from Yockey how did linear and digital sequences appear on Earth, but he did not face that issue. He claimed instead that the origin of life is unknowable, in the same sense that there are propositions of logic that are undecidable. — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri

As I mentioned, religions can and do change their teachings, by reinterpreting or ignoring scripture but not by repudiating scriptural verses. — Art48

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion ¹.

I think there are important differences between Chalmer's approach and these two philosophers. — Paine

That's an example of baggage from outside the discussion. — Banno