Dear Sir,
Your paper was quite thought provoking. You have rightly described Shannon's "relative information" as "correlation" or as you say "downright crude physical correlation". In a previous contest here in our paper "INFORMATION HIDES IN THE GLARE OF REALITY", we had written "Information Theory is based on the concept of writing instructions that will make the computer follow and run a program based on those instructions or matching perceptions of the transmitter with the receiver. Perception is the processing of the result of measurements of different but related fields of something with some stored data to convey a combined form 'it is like that', where 'it' refers to an object (constituted of bits) and 'that' refers to a concept signified by the object (self-contained representation)". Your examples and definition at the end conform to this view. But we fail to understand why you distinguish it from "meaningful information"?
All information is meaningful to the receiver. Otherwise it will be data only. Firstly, Darwin dealt with biological evolution. Part of biology can be related to physics, but "intentionality" (we presume it is the same as freewill) is not a part of it. It can be dealt with cognitive sciences, and partially in psychology and linguistics. Secondly, the same information can have multiple meanings for multiple systems or persons. To that extent, it is relative. But each such information is correlated to something in the system and person, to make it meaningful. The "intentionality" is an outcome of that information - making it meaningful.
Darwinian evolution is still a postulate and there are many contra views to contest his concept of selection. You have rightly pointed out that "A dead organism decays rapidly to thermal equilibrium, while an organism which is alive does not". But this does not flow from Darwinian evolution. Also we fail to understand how "we can legitimately reverse the causal relation between the existence of the mechanism and its function"? Can a chicken be converted back to an egg? It is true that the mechanism exhibits a purpose. But is mechanism independent of the system, within which it functions? Why is the digestive system different in different species? Are our digestive system made for us or are we what we are because of our digestive system? Certainly our digestive system regulates our food habit. But we are not the product of our food habit.
The Darwinian concept of "life on Earth may be the result of random happening of structures, all of which perish except those that happen to survive, and these are the living organisms" cannot explain why the uni/multi cellular organisms are still the same as they were at the beginning millions of years ego? Why the monkeys are still there? The role of variability and selection in the evolution of structures are different. While there is no dispute over variability to explain divergences, the role of selection is questionable.
It is true that "surviving mechanisms survive by using correlations" and "mechanisms that lead to survival and reproduction are adapted by evolution to a certain environment". In fact only in that way they become "meaningful", as your example with bacteria shows. But here we land into a sort of chicken and egg problem. We find similar species with slight variations in different geo-climatic locations. Did the geo-climatic conditions varied the species or the species varied the geo-climate? Obviously the answer is geo-climatic conditions varied the species. A snake anywhere cannot move in a straight line and the only way to escape from a rampaging elephant is to run zig-zag. Here physics of biological structures gets precedence over earthly terrain. But this cannot explain the differences between a tropic goat and a mountain goat. The meaningfulness comes from geo-climatic adaptation.
There is nothing as "accidental correlations that are ubiquitous in nature" and there is nothing that "have no effect on living beings, no role in semantic, no use, and correlations that contribute to survival". Nature is highly ordered and economical. We fail to understand its elegance. True, "today's newspaper is not likely to directly enhance mine or my gene's survival probability", but newspaper is not a creation of Nature. And we avoid many problems due to the information we get from today's newspaper.
Truth and meaningful are related concepts. If something motivates us in a certain way or induces a reaction that remains invariant in all similar perceptions/encounters, the commonality arising from such perception is truth. In such cases, our reaction is meaningful.
Regards,
basudeba