François CholletVerified account

Being someone who went from electronic design automation algorithms to computational biology, I've often thought of DNA exactly as the file system, RNA as the sequential component (registers, maybe cache) and the proteins as the combinational logic.

Yup, in-place computation using a locally optimal greedy algorithm. Very small instruction set. Barely any memory, just some registers really. But damn it works (at the expense of individual compute nodes)

The electric impulse from the CPU's quartz/clock generator is basically a heartbeat

Searle's refutation of "mind as computer" (in the sense of consciousness) might be worth a read when making "x is a computer" analogies.

I would love to hear what a molecular biologist thinks about this

The analogy fails short due to #complicated vs. #complex: While fitting on the microscopic scale there‘s simply no meaningful comparison on tissue, organ, macroscopic and in between scales.

If DNA is a code base, does that make COVID a library?

Very relevant paper: https://twitter.com/theHessam/status/1296650944302776321 …https://twitter.com/theHessam/status/1296650944302776321 …

@rudytheelder talks about it in his books. I have been drilling this idea since I read him and n my pov except for consciousness it seems to consistent with most of life we see.