Living organisms represent a level of technological achievement that we're still far from rivaling.pic.twitter.com/OGoH0xzMAS
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DNA is fairly similar to a programming language, except that it programs matter, not bits, and its interpreter is far more complicated than any software interpreter we've ever built.
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The complexity of the existing corpus of programs written in this language over the past 3 billion years defies the imagination
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What's the biggest impediment to reverse engineering what's going on?
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And unlike a server that you can re-image and start from a known state, complex epigenetics and regulatory feedback mechanisms mean that there is a causal trail apart from DNA, going back indeterminate number of generations of cells, that impact the future states.
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The code in which the Simulation was written?
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Analogy with a programming language breaks down pretty quickly. DNA is not procedural, only somewhat modular, and both encodes and participates in its mechanisms of interpretation. And it's highly context-dependent - same "code" reads many ways depending on cell state.
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DNA relies on emergence to create its artifacts, rather than the explicit commands of a prog lang (is that correct?). I might venture that it is somewhat similar to a ML framework, with the DNA creating it's own examples that get tested against the 'ground truth' environment??
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Is life an attempt to answer a question? I find it comforting to think that all life may be part of a single quest for knowledge.
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I agree generally, but your phrasing makes it seem like programming digital computers is some kind of transcendental, non-material process. I think saying that "DNA programs an organism's morphology" is more accurate.
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