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My personal definition of life: self-replication with unlimited heredity. self-replication: something can make a copy of itself. unlimited heredity: when "inf
by ozy 9y ago
My personal definition of life: self-replication with unlimited heredity.
self-replication: something can make a copy of itself.
unlimited heredity: when "information" is added, it is copied along, even if it does not contribute directly to the replication process itself.
Implied in the definition is variation. And in the bigger view, that all replicators are under pressure to do so well, or be outcompeted on resource usage etc., and disappear.
While a virus depends on a rich and active environment to work, they clearly fall into that definition.
- tehwalrus 9y agoThis definition includes computer viruses. Did you mean to?
- ozy 9y agoSortof. But with a few caveats. 1) most computer viruses don't randomly vary, and thus don't have a learning effect, miss unlimited heredity. 2) they are not physical life, so the relevance is not the same as their chemical counterparts.
- zaarn 9y agoI wonder what would happen if we taught a computer virus to modify itself without restriction. Of course, most of those viruses would probably just be rendered inert, printing a lot of segfaults into the kernel console.