3 ms·
> Proto-life would have to assemble copies of itself from molecules available in the environment. Quines also live in an environment: the programming language
by justinpombrio 9y ago
> Proto-life would have to assemble copies of itself from molecules available in the environment.
Quines also live in an environment: the programming language they're written in. It's a very different _kind_ of environment; for instance the physical world has preservation of mass while it's really easy to copy bits. But both quines and proto-life can only replicate in the right environment, and they do so via an interaction between the information contained in themselves and the environment in which they are embedded. They seem quite analogous to me.
- mjburgess 9y agoA rock is analogues to a car from the point of view of a child. That's the problem with analogies: they are observer-dependent. A quine shares no causal property with DNA.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoOh, but it does, if you treat "assembling a copy of yourself from atoms in the environment" as equivalent to the implementation details of printing to standard output.
- mjburgess 9y ago> causal property "assembling a copy of yourself" is a description you are imposing on a series of events. The events in the case of a digital computer are certain oscillations to the electric field. That shares nothing with the chemical assembly of biological material