Any system capable of homeostasis--maintaining its own existence in the face of a range of environmental conditions--is using models. The models can be hard-cod

Any system capable of homeostasis--maintaining its own existence in the face of a range of environmental conditions--is using models. The models can be hard-coded in genetic material (which was "computed" over aeons of selection pressure) or dynamically learned and encoded in the span of the organism's life. Still models. It's like bootstrapping certain operating systems from source--some of the dependencies exist only in machine code; the original source code has been lost to the sands of time. A human being is modeled by 23 chromosomes' worth of DNA, and when that model is planted in a properly-functioning adult female reproductive system it turns itself into a new human being. I don't see why the world of CPUs and nonvolatile memory is any less capable of being a substrate for intelligent, self-replicating entities as the world of particles and atoms.