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It would surprise me to learn that, yes! Sure: biological systems contain meaningful information from many many many prior generations. Rocks don’t. Rocks are “
by ethanbond 4y ago
It would surprise me to learn that, yes! Sure: biological systems contain meaningful information from many many many prior generations. Rocks don’t. Rocks are “wiped clean” of information every time they dissolve. Same with weather systems.
Of course there’s some highly chaotic cause-and-effect that impacts the processes, but the defining trait of a biological/replicating system is that they are resistant to this chaos. Not only does a dog from 5 generations ago still look like a dog (which requires way more internal order than looking like a rock), but you can see actual specific traits in common between a dog of 5 generations ago and all of its descendants.
In one system (rocks and weather), the only source of consistency is the highly chaotic way materials actually get mixed together. In other systems (biological), that same thing is the only source of inconsistency.
- RC_ITR 4y ago> Rocks are “wiped clean” of information every time they dissolve. Same with weather systems. I won't go into why this isn't true (things are made of atoms and unless there's nuclear processes going on, those atoms stay the same). But anyway, software evolves like rocks (even by your definition), not biological organisms - it can be changed each generation without defined constraints! It can revert changes that were made in previous generations! It can just sit around indefinitely and not change while still surviving! (IDK how to make this point more clear).
- ethanbond 4y agoNobody claimed that all software evolves like a biological system? The claim is that they can be made to do that.