🚀 go-pugleaf

Nick Maclaren <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> In article <j9gtv9.tg.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
> Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>>
>>Don't know about "concrete work", but a serious theoretical issue is
>>this: genes are not DNA sequences, but are encoded in such sequences.
>>The decoding mechanism is the cellular machinery that interacts with
>>the DNA.  Anyone who doubts that needs to read Darwin's Dangerous Idea
>>by Dan Dennett.  And it's the gene, actually an abstraction, that carries
>>the information.

> The same is true of computer programs!  Remember the old amusement
> of writing a program that would be valid in N languages and would
> print the name of the language it was compiled as when run?

I don't actually "remember" that, but I take the point.

> Quite a few mavericks (yes, I admit to being one) have been saying
> for some time that the engineering models of computer programming
> match what is actually going on less well than the biological ones
> of breeding and so on.  That is the converse of the question that
> was being asked, but has its relevance.

Indeed.

> One of the consequences is that, as with English text, what you
> regard as the information content depends very much on at what
> level you are analysing it.  This is very true of DNA, but we do
> not yet know enough about how it works to know what levels of
> analysis are meaningful.

> So I don't think that there is a simple answer, and all answers
> will be pretty fair hand waving for a long time yet - probably
> half a century or so, though progress may speed up.

It's a deep issue.  There was a discussion of it in one of the philosophy
newsgroups a few months ago, a few of the contributions to which were
quite interesting.

-- 
"The concept of information is the key that decodes mind, matter,
meaning, consciousness..."
Robin Faichney -- inside information -- http://www.ii01.org/