Article Is life a form of computation?

[C C]

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-li...mputation/

EXCERPTS: Nonetheless, Turing and von Neumann grasped something fundamental: Computation doesn’t require a central processor, logic gates, binary arithmetic, or sequential programs. There are infinite ways to compute, and, crucially, they are all equivalent. This insight is one of the greatest accomplishments of theoretical computer science.

This “platform independence” or “multiple realizability” means that any computer can emulate any other one. If the computers are of different designs, though, the emulation may be glacially slow. For that reason, von Neumann’s self-reproducing cellular automaton has never been physically built — though that would be fun to see!

[...] In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier. It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational.

Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone. [...]

Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. [...] The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next step becomes likely to happen.

This differs greatly from the operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.

Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

If Wilfred Sellars is right, that the idea of the Given is in fact a myth, then we only ever arrive on the scene of being-in-the-world with everything "in place" and figured out. With the movie already "in progress". The substrate then not matter or mind but a computational level deep within our experience, outputting a reality already conceptually laid out for us and pre-configured to make sense and be navigable by our always awakening minds. Life itself, not to mention its higher tiers of linguistic sense-making and reasoning and our immediate phenomenal awareness, is perhaps the primal superintelligence at the root of reality itself. Life as the metaphysical essence beneath this vivid episodic game of physical and thinkable existence. The flow of time/experience the essence of the processing energy of Life itself. A reevaluation of Robert Lanza's biocentrism, foreshadowed by none other than Emerson himself:

“As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named, came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he would say, “are our perceptions.”― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Time’s existence cannot be found between the tick and the tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

Ultimately then the living computational substrate is what generates time and space, hearkening back to Kant's notions of space and time as modes of representation in the dynamical and interrelating construct of our experience.

“[S]pace and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe