Hi Sara,
Having had the advantage (and pleasure) of reading your preprint "The Algorithmic Origins of Life," that George Ellis kindly linked on his site, I would like to reproduce here part of my reaction, as it applies to your current essay:
"Take the statement, "To say that information is 'instructional' (or algorithmic) and 'coded' represents a crucial conceptual leap -- separating the biological from the non-biological realm -- implying that a gene is 'for' something."
Even though I strongly subscribe to the view -- as I believe both Ellis and Davies also do -- that the universe is suffused with meaning and consciousness, I just can't get my mind around what the statement above logically entails: that ' ... coded instructions are useless unless there is a system that can decode. interpret, and act on those instructions.'
In fact, we don't have a warrant to believe that the world is algorithmically compressible. If it isn't, there is no posssible non-arbitrary demarcation between organic and inorganic life. Self-replicating systems, demonstrably, are sustained on the concept of adaptation alone. In my local ecosystem, a mosquito is useless to me, while globally, my continued existence may depend on the mosquito larvae on which the fish feed and on which I in turn feed. I agree with the authors that analog systems are less adaptable than digital-switching memory processing, such as a CNS-endowed creature possesses; however, analog processes in complex systems allow robust network switching of useful resources for required task performance. So I have to disagree that ' ... in informational terms ... analog systems are not as versatile or as stable as digital systems and as such likely have very limited evolutionary capacity.' In fact, the evolutionary capacity of the complex system is measured in variety and redundance of resources. Nature trades efficiency for creativity, and those created products are manifestly analog systems which provide new input for creating more novel digital mechanical systems producing new analog creations.
I don't know how -- with this piece -- Davies escapes joining the side of biological determinism (The "gene machine" of Dawkins) which in *The Matter Myth* he and John Gribbin criticized: 'Many people have rejected scientific values because they regard materialsm as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automatons and leaves no room for free will or creativity.' Personally, I still regard myself as a materialist and reductionist, though like Gell-Mann, I find no conflict between a continuum of consciousness (quarks to jaguars) and free will. If one refrains from drawing boundaries between life and non-life, algorithmic subroutines that define life and imbue its creatures with free will are not discontinuous with the complex system by which such life is sustained, though which itself is not demonstrably algorithmically compressible.
I support the 'information narrative.' I think I'm more prone, though, to accept an approach that treats the narrative *itself* as an evolutionary continuum, such as Gregory Chaitin's newly published *Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical.*"
Having said that, though -- I appreciate the meticulous care that you have invested in identifying and demarcating non-trivial properties of biological life from the inorganic. I agree up to the point that coded instructions are useless without a decoder -- after all, just as genes contain a great number of "switched off" or undecoded potential functions, I find no reason to think that the rest of nature might not be so endowed -- i.e., assume infinite creativity, and infinite variety and redundancy must follow. This subverts biological determinism -- because we do not have to efficiently match codes to decoders -- without sacrificing the idea that life is emergent. Subsystems can just as well re-program themselves for adaptability. Life can just as well emerge from the quantum vacuum.
If all reality is information-theoretic as Wheeler proposed, and all life is problem solving as Karl Popper proposed, the reality of life is sustained evolution, dependent on an infinitely varied potential of both used and unused resources in any time interval.
Thanks for a great read and best wishes in the contest. I do hope you have a chance to visit my essay ("The Perfect First Question").
Tom