[sooheon]

Biology is the ultimate legacy software running on one of the oldest platforms ever developed, the organic compounds. It is literally a giant genetic algorithm to write instructions (DNA) for manufacturing molecular machines (proteins) that interact with each other in an extremely complex graph of relations (protein pathways, i.e. control flow).

[criddell]

That feels more to me like hardware and software in the sense of a Jacquard loom. I suppose it fits though.

I was thinking more about what's going on in the brain. We have all the regions mapped to specific functions with higher and lower level parts. The low level parts seem to be like hard-wired stimulus-response mechanisms. Are the higher level systems the same at a meta level or is there a type of program running on the hardware of the brain?

[sooheon]

The stimulus response mechanisms are far from hard wired. The brain is plastic at all levels.

[criddell]

A baby doesn't need to be taught how to breath or cry. That seems pretty hard wired.

Anyway, that wasn't really what I was asking about. Is there any separation between the biological hardware of the brain and the instructions of software?

[SomeoneFromCA]

This a very simplistic view, based on assumption that the world is discrete. The whole idea of software relies on the concept of digital computer, a discrete machine. The world might indeed be analogous and real numbers might actually exist.

[sharpneli]

If world did run on real numbers that we could harness for computation I would be more than happy, because using those we would be able to perform hypercomputation. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_computation

However this is forbidden by Bekensteins bound, so unless modern physics is horribly broken it’s ruled out at least in any sense visible to us even in principle.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Not a quantum physicists, but IMO Bekenstein bound is not applicable here, because quantum laws are non-deterministic, therefore you can describe the structure of a system, but you cannot describe how it will evolve. Quantum randomness might be in the very essence of how the brain and mind works.

[catalogia]

Quantum randomness being necessary hardly seems like it would have profound practical implications since augmenting a digital computer with a geiger counter would be trivial.

[criddell]

It's much easier than that. Hardware random number generators are often based on something like a reverse-biased diode. Electrons migrate across and it's entirely random when it happens. Amplify and count them and you get a great source of entropy.

[PeterisP]

DNA and proteins are obviously discrete, so even if the hardware relies on some fundamental analogous behavior, the 'software' and each hardware component can still be analyzed as discrete behavior.

However, for anything operating at human temperatures we can reasonably assume that any effective behavior can be simulated by discrete operations, as any nuances of fundamental analogousness would be drowned by thermal noise and the amount of precision that any behavior can require is rather low, much lower than e.g. any standard floating point number in a discrete CPU.

[sooheon]

I think the assumption that software may only be digital is the limited one.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Otherwise it becomes a meaningless, all-encompassing term.

[dependenttypes]

I am sure that I saw this exact message on HN before. Did you copy it from someone else or did you repost your own post?

[sooheon]

I wrote it out ad hoc, I don’t doubt that something similar has been written before though.