[anonymouskimmer]

Biology isn't software. I say this as a biologist.

Software like things can be done with it, but this is no different than treating a bunch of pipes, valves, and a water source as a computer. (Edit to add: Which would make our sewers the oldest hardware system. And I'm sure there are supercentenarians still pumping software through those systems.)

I imagine that many physicists feel about physics envy the same way I feel about imagining biology as software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy

Maybe someday we'll have a grand unified theory of everything imaginable and real. But even then distinctions should be made between levels of emergent phenomena. A habitable environment allows biology to exist. Biology allows intelligent beings to exist. Intelligent beings create tools that allow them to make even more tools that do predictable, or otherwise defined, sequences based on various inputs. Hardware is two levels above biology, and software is a level above that.

[psychoslave]

>Hardware is two levels above biology, and software is a level above that.

From a conceptual point of view that can be grabbed by some human mind, this all make perfect sense.

However, these hierarchies tell more about our way to handle sensedata than it reveals of the actual structure of the universe, if this does match anything relevant past our thoughts.

[anonymouskimmer]

I'm not normally a hierarchical or categorical thinker, though I do like thinking of things as built up from other things.

It's important to recognize what thinking modality is best fit for a particular idea. You could instead describe this as a line of entropy. A pre-requisite chain. A web of interconnections. Whatever. And certainly it's grossly simplistic to describe it the way I did as being "two levels above", when these levels are based only on ad hoc categorical conveniences.

I agree with you. My describing it this way was a matter of convenience to describe an underlying truth of required precursors. When we have Von Neumann machines capable of evolving their code the link between software and the DNA/RNA system will be a better analogy than it is now. But an analogy is not an equivalence.