Year: 2022

DECOUPLING. "It is this transition where one should expect to see a chemical system literally take-on ‘a life of its own’, characterized by informational dynamics which become decoupled from the dictates of local chemistry alone (while of course remaining fully consistent with those dictates)." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS AUTOMATA. "From the insights provided by molecular biology over the past 50 years, we can now identify that all known life functions in a manner akin to von Neumann automata, where DNA provides an (partial) algorithm, ribosomes act as the core of the UC and DNA polymerases (along with a suite of other molecular machinery) play the role of a supervisory unit." (UC = universal constructor of von Neumann). http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

TOP DOWN CONTROL. "DNA does not contain a blueprint for building the entire cell, but instead contains only small parts of a much larger biological algorithm, which may be roughly described as the distributed ‘top-down’ control of an organism." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"THE ALGORITHM for building an organism is therefore not only stored in a linear digital sequence (tape), but also in the current state of the entire system (e.g. epigenetic factors such as the level of gene expression, post-translational modifications of proteins, methylation patterns, chromatin architecture, nucleosome distribution, cellular phenotype and environmental context)." https://lnkd.in/einZ2Fh View in LinkedIn

GHOST IN THE MACHINE. "The algorithm itself is therefore highly delocalized, distributed inextricably throughout the very physical system whose dynamics it encodes." Elegant synthesis. http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DISPERSED. "Clearly, in an organism the algorithm cannot be decomposed and stored in simple sequential digital form to be read-out by an appropriate machine in the manner envisioned by Turing and von Neumann for their devices." https://lnkd.in/einZ2Fh View in LinkedIn

EVERY FIBER. "We have argued that living and non-living matter differ fundamentally in the way information is organized and flows through the system: biological systems are distinctive because information manipulates the matter it is instantiated in." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

CAUSAL EFFICACY. "We have presented a framework for understanding the origin of life as a transition in causal structure, and information management and control, whereby information gains causal efficacy over the matter it is instantiated in." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ANALOG LIMITATIONS. "Purely analogue life forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

GOING DIGITAL. "Life forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn