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[deleted] t1_ixyjreg wrote

Reply to comment by Hangarnut in Scientists Have Found a Way To Manipulate Digital Data Stored in DNA by Sorin61

I thought this too. But recently I came upon a counter argument that humans tend to describe things with the most advanced technology available to them at the time.

If we go back to the past, most things were described as transcendental, spiritual and natural in order to explain physical reality. Even though we know the Antikythera mechanism is 2000 years old, humans have not described the world as machinery or computers until recently.

It may seem obvious we will continue this trajectory of technological advancement. But we cannot say for certain what new means will be adopted into technology to achieve better understanding of the world around us. As such, we may use different descriptions for physical reality and change our understanding completely to a combination that emphasis less on computer systems.

Everything is just an information system within a bigger system of information. It would appear obvious to me that we’re reverse engineering to get the answer of how the world works by stopping at our current understanding and believing it’s the final answer.

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Tura63 t1_ixzamwx wrote

Well, despite the flaw that one could always make that argument from a psychological point of view without addressing the content of the explanation, the bigger flaw in that criticism is that computers aren't just the current most advanced form of technology, they're universal simulators. No previous technology has that feature.

Computation is deeply connected with the laws of physics though the Turing principle. Any physical system can be simulated on a universal computer. It's not an analogy that brains are like computers. It's a deep principle of physics and computation which means that there isn't a different kind of machine that a brain could be.

Of course, knowledge is always conjectural, which means anything could be overturned someday. But what is one to do, in the absence of better explanations? One should take our best explanations seriously. Especially since denying the computable nature of the world breaks most other reasonable explanations we have.

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