Yeah this is true and is a very good point. Though consider that under our native physics, information in biological brains travels much more slowly than photons, too. Yet it is possible for structures in our native physics to make net measurements of large numbers of photons, use this information to accumulate knowledge about the environment, and use that knowledge to manipulate the environment, all without being able to build control structures in front of the massive number of photons bouncing around us.
Also, another bit of intuition: photons in our native physics will “knock over” most information-processing structures that we might build that are only one or two orders of magnitude larger than individual photons, such as tiny quantum computers constructed out of individual atoms, or tiny classical computers constructed out of transistors that are each just a handful of atoms. We don’t generally build such tiny structures in our universe because it’s actually harder for us, being embedded within our world, to build tiny structures than to build large structures. But when we consider building things in Life, we naturally start thinking at the microscopic scale, since we’re not starting with a bunch of already-understandable macroscopic building blocks like we are in our native physics.
Yeah this is true and is a very good point. Though consider that under our native physics, information in biological brains travels much more slowly than photons, too. Yet it is possible for structures in our native physics to make net measurements of large numbers of photons, use this information to accumulate knowledge about the environment, and use that knowledge to manipulate the environment, all without being able to build control structures in front of the massive number of photons bouncing around us.
Also, another bit of intuition: photons in our native physics will “knock over” most information-processing structures that we might build that are only one or two orders of magnitude larger than individual photons, such as tiny quantum computers constructed out of individual atoms, or tiny classical computers constructed out of transistors that are each just a handful of atoms. We don’t generally build such tiny structures in our universe because it’s actually harder for us, being embedded within our world, to build tiny structures than to build large structures. But when we consider building things in Life, we naturally start thinking at the microscopic scale, since we’re not starting with a bunch of already-understandable macroscopic building blocks like we are in our native physics.