As an aside to an aside, I wonder how much information about the DNA reading frame could in principle be extracted from the DNA of a female organism, given the knowledge (or the assumption) that mature females can gestate a zygote? Almost all possible reading frames would be discardable on the grounds that the resulting organism would not be able to gestate a zygote, of course, but I don’t have any intuitive sense of how big the remaining search space would be.
My intuition says “very, very big”. Consider: depending on womb conditions, the percentage of information expressed in the baby which is encoded in the DNA might change. As an extreme example, consider a female creature whose womb completely ignores the DNA of the zygote, creating instead a perfect clone of the mother. Such an example makes it clear that the search space is at least as large as the number of possible female creatures that are able to produce a perfect clone of themselves.
OTOH, if what I mostly care about is the computer’s behavior at the level of electrical flows through circuits (for example, if I’m trying to figure out how to hack the computer without an input device by means of electrical induction, or confirm that it won’t catch fire in ordinary use), then a thorough electrical analysis of the computer’s circuitry provides me with tons of indispensible new information.
I accept your point. Such an analysis does provide a more complete view of the computer, which is useful in some circumstances.
the search space is at least as large as the number of possible female creatures that are able to produce a perfect clone of themselves.
Sure, I agree that one permissible solution is a decoder which produces an organism capable of cloning itself. And while I’m willing to discard as violating the spirit of the thought experiment decoder designs which discard the human DNA in its entirety and create a predefined organism (in much the same sense that I would discard any text-translation algorithm that discarded the input text and printed out the Declaration of Independence as a legitimate translator of the input text), there’s a large space of possibilities here.
Would you be willing to consider, i.e. not discard, a decoder that used the human DNA as merely a list of indexes, downloading the required genes from some sort of internal lookup table?
By changing the lookup table, one can dramatically change the resulting organism; and having a different result for every viable human DNA is merely a resut of having a large enough lookup table. It would be, to extend your metaphor, like a text-translation algorithm that returned the Declaration of Independance if given as input Alice in Wonderland, and returned Alice in Wonderland if given Hamlet.
My intuition says “very, very big”. Consider: depending on womb conditions, the percentage of information expressed in the baby which is encoded in the DNA might change. As an extreme example, consider a female creature whose womb completely ignores the DNA of the zygote, creating instead a perfect clone of the mother. Such an example makes it clear that the search space is at least as large as the number of possible female creatures that are able to produce a perfect clone of themselves.
I accept your point. Such an analysis does provide a more complete view of the computer, which is useful in some circumstances.
Sure, I agree that one permissible solution is a decoder which produces an organism capable of cloning itself. And while I’m willing to discard as violating the spirit of the thought experiment decoder designs which discard the human DNA in its entirety and create a predefined organism (in much the same sense that I would discard any text-translation algorithm that discarded the input text and printed out the Declaration of Independence as a legitimate translator of the input text), there’s a large space of possibilities here.
Would you be willing to consider, i.e. not discard, a decoder that used the human DNA as merely a list of indexes, downloading the required genes from some sort of internal lookup table?
By changing the lookup table, one can dramatically change the resulting organism; and having a different result for every viable human DNA is merely a resut of having a large enough lookup table. It would be, to extend your metaphor, like a text-translation algorithm that returned the Declaration of Independance if given as input Alice in Wonderland, and returned Alice in Wonderland if given Hamlet.
(considers)
I would like to say “no”, but can’t think of any coherent reason to discard such a design.
Yeah, OK; point made.