An unusual mathematical-leaning definition of a living thing.
(Or, to be more precise… a potential living immortal? A replicon? Whatever.)
A self-replicating physical entity with...
3 Core Components:
Quine: Contains the code to produce itself
Parser: A parser for that code
Code includes instructions for the parser; ideally, compressed instructions
Power: Actively running (probably on some substrate)
Not actively running is death, although for some the death is temporary.
Access to resources may be a subcomponent of this?
Additional components:
Substrate: A material that can be converted into more self
Possibly a multi-step process
Access to resources is probably a component of this
Translator: Converts quine into power, or vice-versa
Not always necessary; sometimes a quine is held as power, not substrate
Parser and Code: the information can actually be stored on either; you can extract the correct complex signal from complete randomness using an arbitrarily-complex parser chosen for that purpose. There are analogies that can be drawn in the other direction, too: a fairly dumb parser can make fairly complicated things, given enough instructions. (Something something Turing Machines)
Ideally, though, they’re well-paired and the compression method is something sensible, to reduce complexity.
A quine by itself has only a partial life; it is just its own code, it requires a parser to replicate.
(If you allow for arbitrarily complex parsers, any code could be a quine, if you were willing to search for the right parser.)
Compilers are… parsers? (Or translators?)
It is possible for what was “code” information to be embedded into the parser. I think this is part of what happens when you completely integrate parts in IFS.
I’m less clear on what’s important about power? Things to poke: Power, Electicity, Energy (& time-as-the-entropy-direction?). Animating. Continuity, Boltzmann brains, and “Is it frozen/discontinuous relative to this frame of time/reference?” (Permutation City). What is Death? (vs Life, or vs a frozen/cryonic quine)
Examples
Example replicons: A bacterium, a cell, a clonal organism, a pair of opposite-sexed humans (but not a single), self-contained repeating Game of Life automata, the eventual goal of RepRap (a 3D printer fully producing a copy of itself)
Viruses: Sometimes quines, sometimes pre-quine and translator
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
-- Daniel Dennett
The distinctive thing about Lisp is that its core is a language defined by writing an interpreter in itself. It wasn’t originally intended as a programming language in the ordinary sense. It was meant to be a formal model of computation, an alternative to the Turing machine. If you want to write an interpreter for a language in itself, what’s the minimum set of predefined operators you need? The Lisp that John McCarthy invented, or more accurately discovered, is an answer to that question.
(Complex multi-step life-cycle in the T5 case, though?. The quine produced a bare-bones quine-compiling “spawner” when it interacts with the wild-type, and then replicates on that. Almost analogous to CS viruses that infect the compiler, and any future compiler compiled by that compiler.)
Process is Art: Is art that demonstrates how to craft the art, a quine on a human compiler?
Some connection to: Compartmentalization (Black Box Testing, unit tests, separation of software components) and the “swappability” of keeping things general and non-embedded, with clearly-marked and limited interface-surfaces (APIs). Generates pressure against having “arbitrary compilers” in practice.
Live Parsers and Quines
An unusual mathematical-leaning definition of a living thing.
(Or, to be more precise… a potential living immortal? A replicon? Whatever.)
A self-replicating physical entity with...
3 Core Components:
Quine: Contains the code to produce itself
Parser: A parser for that code
Code includes instructions for the parser; ideally, compressed instructions
Power: Actively running (probably on some substrate)
Not actively running is death, although for some the death is temporary.
Access to resources may be a subcomponent of this?
Additional components:
Substrate: A material that can be converted into more self
Possibly a multi-step process
Access to resources is probably a component of this
Translator: Converts quine into power, or vice-versa
Not always necessary; sometimes a quine is held as power, not substrate
Parser and Code: the information can actually be stored on either; you can extract the correct complex signal from complete randomness using an arbitrarily-complex parser chosen for that purpose. There are analogies that can be drawn in the other direction, too: a fairly dumb parser can make fairly complicated things, given enough instructions. (Something something Turing Machines)
Ideally, though, they’re well-paired and the compression method is something sensible, to reduce complexity.
A quine by itself has only a partial life; it is just its own code, it requires a parser to replicate.
(If you allow for arbitrarily complex parsers, any code could be a quine, if you were willing to search for the right parser.)
Compilers are… parsers? (Or translators?)
It is possible for what was “code” information to be embedded into the parser. I think this is part of what happens when you completely integrate parts in IFS.
I’m less clear on what’s important about power? Things to poke: Power, Electicity, Energy (& time-as-the-entropy-direction?). Animating. Continuity, Boltzmann brains, and “Is it frozen/discontinuous relative to this frame of time/reference?” (Permutation City). What is Death? (vs Life, or vs a frozen/cryonic quine)
Examples
Example replicons: A bacterium, a cell, a clonal organism, a pair of opposite-sexed humans (but not a single), self-contained repeating Game of Life automata, the eventual goal of RepRap (a 3D printer fully producing a copy of itself)
Viruses: Sometimes quines, sometimes pre-quine and translator
-- Daniel Dennett
-- What I Worked On, Paul Graham
Related: Self-Reference, Post-Irony, Hofstadter’s Strange Loop, Turing Machine, Automata (less-so), deconstruction (less-so)
Is Tiddlywiki a quine?
Is a cryonics’d human a quine? (wrt future technology)
The definition of parasite used in Nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of parasites is literally quines.
(Complex multi-step life-cycle in the T5 case, though?. The quine produced a bare-bones quine-compiling “spawner” when it interacts with the wild-type, and then replicates on that. Almost analogous to CS viruses that infect the compiler, and any future compiler compiled by that compiler.)
Process is Art: Is art that demonstrates how to craft the art, a quine on a human compiler?
Some connection to: Compartmentalization (Black Box Testing, unit tests, separation of software components) and the “swappability” of keeping things general and non-embedded, with clearly-marked and limited interface-surfaces (APIs). Generates pressure against having “arbitrary compilers” in practice.