Biology-Computing Analogies

Biological systems are not "engineered" in the same way a computer is. Computer chips, despite all their complexity, are designed to be understood by humans - they are modular, and abstract-able to facilitate design. Biological systems do not have these properties unless it is advantageous for the task at hand. You often have systems where everything interacts with everything else in meaningful ways. So it isn't really accurate to directly compare reverse engineering technology to

As a software developer, I find biology to be fascinating but at the same time extremely complex and counterintuitive. Everything seems to be influencing everything else in subtle ways. You can never separate an organism into distinct modules that do distinct jobs and expose distinct interfaces, like you could a program or a hardware device when reverse engineering. The fact that physics and chemistry are being exploited in most unexpected ways doesn't help either.But then the thing to r

Or biology evolved a better way to do the same or similar enough computation that we simply haven't yet discovered.

Wow... Biology: the ultimate hack... Anyone think that the singularity will be more about biology than computers?

We are all living biological computers.(Well, except for the occasional experiments where people let GPT-2 or 3 post for them to see what happens).

>I like to see biology as reverse engineering alien technology made by a much more advanced civilization. Of course that's not true — it all evolved over billions of years — but the resemblance is totally there.Be really careful here, though, otherwise you'll hoodwink yourself.The two famous things that come to mind for me are these, both of which remind me to tread carefully:<a href="https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/

This is indeed a big assumption. We have been able to create new systems from technology but are humans capable of reverse engineer complex biological systems or emulate them effectively is a complete unknown. For example, there are few groups trying to simulate a single cell for decades, and we are still extremely nascent in our ability to do so.It is possible that there are many facets of reality that are simply outside the comprehension of human brain. In fact, is is likely that most reali

Maybe you're right about the timescale, maybe you're not. Don't lose sight of the fact that you are merely a biological computer, and a terribly inefficient one at that.Whatever nature can build, we can build better given enough time and resources. We have more building blocks available to us, and we have intelligence. Nature merely had lots of time.

The line between "biological" and "synthetic" is blurry and gets blurrier all the time. You can (and probably should) see biology as super advanced tech. One of the primary benefits is self-replication - ability for components to consume various resources and build copies of themselves. This is huge, and it enables everything from self-regenerating materials to in-situ upgrades. 3D printing is a joke compared to that. So while maybe Earth organisms are a bit over-tuned (on th

That's why I consider biology a type of alien technology that we've been trying to reverse engineer but are still a ways away.