I think the issue with this way of thinking is that humans think in abstractions.

Abstractions don't really exist, they're a product of the human mind, but then we apply them to nature. Calling DNA code, comparing NNs and the brain, etc. But those abstractions fall apart when you look a little too deeply at what actually happens in nature.

Is DNA code? Or is it more like a machine? Is it neither, or is it something embedded in such a complex space that our simple abstractions can't capture the full nature of its being?

When you look at the nature of DNA, it does more than simply act as code. It can edit and self-modify, self-assemble, self-replicate, it can turn genes on and off, it can perform what can be argued as computations itself. If you limit yourself to thinking of it as code, you might miss crucial ways it exists/performs in real life.

> When you look at the nature of DNA, it does more than simply act as code.

> It can edit and self-modify, self-assemble, self-replicate, it can turn genes on and off

Unless my knowledge of biology is very outdated or incomplete, all of those things you cited are done to DNA. They don't happen spontaneously.

DNA doesn't self-replicate, a whole bunch of enzymes come and actively copy it. Genes don't spontaneously turn on and off, some enzyme comes and attaches or removes a methyl group. DNA doesn't self-assemble, it is actively coiled around histones to form nucleosomes. Bacteria have a huge variety of enzymes for manipulating native and foreign DNA, they have their own CRISPR mechanisms.

Well the funny thing about abstractions is they are physically real in our imaginations even if only ephemerally.

Human imagination allows us to explore as a simulation anything we want with a form of physicalized internal coherence.

Does internal coherence align with repeatable external coherence? That's what we call empirical.

Humans are the known meaning generators of the universe, we are interesting and special and our unique/random walks are important in an uncomputable and unbound sense. Who knows what casual chains will lead us, where they'll take us or how they might save us (from asteroids let's say) or might reshape the topology of spacetime.

It's early days yet.

> I think the issue with this way of thinking is that humans think in abstractions.

Isn't that the entire point of making abstractions? Understanding things "as they are" is impossible, so we need simplifications. Of course it should be appreciated that the abstractions are always "wrong".

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

>Abstractions don't really exist

I don't think ontology is quite that simple. They maybe don't exist in the same way as molecules and atoms do, but abstract concepts have some kind of reality to them.

> It can edit and self-modify, self-assemble, self-replicate, it can turn genes on and off, it can perform what can be argued as computations itself.

Malbolge

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful" - George E. P. Box (probably)