What is Life?

This is quite a recent book, but which already has a succession: “What is Intelligence?”, which I hope to read soon. It is quite a short book, so it will not overwhelm you, I highly recommend. Why should you care though?

Blaise talks about that life is in principle computational and that maybe Alan Turing and von Neumann discovered much more than just a way to calculate functions. The fabric of universe is made such that simple operations happen (there is free energy from the sun powering them), molecules bump to each other and these interactions can have consequences (but they do not have to). This is similar to instructions executed on the computer. The structures that appear are (self-)replicating structures as those just have a higher probability of appearing over time (just cause they replicate). This means that over time, life is BOUND TO APPEAR in our universe.

Especially the last part is crazy to me. I always though of life as something mythical that just accidentally happened, but no, it is meant to be (in a sense).

In the spirit of experimental computer science, they replicate this using strings of “brainfuck” programming language, showing that at some point replicating structures appear out of pure computation. As far as I understood we will not be using this anytime soon to evolve intelligence, but for sure amazing to change the way we look at the world.