> > What's your point? Oh let me guess. The rest of us are all idiots and > this has all been solved already? > I was trying to augment the idea below with an example. Boundaries implied by terms like `organism' or `cell' could easily become too rigid.. much as the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology became too rigid given reverse transcriptase. > The trouble is that they are not _simply_ self-reinforcing. Each > iteration through the cycle _changes_ the system. So, you cannot > _finitely_ list all cycles up until some point UNLESS you actually do > it. I.e. the end result of the 4 billion years of iteration is not > analytically predictable from the very first set of axioms we started > with 4 billion years ago. It's incompressible because each iteration > changes the building blocks. When I was a kid I used to play Core Wars, where we'd write little programs that fought for memory and processor resources. Even these little programs would show unexpected dynamics when they interacted, sometimes even merging into a sort of superspecies. -- Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.'' Donald Knuth, 1977
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