What is life?
From a biological point of view, it is the combination of sperm and egg (of course there are other ways to breed life, such as asexual reproduction).
More than 70 years ago, the famous physicist Schrödinger started thinking about life. His ideas shocked the entire physics and biology community at that time. In his view, life, like everything in the world, follows the laws of the universe, except that living objects can absorb the order in the environment to maintain their own survival.
Schrödinger’s thinking about life has crossed the dimension of physics.
“Life depends on negative entropy for a living,” Schrödinger’s words give life a physical soul.
Just three years after Schrödinger published his thoughts on life “What is life” in 1943, in 1946, a major event also happened:
The world’s first general-purpose computer ENIAC was born.
The inventors of ENIAC are Americans John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. History should remember them, but it should also be remembered by another person a hundred years ago:
George Bull, the foundation of logical operations. It is not an exaggeration to say that he is the inventor of logical operations. Without him, electronic computers could not have been born like this.
Logic operations are also called Boolean operations. They were invented by the British mathematician George Boole in 1847(strictly speaking, not invention). In fact, logical operations have existed for a long time. As early as the age of Euclid, people have used logical reasoning to establish a geometric system through preset axioms. But George Boole systematized and symbolized logical operations for the first time, making logical operations a system that can be described and studied in mathematical language like arithmetic operations, which profoundly affected the establishment of subsequent mathematical logic, and even indirectly affected the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Russell.
After the advent of electronic computers, the two states of “on” and “off” in computer circuits perfectly corresponded to the mutually exclusive characteristics of the two Boolean values “true” and “false” in logic operations. Therefore, the early vacuum tube computers, including the subsequent transistor computers and integrated circuit computers, all used logic operations as their basic calculation methods.
Another great biologist of Burr’s contemporaries, Gregor Mendel, also began his exploration and thinking of life. After completing his advanced studies at the University of Vienna, Mendel returned to the monastery and started Eight years of pea experiments were published in 1865 and gave birth to the Mendelian law of genetics.
Taking the flower color hybridization of pea as an example, suppose that the purebred white-flowered pea and the purebred safflower pea are crossed, and the results of the second and third generations are shown in the following figure:
It can be seen from the figure that the white flower does not appear until the third generation, indicating that the white flower is a recessive trait, while the corresponding safflower is a dominant trait.
If we use Boolean logic operations to look at Mendel’s pea flower color hybridization experiment, we can see that the results of this experiment follow the logic operation method.
White flowers follow the law of logical AND: white flowers (1) & red flowers (0) = red flowers (0), white flowers (1) & white flowers (1) = white flowers (1);
And safflower follows the law of logical OR: safflower (1)||white flower (0)=safflower, safflower (1)||safflower(1)=safflower(1);
Life also exhibits the characteristics of computer logic operations. Is life also a computer?
If we can say that life is a computer based on this point alone (life exhibits the characteristics of computer logic operations), it would seem too sloppy, but what makes me surprised is that I keep discovering the characteristics of this kind of computer displayed by life.
Edward Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who has studied ants for almost a lifetime, discovered an interesting phenomenon:
The ant’s brain contains a simple behavioral program that guides the ant to follow the ant in front of it when crawling. If such ants are made into a circle when they are crawling, they will sometimes keep walking until they die.
Isn’t this an endless loop?
Any student majoring in computing will avoid infinite loops when learning programming, but it is incredible that such infinite loops happen to living ants.
Also, what is the purpose of life?
Isn’t the purpose of life to multiply? The purpose of any life is to multiply, even bacteria and viruses are no exception.
Then reproduction, as the ultimate goal of life, is a kind of main program, and the goal of the main program is to realize the replication of genetic material DNA or RNA.
So how does life, especially complex life, achieve the goal of this main program?
Taking humans as an example, since the ultimate goal is reproduction, two things must be done:
First, take food to meet the needs of energy and resistance to entropy. In layman’s terms, you will have energy only when you are full, only when you are full do you have raw materials to regenerate new cells to replace senescent and dead cells and maintain the longevity of the body;
Second, only with the long-term existence of the organism can there be enough time to find a spouse, combine the sexes, and conceive a new life;
The above two points can be regarded as the two subroutines under the main program, but the direct goal of these two subroutines is not to multiply. The goal of the subroutine is different from that of the main program. They are food intake and gender union. .
Isn’t this kind of main program and subprogram design a strategy adopted in the design of large-scale programs?
From time to time, I accidentally discover the computer characteristics of life. I often wonder, when human beings invented computers, did they know the computer characteristics of life and were inspired by this?
But I was always skeptical about being inspired. When Wilson started to study ants and discovered this interesting infinite loop phenomenon of ants, computers were born long ago. It is hard to believe that the two scientists who invented the computer, or the follow-up Many computer scientists have in-depth research on ants.
Or are these all coincidences?
Or is it that the God who created life did not actually limit the birth of life to DNA and amino acids as raw materials, maybe silicon as raw materials, electricity as energy, and copy and paste as the transfer method of genetic material. It’s just that life with DNA and amino acids as raw materials was born first.
If the birth of life is preempted by the use of silicon as the raw material, then the computer created now may be based on DNA and amino acids as the raw material, then the computer is a computer with flesh and blood, and life is a life without flesh and blood.
If so, will the flesh-and-blood computer eventually show signs of life?
As we currently expect, can silicon-based computers eventually show signs of life?
Maybe we need to find more life computer first, and then think about life more deeply.
Maybe we can have a result, maybe there will never be a result.
But thinking about life will never stop.