"Code" is a Bad Analogy for the World

The church of scientism and mammon as DudleyDeuxWrite put it in a tweet a few weeks ago is the faith of the modern western world. The key tenant of that church is the world is basically symbolic, that is the toy models of the world are more real than the world is. Similarly, a tree that's cut down and sold for a shekel is more valuable as a shekel than it is living in the ground.

The computer is the ultimate medium for making toy models using Turing Machine codes. The theory is any natural system can be perfectly modeled with a sufficiently fast Turing Machine. The apotheosis of this idea is that we currently live in a simulation and so if we can create a sufficiently complicated computer model, we could move from this current level of simulation into that new reality. This is depicted in movies and TV shows like Caprica and Black Mirror.

To the would be computer gods, code can represent everything, and they see DNA as a sort of code that can be cracked. They think information stored in DNA is in some symbolic form.

The natural world, though, does not store information in digital codes. Information is stored within a web of a million associations. The natural world is more like a toolbox in the context of a craft than a computer. Information is probably "stored" in DNA the same way a wrench stores information about itself, the general range of torques that might be applied, the size fastener that's used, etc... rather than a pile of symbols that can be read out and operated on like entries in an accounting book.

alligator forearm. From here.

Contemplate how structures like forearms are shared across hundreds of species--a radius and ulna in a bird wing, an alligator leg, and a human forearm. There might be a molecular sub-machine in DNA that helps construct that skeleton, but its a structure that exists within the context of a world with certain gravity, lots of water, certain chemical elemental abundances and a range of forces that animals need to apply to move.

Computers and code are bad analogies for the natural world.

Is It Possible to Organize People Without Money or Bureaucracy

The modern western world is largely organized by corporations. The production of almost every necessary and luxury good is carried out by a corporate organization, and all the planning is done using money as a symbol of "the good". Money and prices of goods end up being defined by that mode of planning and organization, so "the market" for things ends up being set by that system rather than by a "free market".

Most of the posts in this blog point out problems with this approach. The financial system, and the corporate system are mostly systems of control of human activity and they are at least equally about maintaining a hierarchy of people from the equivalent of modern day dukes and barons down to peasants, as they are methods for organizing people for productive activities. Also, using money as a representation of "wealth" has cheapened everything that's not money, e.g. the natural world. So in the 19th century, for example, settlers of the newly opened frontiers of the USA all but obliterated the natural world, and today in China, factories pollute the air, water and land of that country to pursue money tokens that managers and workers can exchange for luxury items.

Sub-cultures within the United States exist outside the financial system for the most part. The Amish are one example. Prior to the centralization of the banking system and widespread industrialization in the United States most people lived outside the money/financial system and conducted business in terms of credit agreements and in-kind trades, e.g. chicken eggs for flour.

I have the sense that we've come full circle in the modern system. The credit that's extended to corporations like Tesla, for example, seems pretty worthless in real world terms. The project of electrifying cars, building smart cities, and new infrastructure for self-driving vehicles seems pretty stupid and uninspiring to many.

Is it possible to do something different and have a different basis for civilization that's more aligned with the natural world? One of the really interesting questions I've thought about in recent years is: are natural systems more efficient and "productive" than agricultural systems of man? It is quite possible that's the case. If that's true, then agriculture, as currently practiced is a dismal failure and our civilizations are really a sort of millstone around our necks.