"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.