I really had fun reading this and thinking deeply about the blurry Ill defined line between things that are alive (an individual) and things that are not.
To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus.
A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then cause the cell to create more virus. The goal of this is to pass “information” to successive versions of the virus which are then programmed to do the same thing. Since they are trying to keep the same information, then they are in fact attempting to reduce entropy across time therefore they are as the author defines, an “individual”.
Would love for someone to test that logic train that I just rode
To take this experiment to a conclusion which the author has “left to the reader” as all good texts do, let’s think about a virus.
A virus has information, in the form of dna or rna (I believe this is what a coronavirus uses), that it injects into a cell to then cause the cell to create more virus. The goal of this is to pass “information” to successive versions of the virus which are then programmed to do the same thing. Since they are trying to keep the same information, then they are in fact attempting to reduce entropy across time therefore they are as the author defines, an “individual”.
Would love for someone to test that logic train that I just rode