> Proto-life would have to assemble copies of itself from molecules available in the environment.

Quines also live in an environment: the programming language they're written in. It's a very different _kind_ of environment; for instance the physical world has preservation of mass while it's really easy to copy bits. But both quines and proto-life can only replicate in the right environment, and they do so via an interaction between the information contained in themselves and the environment in which they are embedded. They seem quite analogous to me.

A rock is analogues to a car from the point of view of a child.

That's the problem with analogies: they are observer-dependent.

A quine shares no causal property with DNA.

Oh, but it does, if you treat "assembling a copy of yourself from atoms in the environment" as equivalent to the implementation details of printing to standard output.

> causal property

"assembling a copy of yourself" is a description you are imposing on a series of events.

The events in the case of a digital computer are certain oscillations to the electric field. That shares nothing with the chemical assembly of biological material

The whole field of artificial intelligence is missold on analogy.

"Neurons" arent neurons. Replication isnt replication.

AI proponents speak of photographs of animals made of ink (electrical fields in silicon) as-if they were themselves animals. Inviting us to marvel at how life-like the piece of paper is.

The "assembling of a copy" is implemented by a combination of printing to standard output and compiling (and running) the resulting program - both of which are parts of the environment, not of the quine.

If you're interested, there's an entire section of the book Godel, Escher, Bach that talks about exactly this connection. (Chapter 16, "Self-Ref and Self-Rep")

The title was updated in the last 3 hours to include the word quine instead of self-replicator. GP comment was written in the previous context.