as far as biology goes, i can take any control structure you have in code and show you examples of how it’s being done. just because it’s happening at a large scale and it’s hard to predict at a micro level does not mean it’s not a computation and it does not mean it’s non-deterministiv
technically everything in the universe is nondeterministic but to say "but also computers are nondeterministic" is reductionistic to the point where the categories are meaningless.
It's also not sufficient to say "computation" exists. Well, you could reductionistically describe the orbits of the planets as a very machine that is very good at one computation. So I guess that makes it a computer. The solar system is a computer.
Going beyond the question of determinism, similarly saying you can encode arbitrary computation to an arbitrary degree of determinism (which you can, in biology), is not helpful. This is like pointing to the Game Of Life, and showing that people can build computers in the game of life, and saying that the emergent phenomena are "just like a computer". Well yes, there is a computer underneath, but I think you're probably missing something important if you think the parameter and output spaces of game of life as "just like a computer".
but it you define a computer as something that runs on some sort of code and translates input to output literally everything can be seen as a computer. the more complex something is the more impressive it is.
you should also probably update your profile description since it’s literally confirming what i am saying :)) (ie I've been: A molecular biologist that discovered that an enzyme was secretly an NPN transistor)
To wit: I didn't get my job done on that project because I thought of it as a computer, I got it done because having been a curious child who also did computers I happened to know (and remember into adulthood) how computers work at a very low level and was able to make an insight based on that, nothing particularly CSey.
anyways, we may disagree but you do sound like a fascinating person. molecular biology, CS, elixir. that's a rare but exciting combo. what materials would you recommend for someone who is a rookie but wants to learn more about molecular biology?
I don't really recommend 'learning' molecular biology. There really is no substitute for designing a molecular biology experiment, starting with dna synthesis, through cloning, and seeing it through to its biochemical outcome. It's not terribly time consuming, I had an intern that I took through the steps in 3 months, starting from no lab experience he completed 50 mutations on the enzyme, tested half of them, and got a paper out of it.
why don't you recommend learning molecular biology? is it hard to grasp without the practical experiments? what's your thinking behind "i don't recommend it"?
That's a pretty macro example (both at the genotypic ratio and phenotype levels), but it can happen at the micro level, too. You can have grossly nonlinear effects (well actually many effects are O(n^k) in concentration n, where k is the oligomer size, 2->12->20++) and sometimes even the phenotypically important species is like 10%? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? of the molecule population. And the proportion of the species could depend on the temperature. Are you running at 35C? 38C? 40C? 42C?
In a reductionistic way you could say that any system that follows logical rules is "like a computer" but I think at that point it ceases to be a meaningful statement.
Computers are great because if you give them an input they can give a deterministic answer (you can also choose to have them not give a deterministic answer, as in ML, and yes sometimes at Google scale you have to deal with cosmic radiation) but the choice is inverted for biological systems. You can try really hard to make biological systems give deterministic answers, and in some systems you don't have to try that hard, especially nowadays, but the default still is "nondeterministic".