You could create this situation explicitly using FPGAs.
>no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design
There's no concept of abstraction, but there is remarkable consistency in the genetic code for all that. The fact that these tiny machines are understandable at all is remarkable. Our biosphere is effectively a single process with an uptime of ~4 billion years, including the ability to recover from meteor strikes that killed off 99% of species, multiple times (albeit with different species!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction_ev...
Logically, I know this can’t be worse than the K-T boundary, where a whole continent of forests simultaneously caught fire, and a hypercane formed over the Yucatán. On the first day. But it sure feels that bad. We live in a world people flip out because one wolf was reintroduced to a broken ecosystem yet no one gives a shit about the million people a year who die from fossil fuel air pollution. That one’s real: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/fossil-fuel-combusti...
There can high levels of inequality, yet this can still be true.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchron...
Honestly that sounds like basically what we got. The "design coherence" on the scale of the entire industry has been pretty low for decades.
I am sure things could be more optimal somehow, but the industry generally operates on a principle of interfaces - and it's true, the higher level you go (all the way up to the people using the technology) the messier it gets, but it certainly doesn't feel like an organism with no concept of "abstraction" as the parent describes.
Like everyone uses NixOS/Nixpkgs and also it's more ergonomic.
> But the industry generally operates on a principle of interfaces
Aha! Actually I would say it does not, and there in is the problem. Most interfaces only have a few implementations, and as much as I love FOSS it has made that problem worse (in the context of the economy we've got). The interfaces we do have tend to become monotonically more complex over time as there is no systematic culling, and the result is we increasingly drown in accidental complexity.
Basically, accumulated implementations are viewed as big scary problems were maintaince to simplify is a cost no one wants to bare.
A lot of this is the same critique as http://langsec.org/, generalized to areas other than security.
I think your thought experiment makes the mistake that such an abstraction-less computer would still be designed and built by humans. That won't work, because no human can understand the whole of it all at once, hence the need for abstractions. A computer "designed" by an incredibly complex computer program could push that barrier but probably not break it. If you really want an analogy to actual life, such a computer would have to be the outcome of some evolution-like process. And no, not what people like to call "evolutionary process" or something like that today, but actual evolution that mirrors biology -- and quickly becomes too complex to understand by humans.
3 DNA base pairs abstract to an amino acid which has chemical properties. It's just theres some redundancy which 3 base pairs get converted to an amino acid. And if there's a single mistake somewhere with just one amino acid, the structure of the thousand amino acid long protein probably has some fault tolerance there.
Those amino acids are arranged in a way in the DNA code to make bigger motifs, alpha helices, beta sheets, active sites, coordinating complexes with inorganic ions.
It's all in the DNA code, though I suspect this train of thoughts is influenced by epigenetics. Parts of the DNA code also responsible for the regulation of how much the protein itself is expressed. That can still abstract to conditional and loop structures.
Yes some of the base pairs strongly bind together in the double helice which can influence stability of the DNA strand. The GC pairing has 3 hydrogen bonds, where AT has 2, but I think this influences the distribution of junk DNA, as you still need codons to make proteins which is the central dogma of biology.
The first level of problems is that what you're describing applies to only a tiny percentage of the DNA in a cell, and even for that DNA, it may overlap/exist in parallel with completely different "codings" that are more to do with structure, packing and replication machinery than protein coding.
I don't mean to distress you, but you are a biological computer.
Just rejoice that you needn't read the release notes.
“Thanks for being human. This update changes your DNA and may contain bug fixes and performance improvements. Keep on humaning!”
I see your point. But I would like to make a counterargument.
If you consider the time scale with which biological systems have to work, you probably won't call their design illogical or incoherent. Computer programs have been around for not even a century. Billion years is a whole different ballgame. Can anyone even imagine writing a computer program with any guarantee that it would be readable by someone 1000 years from now? We have a tough time figuring out what our our own code does a few months after writing them.
And wrt fault tolerance, resilience, I don't know, the design language of nature definitely seems far more evolved..
[0] https://bioone.org/journals/acta-palaeontologica-polonica/vo...
Nature works on a "just good enough" principle, in general.
Imagine that every one of people who designed computers, from the chip makers, to the ones making the instruction set, to the firmware coders etc. had no concept of "abstraction", adherence to standards or even a logical, coherent design. Would computers be more like cells then?
I could imagine a CPU which does not have a clock to keep everything syncronized - where the die is not separated into logical areas of decoders ALUs etc but just a jumped mess of wires and logic gates that somehow works to do computation. There is no "assembly language" for this CPU, but give it the right binary inputs at the right time and it will probably do what you ask it to (depending on its complicated internal state).