“Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
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Max Tegmark 24
Swedish-American cosmologist 1967Related quotes

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“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.”
Source: Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos