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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

Virus behave like life in some ways. They're made out of the building blocks of life, and are indeed subject to evolution. But they don't absorb nutrients and don't reproduce themselves. They are created by the cells they infect.

But it's a thin line, and it depends on which definition you want to use.

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I have come to view them (from a programer's sense) kinda like functions and stateless services compared to living life which is like classes and other state-y things. It can change classes, it can be mutated and overridden, but does not think or act on its self, it must be interacted with.

Interesting. I also have a programmers model. But in my head the virus is the static artifact, the code. While what’s living is the process interpreting that code.

Or rather SARS-CoV-2 is the nonliving static code. COVID-19 is the “living” process interpreting the code.

Or your DNA is the code, you’re the living process interpreting that code.

My take: DNA (in a suitable environment) is a self-hosted DNA interpreter executing code to regulate its own environment via RNA JIT bytecode compilation. Viruses are… well, viruses.

The CPU, in this analogy, is physics.

If virus are alive, then internet memes are alive. —They reproduce not by themselves but by infecting other organisms -- They evolve / mutate

Come on, we're getting too philosophical. Viruses have genes, internet memes are just ideas.

Do you know where the word meme comes from?

Of course, and that reinforces their status of imaginary genes.

What difference is there between information stored as proteins in a chains or as bytes on hard drive / neuron configuration in your brain.

We just got used to the DNA=life, but is this a valid assumption?

Some exotic lifeforms could encode their self-defining information on silicium magnetic polarisation, electron spin or whatever. And you would call them life if they were standing and moving in an animal-like way.

I didn't read The Selfish Gene, the book that coined the term "meme", but I heard that it mostly explores that analogy, for a much broader definition of meme.

Random analogy - is a flash drive a computer?

A flash drive often contains a microprocessor/microcontroller which could be programmed to do more on its own

Certainly. It does compute and without computation property it will be not possible to store and retrieve information.

I, for one, as a human being whose root ancestors¹ infected planet Earth² which eventually produced me³, am will to use a definition that qualifies viruses as very much alive. ;-)

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Tangentially related, I sympathize with Earth parasite Musk who wishes for us to infect another cell— err, I mean, planet. Shoosh, Earth, back to sleep, nothing to see here...

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[1]: I wonder who's the chicken, here. Certainly, the virus is the egg, right? It's all a plan to engineer the actual masters of this universe?

[2]: A long, long time ago...

[3]: Well, the 10% of my weight with my DNA. I feel more like an ecosystem, I am a legion of species, a myriad DNAs, we are millions in those guts. "I" is not even the same "I" when travelling to a different biome: you are what you eat, quite literally, however you want to spin that idea.

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