Is Life Simply a Computer? New Research Reframes Biology as Computation
Imagine a living cell as nothing more than a line of software running on a hardware substrate we call biology. That provocative idea—life as computation—has surged back into public conversation as researchers revisit the age-old question: where does information end and life begin? The latest wave of thinking draws on decades of work by pioneers like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, who first suggested that the logic governing life and the logic governing machines might share a common structure. Today’s researchers push that concept into new frontiers, from theoretical physics to practical biology, from DNA as programmable code to cellular networks acting as vast, distributed processors. For Thai readers, the question resonates on multiple levels: it touches how we understand health, disease, education, and the very fabric of Thai cultural approaches to science, tradition, and communal care.