Meaning in DNA and Vitalism.
Dawkins and Perry come close to really addressing meaning in DNA. The meaning is that this code, this information, tells the organism important things about its environment and so makes it more fit. In other words it increases it’s odds of surviving and reproducing. It is important information.
The meaning comes into existance by mutation and selected by natural selection over deep time. Millions and millions of years. Mutations are random, yes, but what gets select in are the ones that are meaningful, useful in better living. The others don’t make it. The illusion of a vitalist force is very strong. I agree. But it takes no creators, no gods.
There is an incredible amount of meaningful information in our DNA. In other words, meaningful codes are the ones that give a representation of the environment and so decreases the entropy (chaos of the environment) for that organism. Claude Shannon helped us understand how that can be codded digitally.
Just like A.I., like GPT3, is to a large part self codding, life has been self coding.
