It is an astounding journey: this long slow march from overtly inanimate matter, eventually to living systems through sentience and into higher intelligence, socially-networked interdependence and on into digital and then autonomous information and probabilistic sub-microscopic energy-processing systems. The temporal linearity and arrow of time upon which progressive iterations of information or energy-processing depend, or at least that the procedural operations of which must reflexively imply, finds itself as the template from which all extension and logical depth emanate.
If this process is intelligible as computation; and if the essential character of this computation is the processing of information, energy and matter through the filter and rules-set of physical law and causal implicature; just where, exactly, is this rules-set stored ? If the rules-set itself is stored in, or as, the progressively refined iterations, configurations and constellations of matter and energy then no external storage is required. This doesn’t comprehensively solve any problems as all it does is displace one domain in a problem-space (of just how does matter, energy or information know what the laws of physics are) to another, similar, location (i.e. that of how rules-sets or physical laws entangled or encrypted into material systems or processes are observationally uniform across all material systems so far encountered and just how such distributed information-sharing might take place).
Add to this that the rules-sets or laws of material systems are hardly complete; that just what such a definition of completeness or global and uniform self-consistency might be is problematised by foundational discontinuities in logic and mathematics; and, that the causal and intuitive linearity of logical and temporal depth along a simple scalar metric of magnitude or length is not necessarily or even provably the most concise or powerful method of information and energy-processing system potentially available for simulation, calculation or even as simple metaphor.
It is nothing if not an interesting thread of thought.
Daedelus Kite 