[extropy-chat] Warwick: Could future computer viruses infect humans?

[Adrian Tymes]

--- ben <benboc at lineone.net> wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
> "Umm...no.  Biological viruses require a physical
> presence to infect; software viruses do not, being
> pure information."
> 
> Whoa!!
> 
> There is no such thing as 'pure information'.
> 
> Unless you believe in souls, etc.
> 
> Information is always embodied in some way.
> 
> I assume you meant to make a distinction between
> information encoded on 
> electrons and information encoded on molecules?
> 
> I certainly hope so, anyway.

Kind of, but moreso since this distinction is so
critical to why biological and computer viruses are
fundamentally different.  How about this?

Computer viruses can be transmitted by the usual ways
we transmit information, and are not affected by
having their encoding transformed from electrons to
photons to sound waves to any other information
transmission method a computer can understand, thus
the actual "virus" itself can be seen as purely the
informational content of these encodings rather than
something associated with one particular physical
encoding.  Thus, a computer virus can be called "pure
information" even though it will always have a
physical encoding (and would not exist without one).
Similarly, one can speak of "minds" or "souls" as
things that exists, even though they would not without
the physical brains they run on: the patterns
themselves, and their informational content, are the
"things" being discussed.

Biological viruses, OTOH, are strictly bound to their
particular physical method of expression - usually DNA
or RNA with a protein coat.  While they may contain
information, they also contain physical mechanisms to
force this information into a cell or other
replicator.  It is true that it does not matter much
which, say, carbon atom goes in position N, so long as
there is a carbon atom there, but this is far
different from not caring whether one is expressed as
a big-endian or little-endian stream (which completely
inverts the order of each set of 8 bits).  Known
biological viruses do not survive translation to
significantly different physical mediums - i.e., a
picture of a biological virus, by itself, does not
usually cause transmission of the virus to those who
view it, whereas there have been reported instances of
computer viruses generating pictures files (which
themselves got physically expressed in a number of
ways) that contained code that would infect certain
types of viewers.  (These viewers had, of course, some
rather basic coding flaws, even moreso than one would
expect of Microsoft products.  Google for "JPEG virus"
if you want details; there have been multiple versions
of it, some closer to trojans than viruses.)

Does this clarify the sense in which I meant "pure
information"?