So there seems to be a certain amount of credibility in
Chris Langton's paradigmatic view of "Life as a computation".
I'm inclined to view the Universe as a huge computer.
Or our computer as a mini-universe.
Or you might say the universe as a Turing machine,
but heck the universe was first, no ?
And in fact how did Turing call his ticker-tape machine ?
Universal computer ?
If I remember correctly, Von Neumann in his famous gendakenexperimente
about self-replication imagined a "universal constructor" floating
on a pond of some sort.
And hence he managed to find a mechanism by which self-replication
may occur, and it turned out a few years later that the mechanism
by which DNA replicates is similar.
Ah, the power of logical thinking.
Yash.