Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

In other words, the human body actually isn't completely represented in the DNA, but as a sequence of instructions ABOUT a human body

Erm...isn't DNA a sequence of instructions about a human body?

Boru

That's right.  My point is that the DNA doesn't carry separate instructions about, for example, each finger.  Rather, it carries a description of what a "finger" is, and then an arbitrary amount of information describing what to do with that idea.

To me this is important, because an idealistic model is medium-independent in a sense: it would be more proper to say that the human body is an expression of ideas which happen to be represented in DNA, than to say that the DNA expresses itself as a human body.