Physical idealism

[bennyboy]

What makes you conclude that the body isn't represented in the DNA from the example you quote? Maybe you could also clarify what you mean by the Body being represented vs. having instructions about the body.

I should say that the DNA doesn't represent a blueprint for a body: "The door is 2.5m tall and 1.5m wide", but rather as a collection of relative principles: "The door should be 2x taller than the kitchen window" etc.

I think people in this thread might be thinking "Well, duh. This is all known and obvious." However, to me there might be important philosophical implications. For example, an idealistic model is medium-independent: if you could decode the entire DNA strand as a collection of relative ideas into say a database, you could recreate the human species without using DNA at all.

Another implication is that evolution could be much faster than we normally think of it. If there were a real benefit to having a different number of fingers, we wouldn't see people with stumpy little 6th fingers, then slightly more defined 6th fingers over millions of years. We'd see x% of the population having 6 fingers, with that % spiking pretty rapidly depending on the genetic fitness advantage it would give.