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#5106·Tyler MillsOP, 6 days agoFor the changes made by a source of variation to be dependent on the content of any knowledge in the target, the source would have to contain knowledge itself. (The DNA mutation sources do not.) Blind changes are dependent on the medium in which information is contained, like an A versus a G in a strand of DNA (assuming these are information media). But the change made to the A or G by the cosmic ray is independent of the information they are hosting, if any. Any changes by the ray are dependent on the physical/chemical structure of the target, the substrate. Information is substrate independent. It is not the information stored in the A or G that is determining what changes are made to them.
Cosmic rays have been known to flip bits in computers, eg impacting election results: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210505103N/abstract
However, due to computational universality, we should be able to simulate a knowledge-growing system plus cosmic rays impacting that system.
So then at that point the source of the mutation is part of the program again…