This is the founding document of what eventually became Eywal Research Group.
Forest Language: The Inevitable Merge of Natural and Classical Computing is a 125-page paper written for the general reader — someone curious, not necessarily technical. It took over two years to finish. The goal was to build a coherent picture of where computation is going by taking biology seriously as a computational medium, not a metaphor for one.
The paper moves through four sections:
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Applications in nature — computation as it already exists in living systems. Tardigrades surviving conditions that would destroy any silicon chip. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the zombie-ant fungus — executing a behavioral program in a host organism with no nervous tissue of its own. Embryogenesis, particularly Levin's work on how cells coordinate to build a body plan using bioelectric gradients rather than a central instruction set.
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Applications in technology — where classical computing currently sits, and what its limits are. Binary logic, silicon constraints, the energy cost of computation at scale.
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Overlapping and bridging applications — the interesting zone. Where the two systems start to look alike. Mandelbrot sets appear in both coastlines and antenna design. Slime molds solve routing problems that parallel Dijkstra's algorithm. The question isn't "can biology compute" — it's "are they computing the same things in different substrates?"
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Future applications — where this convergence leads. Programmable morphogenesis. Xenobots. Biological memory. This section also touches on TOEs (Theories of Everything) and what an explanation of consciousness that spans both domains might require.
I wrote this alone. I'm hoping to find people to think alongside for whatever comes next — the second paper, the lab work, the questions this one couldn't answer.
If you read this and want to talk, reach out.
The paper is also published on this site.