Nonsense. While essentially all computer programs work on a yes/no basis, you cannot build a program that say does anything useful with just two machine code instructions. If all it took to make a living thing was two machine code instructions, this discussion would have never started. Yes, you can build quite complex programs using just the yes/no capabilities of a binary system, however - you still have to write the code to accomplish what you wish to accomplish. While one might be able to write an operating system that does as much as the present ones with less code, you certainly could not write them with two machine language instructions.
Further, as I stated in my previous post the problem is not one of describing life, but of pre-scribing it. You have to write the code which will give one mammal (the mouse) hard bones and legs and another (which some say is similar in many ways) soft bones, wings, and a fantastic sonar (the bat). Tell me how you pre-scribe all that from the first bacteria to those two animals with all the intervening species in between with two lines of code.
Oh, and as Columbo used to say - just one more thing. Turing machines have a halting problem, living things do not, so they are not a perfectly accurate model for living things just on that point alone.
Not what he said. He said only two internal states. This not the same thing at all. One can have a computer with only 4 symbols and 5 internal states (published in 2001 by Watanabe Shigeru; beating Minsky's 4 state 7 symbol machine in product mimimization.)
Of course, the ultimate in computer reductionism is the single instruction machine. Based on a RAM model, the instruction is: subtract memory location being pointed-at from the accumulator; if the accumulator is negative, skip the next location, else execute the next location. This mimics the working of both the IBM 650 and the Bendix G15. Such a single-instruction computer can simulate a universal Turing machine.
My universal Touring machines used to be Corvettes, but as I got older, I switched to Tahoes.
I would say you are wrong. Heck, I do research on an extremely advanced form of universal computer that has less than 5 instructions in total. But you don't have to take my word for it. Here is a link to a website that describes the entire instruction set of a couple universal computer languages that prove my point. Google is your friend, you should use it more.
http://ling.ucsd.edu/~barker/Iota/
Tell me how you pre-scribe all that from the first bacteria to those two animals with all the intervening species in between with two lines of code.
A computer that only has two instructions is still allowed to process an arbitrarily large amount of information. Just because the control function of the computer is extremely tiny does not mean that you can't build incredibly large and expressive systems. I think you misunderstood what having a small instruction set means. You can have a machine that only knows two instructions and STILL have millions of lines of code. Remember, there is no real difference between a program and data anyway.
Turing machines have a halting problem, living things do not
From this statement, I'm not sure that you actually grok the Halting Problem. I would also state as a relevant point that there exists novel Turing Machine (i.e. universal computer) models that effectively "cheat" the halting problem by tweaking some of the underlying assumptions of Turing machines. We've had such machines running on silicon for a few years now.