The data is the code is the data. Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code". These terms are categories we impose on systems we design, to make it easier for us to build and reason about them, but they're nothing but mere opinions, and depend less on the system structure, and more on the perspective of the person asking which is which.
This is related to, and possibly equivalent with, the core point of both this story and the original one: computation is independent from substrate.
You can build a computer out of anything, whether it's semiconductors or lasers or meat or magnetic fields or water flowing downhill or abstract thought, and that computer will happily perform the same computation as every other equivalent construct from whatever substrate. That's because computers are ultimately made of math, and we design "real ones" by finding ways to approximate the mathematical constraints with physical systems. But the choice of how to map the math to physical systems is completely arbitrary, and any such mappings are equivalent from POV of information processing ability.
(Of course substrate is not arbitrary from economic POV, which is why we build most of our computers out of silicon and plastic, and make it work with electric current and lasers.)
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The data is the code is the data. Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code". These terms are categories we impose on systems we design, to make it easier for us to build and reason about them, but they're nothing but mere opinions, and depend less on the system structure, and more on the perspective of the person asking which is which.
This is related to, and possibly equivalent with, the core point of both this story and the original one: computation is independent from substrate.
You can build a computer out of anything, whether it's semiconductors or lasers or meat or magnetic fields or water flowing downhill or abstract thought, and that computer will happily perform the same computation as every other equivalent construct from whatever substrate. That's because computers are ultimately made of math, and we design "real ones" by finding ways to approximate the mathematical constraints with physical systems. But the choice of how to map the math to physical systems is completely arbitrary, and any such mappings are equivalent from POV of information processing ability.
(Of course substrate is not arbitrary from economic POV, which is why we build most of our computers out of silicon and plastic, and make it work with electric current and lasers.)