Re:It's time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life
by Kim_Bruning on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @09:35AM
(#39289037)
By analogy/homology:
Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technically- itself physical.
Arguably this can be demonstrated by moving it to a different physical representation (magnetic, optical, diode charges, dynamic memory cells; little endian, big endian; AMD, Intel, ARM, Turing Machine In Game Of Life, Minecraft Turing Machine) without affecting its behavior or functionality.
I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about this kind of phenomenon, per-se.
You could grok the behavior of the software by poking at the hardware its running on for long enough; but it might be more useful to split the problem into separate layers that are easier to reason about. (Hence the need for reduction and emergence)
Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technically- itself physical.
Arguably this can be demonstrated by moving it to a different physical representation (magnetic, optical, diode charges, dynamic memory cells; little endian, big endian; AMD, Intel, ARM, Turing Machine In Game Of Life, Minecraft Turing Machine) without affecting its behavior or functionality.
I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about this kind of phenomenon, per-se.
You could grok the behavior of the software by poking at the hardware its running on for long enough; but it might be more useful to split the problem into separate layers that are easier to reason about. (Hence the need for reduction and emergence)