My intuitions about the world (and I guess most everyone's) roughly divide it into two kinds of things: agents and inanimate objects. It's most obvious and natu

My intuitions about the world (and I guess most everyone's) roughly divide it into two kinds of things: agents and inanimate objects. It's most obvious and natural then to see a computer as a kind of agent, built out of smaller dumber sub-agents. (There have been psych studies showing young kids often include computers in the 'living things' bin, so I don't think this is just me here.) In the end with this intuition you get logic gates as particularly simpleminded agents. Maybe this is just me, and it feels stupid to admit it, but I felt a definite shift of perspective on really seeing logic gates as inanimate. I had a related shift about F=ma around the same time, which is hard to articulate without sounding even stupider. You want to think of it like "you push, and the object accelerates" when from this nonanimate point of view there is no you causing things, there's only a network of constraints.