4 ms·

The thing with bytes, and everything else pertaining to computing, is that it's wholly invented by humans, so of course it's possible to obtain a complete enoug

The thing with bytes, and everything else pertaining to computing, is that it's wholly invented by humans, so of course it's possible to obtain a complete enough mental image of things like CPUs given enough documentation. Human body, on the other hand, is literally alien technology because humans themselves didn't take any part in engineering it.

achillesheels 6y ago
Actually, you’d be surprised how plausible it is to diagram the human electrophysiology using electromechanical circuit analogs. Everything in the body signals electrically, and biological matter being piezoelectric has been known (probably not popularly) since the late 60’s. Indeed, I am finishing up my dissertation applying electrical engineering theory to model cellular evolutionary biology predicated on digital signal processing theory to demonstrate natural selection progressively evolves adaptations with faster sampling rates of environmental radiation for greatest BIBO system stability.
- grishka 6y ago
  It's not that. Yes it's all electrical and chemical and electrochemical and so on. The problem is not with finding a good visual/logical representation. You usually don't see connections between different things when you aren't actively looking for them, or when you haven't seen/thought those things to be related in the past. Since CPUs were designed by humans, your logical reasoning would usually work well when reverse engineering one, especially if you know the general ideas of how integrated circuits are constructed and what functional blocks a CPU is made of. Nature, on the other hand, has no logic. Your reasoning doesn't work with natural phenomena, and that's exactly what we're seeing in areas where experimentation and direct observation is hard, infeasible, or impossible.
  - achillesheels 6y ago
    As a matter of fact, Nature does have logic. It’s motion is principally geometrical and affords us the ability to recursively structure electrical signals harmonically, eg feedback amplification. Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point.
    - grishka 6y ago
      > Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point. Yes they are. Consciousness is a result of an electric feedback loop, and aging is apparently a result of a chemical feedback loop but that wasn't proven completely yet (that's the feedback loop I'd very much like disrupted). But again, that's not what I'm talking about. You're missing my point entirely. I'm talking about connections that aren't obvious so no one looks for them in the first place and performs no experiments to reveal them. Example: sleep-deprived fruit flies accumulate active oxygen in their gut[1] and eventually die because of it. Is this an obvious connection to look for? Hell no. And there are many more examples of such unexpected and perplexing connections in the inner workings of living things. Nature doesn't always choose the most optimal implementations either. Life is a fascinatingly complex Rube Goldberg machine. 1 https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sleep-death-gut https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sleep-death-gut
      - achillesheels 6y ago
        I see what you are saying. Sorry for missing the point. Of course I have to agree that what you describe is the enterprise of scientific discovery altogether! My point on that end is all these “mysteries” in the biological domain are easier to spot with the proper framework. Right now the biological sciences do not emphasize any mathematically rigorous understanding of electricity which is keeping their blinders on. It is intuitive to understand the oxidation reactions, per your example, dielectrically, but the researchers certainly lack the cohesive understanding.
rbanffy 6y ago
Are you sure the CPU you are using now actually has the same number of registers that the ISA documentation says? Even here, we have surprises. Every modern x86 in use has thousands of errata pages in the specs.
- grishka 6y ago
  Yes I know because I read about register renaming a while ago :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

achillesheels 6y ago

Actually, you’d be surprised how plausible it is to diagram the human electrophysiology using electromechanical circuit analogs. Everything in the body signals electrically, and biological matter being piezoelectric has been known (probably not popularly) since the late 60’s. Indeed, I am finishing up my dissertation applying electrical engineering theory to model cellular evolutionary biology predicated on digital signal processing theory to demonstrate natural selection progressively evolves adaptations with faster sampling rates of environmental radiation for greatest BIBO system stability.

grishka 6y ago
It's not that. Yes it's all electrical and chemical and electrochemical and so on. The problem is not with finding a good visual/logical representation. You usually don't see connections between different things when you aren't actively looking for them, or when you haven't seen/thought those things to be related in the past. Since CPUs were designed by humans, your logical reasoning would usually work well when reverse engineering one, especially if you know the general ideas of how integrated circuits are constructed and what functional blocks a CPU is made of. Nature, on the other hand, has no logic. Your reasoning doesn't work with natural phenomena, and that's exactly what we're seeing in areas where experimentation and direct observation is hard, infeasible, or impossible.
- achillesheels 6y ago
  As a matter of fact, Nature does have logic. It’s motion is principally geometrical and affords us the ability to recursively structure electrical signals harmonically, eg feedback amplification. Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point.
  - grishka 6y ago
    > Feedback circuits are vital to biological systems and prove my point. Yes they are. Consciousness is a result of an electric feedback loop, and aging is apparently a result of a chemical feedback loop but that wasn't proven completely yet (that's the feedback loop I'd very much like disrupted). But again, that's not what I'm talking about. You're missing my point entirely. I'm talking about connections that aren't obvious so no one looks for them in the first place and performs no experiments to reveal them. Example: sleep-deprived fruit flies accumulate active oxygen in their gut[1] and eventually die because of it. Is this an obvious connection to look for? Hell no. And there are many more examples of such unexpected and perplexing connections in the inner workings of living things. Nature doesn't always choose the most optimal implementations either. Life is a fascinatingly complex Rube Goldberg machine. 1 https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sleep-death-gut https://hms.harvard.edu/news/sleep-death-gut
    - achillesheels 6y ago
      I see what you are saying. Sorry for missing the point. Of course I have to agree that what you describe is the enterprise of scientific discovery altogether! My point on that end is all these “mysteries” in the biological domain are easier to spot with the proper framework. Right now the biological sciences do not emphasize any mathematically rigorous understanding of electricity which is keeping their blinders on. It is intuitive to understand the oxidation reactions, per your example, dielectrically, but the researchers certainly lack the cohesive understanding.

rbanffy 6y ago

Are you sure the CPU you are using now actually has the same number of registers that the ISA documentation says? Even here, we have surprises. Every modern x86 in use has thousands of errata pages in the specs.

grishka 6y ago
Yes I know because I read about register renaming a while ago :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]