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> If you gave someone who understood electricity but not computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to
by goatlover 5y ago
> If you gave someone who understood electricity but not computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to say that computation must be the result of something other than electricity.
It would be a good reason to suppose that computation was something added culturally to understanding the CPU (as part of constructing a CPU), since physics alone doesn't explain it. The computation is something in addition to the physics. It's cultural (the meaning of the computation in terms of bit patterns, manipulations and input/outputs) as well as electrical. Otherwise, it's just moving electricity around and producing heat.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
- michaelmrose 5y agoComputation is fully explicable as an abstraction over moving electricity around and producing heat. Without a specific theory of computation understanding the CPU isn't impossible but it may prove intractable in the same fashion as its very difficult but not impossible to understand chemistry solely in terms of physics. What is missing would not be a magical compute field but the necessary abstractions.