By analogy/homology: Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technic

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)