The colloquial distinction is that you can touch hardware, but not software. Hardware states are addressable by a spacetime location, software states by their causal relationships.
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Replying to @Plinz
My point is this: Our concept of (computer) SW assumes an abstract machine to run it. Engineering focus is to implement this HW architecture in physics. But in living things this looks inseparable. The physical process has no clear abstraction boundary to take such a distinction.
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Replying to @FroehlichMarcel
When we teach something to a human or an animal, we exploit the fact that they implement an abstract machine to implement what we teach. We use this abstract machine (which is a partial model of their control architecture) to interpret, predict and influence their behavior.
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Replying to @Plinz
Boils down to how much agency and autonomy there is. We can only create our own models each to predict others’ behavior. And while we are musing about those macro patterns, a myriad of meaningful processes take place in this being on many scales, that make this life possible.
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Replying to @FroehlichMarcel @Plinz
I do not question that there are some “higher level” control processes. But they are so much more complex and intertwined, that the metaphor of SW/HW just seems to fall short to describe what happens.
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Replying to @FroehlichMarcel
Software is a virtual machine, hardware a physical machine. Software exploits free state of the hardware machine. Yet physics itself does not have free state, only the machine model does. Hardware and software are not ontologically different, they differ in their affordances.
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Replying to @Plinz
Is it? My, maybe naive def. would be that SW is the spec. of a computation that requires a machine (a computer) to be executed. SW is not a machine itself. Ultimately a machine requires a physical substrate, matter and energy.
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Replying to @FroehlichMarcel @Plinz
Marcel Fröhlich Retweeted Marcel Fröhlich
What is a computer without an observer that ascribes this process a computational function?https://twitter.com/FroehlichMarcel/status/1196891174868377600?s=20 …
Marcel Fröhlich added,
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Replying to @FroehlichMarcel
When a tree falls in the forest with no-one to hear, does it make a sound?
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Replying to @Plinz
It is not about questioning that physical processes happen. It does make a sound and the computer performs a specific processual pattern.
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There are no sounds or colors in the physical universe. They are geometric functions that are used by certain classes of observers, to compress certain categories of patterns. The same is true for software.
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