Hardware is just software on a higher plane of existence
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Replying to @Plinz
Read Section 1.1, 'Duality': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/ …
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Replying to @FieryPhoenix7
I think this is not a very deep treatment of the problem. The interesting question is not whether software is different from hardware, but what kind of software our physical hardware is.
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Replying to @Plinz
But how can we answer that without considering the distinction between the two? It's definitely an interesting question, but the way you see it could be different from the way I do depending on our individual perceptions of hardware and software, as discussed in the article.
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Replying to @FieryPhoenix7 @Plinz
Fundamentally, I think the two are one and the same. For example, at a high level, both can be modeled as a finite-state machine describing their control flow. And both can be thought of as computational devices pertaining to one or more functions. But beyond that it gets harder!
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Replying to @FieryPhoenix7
The main difference seems to be that we think of physics as having a fundamental level at which it has total causal closure, whereas software is conditional on mutable properties of the substrate.
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Replying to @Plinz
Yes, that is exactly correct. Assuming the thesis of causal closure is true, it follows necessarily that hardware and software are decidedly different, thereby invalidating any attempt at reconciliation. But that is also kind of a loose assumption...
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It is just an statement about write access. If you live in a software that does not offer access to the underlying hardware, that software is causally closed as well.
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