I’ve been thinking a lot about software and how it affects hardware. How is it that software, that runs on code, or some computer language, can affect the physical properties of the computer? For example what has to happen for a phone to physically shut down after pressing the shutdown button on a touch screen? Or how can it be that by pressing a button in a software, a physical movement can be made on an object? Going deeper, how can it be that a button press, or a touch can affect the state of the transistors?
This reminds me of the problem of consciousness, where in a computer a software is like the mind and that cannot phisically connect to the body.
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There’s a big difference between consciousness and software. We don’t understand consciousness but we know that software exists empirically in the physical world as hundreds of millions of 1s and 0s stored in physical microscopic switches of some kind inside your computer’s circuitry.
(Think of the numbers you put into a safe door to unlock it. The number is physically represented in the mechanism, same with software.)
This pattern of 1s and 0s modifies the paths that electricity takes through your computer in a big network of wires. This network is extremely complex and it’s connected to things you as a person can interact with like your speakers, fans, keyboard, screen, etc. So the 1s and 0s that make up software are 100% as physical as a light switch. The difference between writing code and flipping a light switch is just the number of steps that happen in between and the number of switches involved.
Bottom line is that all of it was always physical, there was no jumping between worlds, it just seems like it because of the sheer complexity of modern computers.
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