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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The main thing that transistors and other computer peripherals have in common is that they use electricity. When you provide an input to your computer of your phone, such as pushing the power button, an electrical impulse is sent into the transistors which are arranged in such a way that they’ll perform a set collection of actions. When those transistors need to tell another part of the device to do something, they send an electrical signal which is usually amplified by other electronics so that it produces an output (such as a noise or an image on a display).
Computer engineers have gotten very good over the decades at telling those transistors how to transform those electrical inputs into useful electrical outputs.
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