How do bits in a computer become meaningful to human beings?
In: Technology
You can think about it the other way around. Something that is meaningful to us, like a word or sentence can easily be converted into bits.
As an example, we often talk in bytes, where one byte is simply 8 bits (like an 8 letter word, but only 0s and 1s).
With one byte, you can represent 2^8 = 256 different values. Now you can essentially decide what each of those values represent, e.g. assign one to each letters and so on. (So maybe 01101000 is “h” and 01101001 is “i”) meaning i could spell “hi” by sending the message 01101000 01101001.
Building blocks don’t mean anything when they’re in the toy basket. When you arrange them certain ways, they mean things. Like this row of rectangular blocks is the castle wall and this cylinder with triangle on top is a tower.
Bits by themselves don’t mean anything. But when you arrange them in certain ways, they can mean something. The “certain ways”is where things get complicated.
If your question is “how 1 and 0 can produce what a computer to” I can give you two answer
First juste go to nandgames.com, it will explain you how from a very basic circuit called “and gate” you can achieve a computer. It does a very good job at making you find how to do it
Second is my simplified version.
Human found a way to make electronic do very specific task like “add this and that” “compare these two” “read that case of memory” it’s hard to do a lot of stuff but enough to give name to these tasks (called instruction).
It became what we know as assembly, the closest language to the computer still in use.
Then other programmation langage appeared, more complex (can do more elaborated task like showing image…) But it was a program who translated the word to Assembly (which was almost juste a bunch of instruction in order to do for the computer). And then even more elaborated language used the language (first Python interpreter was in C which is compiled in assembly which is interpreted by the computer) and so one.
Bits are small amounts of memory. Bits, bytes, megabytes ect. The 5 MB manual on the bobcat i downloaded today was pretty helpful.
Bits aren’t meaningful. What they produce is meaningful.
If I use the bits in a computer to generate a picture of my wife on a monitor, then I will value the computer and its “bits” for being able to provide me something valuable to me.
I don’t care about the bits themselves. No one does. They are only tools in a process that creates things of value.
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