Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 151 of 171
Computers are like comic-book characters
one of the more counterintuitive parts to this argument is that computers themselves are not really performing computations. Manzotti argues that computers are simply “transferring electricity from one place to another and dissipating a huge amount of it. Computations and information are not inside the computer.” For example, think of a comic-book character. In the book, he seems to be speaking—but he is not really saying anything. In the same way, we treat computers as computational and informational agents, but computation and information are not intrinsic to computers—or, more important, to humans.