Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 60 of 171
Ones and zeros mean nothing to the computer
From an electrical engineering perspective, the messy stuff in between one and zero does travel down wires, through chips, and in packets. Computer switches are actually not either on or off. Both physically and electrically, computer switches, transistors, or logic circuits just have different levels of voltage to which engineers have assigned the values one or zero. Further up the chain of abstraction to software, one then starts to mean “true” and zero means “false.” But without human beings writing and interpreting software code, the computer itself is merely moving electrically charged ions around. The computer programs that are encoded as ones and zeros and “interpreted” by the circuits and logic gates on the chips do not actually mean anything to the computer.