Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 63 of 171
Computers don't really compute
On a deeper level, which we might call the ontological level, the distinction between analog and digital disappears, as both concepts like “analog” and “digital” are ultimately epistemic tools humans have invented to describe natural and man-made signals. On a computer chip the only real thing that exists in the physical world as a physical phenomenon is (probably) electric charge—which might really turn out to be something else as well. The binary numbers one and zero are not real like mass or electric charge. A computer is not really performing computations at all. A computer is nothing more than some special transistors and electric gates. Even the iPhone 6 is not fundamentally different from the clunky early computers that filled up entire gymnasiums and only had a few bytes of memory. If we were to look…