"through out history there are groups of people just like that. Nazi's,(insert race) supremeists, etc that try or desire to limit humans to one hair, skin, eye color combos which they view as superior."
It's also interesting that the Nazis did not invent their 'racial hygiene' ideology out of whole cloth but were inspired in many ways by the preexisting Eugenics movement in the United States ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics ) . Of which Margaret Sanger ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger ) of Planned Parenthood was a leading and controversial figure.
The history of 'reproductive rights' (where 'right' is usually constructed, oddly, as 'the right NOT to reproduce') is deeply intertwined with some fairly nasty ideological bedfellows, and the connections are still not generally acknowledged. Good luck sorting out what's really going on.
That's my biggest concern with embedded video support in Firefox. When everyone uses Flash, it's easy to stop random web pages from auto-running a pointless and loud video clip in my ear. I just install Flashblock. Can I do the same for Theora?
I ask because I just today had a movie review site auto-play a video and I went 'what the? am I running IE again?' It was truly a retro 1990s experience, and not in a good way.
You probably also had a Laserdisc in the 80s, were first in line to buy *both* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and have a $100,000 valve amp with gold cables for your reel-to-reel studio format player .
"You cannot criticise something, be it a movie, book, song, painting, or a solar powered machine, for failing to do something it does not set out to do."
Sure you can. You can criticise it for trying to do something stupid that should never have been attempted in the first place.
"Your atomic bomb blew up and killed everyone. Er, that's not so great actually" "Hey! You can't criticise my work of SCIENCE!"
"Your installation artwork is pointless and takes up space." "Hey! You can't criticise my work of ART!"
Re:like cross-bows in the middle ages
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention the American Civil War, where the Gatling gun was first deployed.
Cf Strategic Computing Initiative
on
Wired for War
·
· Score: 1
I find it interesting to compare this stuff with its first incarnation - or perhaps the seed from which it grew - the infamous 1980s Strategic Computing Initiative.
Back in 1983, the DoD was asking for natural language, speech, machine vision, autonomous vehicles, and automated battlefield management systems to happen on precise schedules within ten years, which would make both the original Terminator movie and WarGames into fairly conservative extrapolations of sober science of the era. It didn't happen that fast, which led to the AI Winter and the downfall of Lisp and the rise of the lolintertubes instead - but it looks like parts of that 'autonomous battlefield robot' vision still *are* happening.
You can scoff, but it's true, if you look at the actual history, that the driving force behind post-WW2 US technological development was in fact the military. ICBMs in particular. The 'civilian' space program such as NASA was a pretty shiny patch on the top of the ugly robot city-killers, so that the US could claim that they were in space 'for peaceful exploration'.
But that was mostly a lie. Most of the space stuff was dual-use. The Saturns are one of the exceptions - but if you look you'll see USAF's Manned Orbital Laboratory behind the Apollo Applications Program, and USAF and NRO's spy sat launch requirements (polar orbits) driving the Space Shuttle requirements to such a degree that the final design was a huge, bitterly hated, compromise.
For egregious examples, look up GRAB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRAB) and TDRSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDRSS) . Notice how much classified military stuff exists in 'pure science' missions. Then wonder what else *hasn't* been acknowledged.
NASA's peaceful space program is not all puppies and rainbows.
"There is next to no XML in anything I've ever written, most communication between services is done in JSON - I doubt there would be much XML in Wave either."
Since it runs over XMPP, which runs over XML, you'd be wrong.
If you don't understand HTTP, you probably won't be much good when it comes to debugging your web application. Heck, even writing little PHP apps you need to care A LOT about HTTP headers and cookies.
And if you don't understand TCP/IP, you'll be *really* lost when you see one of those sets of four numbers with dots between them...
The thing that gets me is, Lotus Notes was basically doing the same thing as Google Wave years ago. Distributed persistent documents. A brilliant idea, flawed in execution (and the fact that it wasn't open source so you only had one company to get it from, so it got locked into its own ghetto).
Wave is another attempt at the concept, hopefully learning a few things and doing it simpler, but... surely Roy Ozzie of all people should see the similarities.
Threading isn't any kind of solution. Threading is the problem. Languages like C++ which think threading can be made safe at any speed, are also the problem.
"Ohm's law is demonstrable to a freshman in the first week of school (high school or college) with 19th century instruments. The basis of the argument here is that absolutely no concepts of philosophy can be conveyed so directly. Doesn't this say more about philosophy than it does about communication?"
Yes, that assertion worries me too. If the material is so complex (or self-contradictory) that it can't even be expressed as a succinct thought by someone skilled in the art... then how does the philosopher know that it's true? I don't buy it.
And that's coming from a Reason Magazine blogger too, therefore presumably an admirer of Ayn Rand, who famously did summarise her whole philosophy in four sentences.
"Defining a word is metalinguistic. Defining a word about metalinguistics takes it up a notch."
Not really. "Word-defining". There. I just committed an act of meta-meta-linguisticst. Oh wait, "definition" already exists in the language. Isn't that interesting? Plain everyday English is *already* a meta-meta-linguistic language.
Actually you only need one level of meta. Once you have nouns and verbs for concepts like "word", you're already there.
Natural language is pretty neat like that. Of the computer languages, only Lisp (or Joy) really starts to approach it for self-referentiality. And it turns out that self-referentiality seems to make a language *simpler*, not more complex - because you need fewer special-case constructs.
With that caveat, I agree with almost everything else you said. Buckminster Fuller and David Bohm would also agree. Both were in favour of plain language communication, glimpsed the deep simplicity at the heart of apparently complex concepts, and were deeply concerned with the tendency of modern culture to over-specialise and fragment language into elitist ghettos for no good reason.
"The cells of the brain (and the entire human body) have characteristics that differ significantly from other kinds of cells, and the structure in which brain (and body) cells are organized is important as well."
Obviously. But surely the structure and characteristics of those cells, and the spatial connections between them, is strictly implied in the words 'nothing more than'? Nothing more than also means 'precisely equal to', and you can't have a structured set of data be be precisely equal to some other structured set of data.
The works of Shakespeare may be nothing more than a sequence of Roman letters, but it is the *precise sequence* of those letters which make them the works of Shakespeare. Nobody ever argues that because Hamlet is 'just' a sequence of letters that we could scoop out those letters and replace them with the letters from Dr Seuss' 'The Lorax' and have them be the same work. Any more than one would say that even though the Linux kernel is precisely the same as the sequence of bytes representing it, that you could replace those bytes with/dev/rand and have the program be the same.
So why would you think of arguing the same for the human brain?
However, it seems to me that the mind-brain question is much more interestingly like asking whether the *thoughts* of Shakespeare can be limited to being 'nothing more than' or even 'precisely equal to' the *written works* of Shakespeare, which is a very different thing indeed.
"A number stored on a collection of flipflops is physically represented by their states, but its identity is not physically encoded anywhere. There is no physical connection that makes a flipflop state map to the logical value of zero or one; these are arbitrary, assigned by us for the purpose of computation. Likewise, there is no physical reason to group a collection of bits into a number, no physical reason to interpret them as a 1, 2, or 4 byte integer, no physical reason to interpret them in LSB or MSB format."
That's a good argument, but I don't agree that it's correct. In fact I think a little thought can serve to invalidate it.
If you look at a single instant in a running computation - a snapshot in time of a single register, say - yes, you couldn't determine from that what voltage level indicates '1' and what indicates '0', which ordering LSB/MSB is correct, etc.
However. That's an illusion, because we're dealing with systems embedded in space-time which are processes, not just disconnected snapshots of state. When you look at the changing state of a physically-realised computer over time, you will notice converging patterns of behaviour, and it's that *behaviour* which gives the semantics for the physical representation of numbers.
For instance: a 01 bit and a 10 bit that enter a black box device which emits a 11 bit... after a while, and in context, it would appear sensible that that device is a binary adder. (It could also be a logical 'or', so there's certainly ambiguity here... but if you had more bits and you saw over time that 001 000 == 001, 001 001 == 010, etc... then you would be able to generate from those observations the semantics / truth table of binary addition.
More obviously, if you have, say, a voltage pattern arbitrarily represented as '0101' in a aparticular register and it was always correlated with, say, a motor moving five inches... you now have a direct physical *semantic* definition of number, with no human observer or mind required. In this instance, '0101' in this place literally does MEAN 'move five inches' because there is a causal relationship between the one and the other.
I don't know if philosophers agree with this definition of 'meaning' but it works perfectly well for me. Meaning or semantics is a causal relationship between one entity and another, regardless of any outside entity's ideas about symbol mapping. Meaning is connection, nothing more or less.
That's how debugging programs works, anyway. The programmer's hardest job is clearing their mind of invalid symbol/meaning associations and working out what the *computer* really 'thinks'... in other words, what one entity is *really* causing to happen in another entity. A philosopher or deconstructionist literary theorist might think they can stare at that '0101' and say 'I hereby deem you to mean VANILLA SUNDAE'... but that's not a 'real' meaning because it's not a causal relationship obeyed by physical reality.
OTOH, if a programmer writes in BASIC 'A$="VANILLA SUNDAE" then now they have established a legitimate meaning relationship between "A$" and the string "VANILLA SUNDAE"... because they've create a real, actually-existing, causal relationship.
And that's all we need to create 'meaning' out of 'purely mechanical' components, I think.
However, I believe there's something else going on with the mind/brain connection than with the computer/software connection, because of 150 years worth of evidence about psi and altered states of cognition, where information is being transferred without regard to the normal laws of physics. See http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922 for the gory details and more footnotes than you can poke with a sharp stick. But I think the general idea of 'meaning is connection' is well established.
"As a programmer, I must point out the obvious analogy: "the computer is still nothing more than a collection of transistors", and reply that if that were so, nobody would have to argue whether it is better to run Linux or Vista."
Huh?
See, this is why I am not a philosopher. That statement is trivially refutable, verging on nonsense, to me.
1. A computer - or at least its CPU - IS nothing more than a collection of transistors. 2. And yet, the software it runs DOES determine how it operates. 3. These are the foundations of computer science.
Obviously, the defined behaviour of 'transistor' implies 'a thing which stores electric current and modifies its behaviour based on both its 'hard' interconnections and its 'soft' electrical state. Therefore, the existence of such a thing as a single 'transistor' implies the existence of both 'hard' wiring and 'soft' state - memory. Memory implies storage, and from knowing the wiring of those transistors, the initial state of the storage, and the rules governing how each transistor changes state, we can deduce everything about how they operate together and how they behave as a unit.
We call these 'circuit diagrams' in the biz, you know.
Also trivially obviously, 'software' is very much a product of the physical computing platform it runs on. Any actually existing computer as 'a collection of transistors' - bearing in mind that it is THE NATURE OF THAT CONNECTION which is extremelly important, it's not just a 'bag' of transistors but a 'graph' - but you know the importance of precise logical connection because you''ve done philosophy right? - has certain very obvious properties - discrete voltage levels, which imply a binary code, which imply registers, which plus decoding logic imply opcodes, which plus a sequencer imply a von Neumann machine
I really truly do not understand this argument that 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts'. No, it's not. At least not in this example. The whole literally *is* the sum of its parts. That's the definition of 'whole'. Understand the parts of a computer, and you understand - at least in theory - everything about it. Your understanding may be limited by your capacity for observation and memory and deduction, but not the system *itself*.
Let me say that again. The behaviour of a system does not 'emerge' in some mysterious manner from its configuration. ITS BEHAVIOUR IS ITS CONFIGURATION seen in spacetime.
Now. Difficulties come in because real computers are actually only approximated by their circuit diagrams and real programs are only approximated by the statements we make about what they *should* do and are *attempting* to do. The state space of a computer if you include the atomic-level (not even quantum-level) interconnections of all its bits is pretty darn big so in practice we don't look at it, we make simplified models and look at those models instead.
And 'computer science' as a discipline is less about what *actual* computers do and more about what people think idealised *representations* of computers 'ought' to do. About formal models of functions and computability, etc.
So perhaps in that sense you could say that the *formal model* of an idealised computer is somehow 'different' from *the actual computer* - but to say that there's a difference between hardware and software *themselves* makes no sense to me.
Software (electrical state) is a subset of the properties of hardware. That's how come we can *execute* it on hardware.
"I wonder if Copyright shouldn't be extended indefinitely, but with derivative works permitted and protected immediately so that anyone is free to reinvent anything any time, but nobody is free to reproduce anything without permission ever. It would promote similar, competing works... But still prevent people from gaining from the labor of others. They would have to do something."
And that's why nobody performs Hamlet these days. The licence fees to the Shakespeare Foundation (a TimeWarner/Murdoch company) are just too steep.
On the other hand, "Revenge of the Danish Prince Bob Part IX: Now With Rockets" is doing pretty well in off-off-off-Broadway.
Slashdot Mirror
"That is the problem with the UN, it was designed to ensure nothing actually got done. "
s/got done/got done that the permanent Security Council Members don't approve of.
"The fricking French have a veto."
Also they have nukes.
There's an interesting correlation between the UN permanent Security Council members and the post-WW2 states who got nukes.
I wonder if that's entirely a coincidence?
On a completely unrelated topic, I wonder why states like North Korea and Iran are suddenly deciding that getting nukes might be a useful thing?
"through out history there are groups of people just like that. Nazi's,(insert race) supremeists, etc that try or desire to limit humans to one hair, skin, eye color combos which they view as superior."
It's also interesting that the Nazis did not invent their 'racial hygiene' ideology out of whole cloth but were inspired in many ways by the preexisting Eugenics movement in the United States ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics ) . Of which Margaret Sanger ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger ) of Planned Parenthood was a leading and controversial figure.
The history of 'reproductive rights' (where 'right' is usually constructed, oddly, as 'the right NOT to reproduce') is deeply intertwined with some fairly nasty ideological bedfellows, and the connections are still not generally acknowledged. Good luck sorting out what's really going on.
"I'm tired of tolerance. "Lawful good" alignment is suicide for the rest of the world."
Mmm, chaotic evil. The breakfast of superpowers.
That's my biggest concern with embedded video support in Firefox. When everyone uses Flash, it's easy to stop random web pages from auto-running a pointless and loud video clip in my ear. I just install Flashblock. Can I do the same for Theora?
I ask because I just today had a movie review site auto-play a video and I went 'what the? am I running IE again?' It was truly a retro 1990s experience, and not in a good way.
"Am I "hardcore" for listening to lossless?"
Yes.
You probably also had a Laserdisc in the 80s, were first in line to buy *both* HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and have a $100,000 valve amp with gold cables for your reel-to-reel studio format player .
"Its like Ender's Game, turned into shitty hack sci-fi." ... "turned into"?
Ender == the original Mary Sue.
"You cannot criticise something, be it a movie, book, song, painting, or a solar powered machine, for failing to do something it does not set out to do."
Sure you can. You can criticise it for trying to do something stupid that should never have been attempted in the first place.
"Your atomic bomb blew up and killed everyone. Er, that's not so great actually"
"Hey! You can't criticise my work of SCIENCE!"
"Your installation artwork is pointless and takes up space."
"Hey! You can't criticise my work of ART!"
Not to mention the American Civil War, where the Gatling gun was first deployed.
I find it interesting to compare this stuff with its first incarnation - or perhaps the seed from which it grew - the infamous 1980s Strategic Computing Initiative.
Back in 1983, the DoD was asking for natural language, speech, machine vision, autonomous vehicles, and automated battlefield management systems to happen on precise schedules within ten years, which would make both the original Terminator movie and WarGames into fairly conservative extrapolations of sober science of the era. It didn't happen that fast, which led to the AI Winter and the downfall of Lisp and the rise of the lolintertubes instead - but it looks like parts of that 'autonomous battlefield robot' vision still *are* happening.
Little known science fact: the LHC *is* a bathtub, and the Compact Muon Solenoid is merely a frontage for a giant yellow rubber duck.
This will all be explored in Dan Brown's upcoming novel.
"I wonder what a carbon nanotube welder would get paid per hour. Much less an aluminum welder."
Well, of course. They'd be a lot smaller.
Exactly! The manned space program gives us all hope that one day we can rain death on whole other PLANETS.
You can scoff, but it's true, if you look at the actual history, that the driving force behind post-WW2 US technological development was in fact the military. ICBMs in particular. The 'civilian' space program such as NASA was a pretty shiny patch on the top of the ugly robot city-killers, so that the US could claim that they were in space 'for peaceful exploration'.
But that was mostly a lie. Most of the space stuff was dual-use. The Saturns are one of the exceptions - but if you look you'll see USAF's Manned Orbital Laboratory behind the Apollo Applications Program, and USAF and NRO's spy sat launch requirements (polar orbits) driving the Space Shuttle requirements to such a degree that the final design was a huge, bitterly hated, compromise.
For egregious examples, look up GRAB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRAB) and TDRSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDRSS) . Notice how much classified military stuff exists in 'pure science' missions. Then wonder what else *hasn't* been acknowledged.
NASA's peaceful space program is not all puppies and rainbows.
"There is next to no XML in anything I've ever written, most communication between services is done in JSON - I doubt there would be much XML in Wave either."
Since it runs over XMPP, which runs over XML, you'd be wrong.
Welcome to the pain.
If you don't understand HTTP, you probably won't be much good when it comes to debugging your web application. Heck, even writing little PHP apps you need to care A LOT about HTTP headers and cookies.
And if you don't understand TCP/IP, you'll be *really* lost when you see one of those sets of four numbers with dots between them...
The thing that gets me is, Lotus Notes was basically doing the same thing as Google Wave years ago. Distributed persistent documents. A brilliant idea, flawed in execution (and the fact that it wasn't open source so you only had one company to get it from, so it got locked into its own ghetto).
Wave is another attempt at the concept, hopefully learning a few things and doing it simpler, but... surely Roy Ozzie of all people should see the similarities.
Threading isn't any kind of solution. Threading is the problem. Languages like C++ which think threading can be made safe at any speed, are also the problem.
Featuring an Economic Model inspired by MONIAC:
http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-and-babbage-vs-the-economy/
"Ohm's law is demonstrable to a freshman in the first week of school (high school or college) with 19th century instruments. The basis of the argument here is that absolutely no concepts of philosophy can be conveyed so directly. Doesn't this say more about philosophy than it does about communication?"
Yes, that assertion worries me too. If the material is so complex (or self-contradictory) that it can't even be expressed as a succinct thought by someone skilled in the art... then how does the philosopher know that it's true? I don't buy it.
And that's coming from a Reason Magazine blogger too, therefore presumably an admirer of Ayn Rand, who famously did summarise her whole philosophy in four sentences.
"Defining a word is metalinguistic. Defining a word about metalinguistics takes it up a notch."
Not really. "Word-defining". There. I just committed an act of meta-meta-linguisticst. Oh wait, "definition" already exists in the language. Isn't that interesting? Plain everyday English is *already* a meta-meta-linguistic language.
Actually you only need one level of meta. Once you have nouns and verbs for concepts like "word", you're already there.
Natural language is pretty neat like that. Of the computer languages, only Lisp (or Joy) really starts to approach it for self-referentiality. And it turns out that self-referentiality seems to make a language *simpler*, not more complex - because you need fewer special-case constructs.
With that caveat, I agree with almost everything else you said. Buckminster Fuller and David Bohm would also agree. Both were in favour of plain language communication, glimpsed the deep simplicity at the heart of apparently complex concepts, and were deeply concerned with the tendency of modern culture to over-specialise and fragment language into elitist ghettos for no good reason.
Actually, add John Ralson Saul to that list too.
"The cells of the brain (and the entire human body) have characteristics that differ significantly from other kinds of cells, and the structure in which brain (and body) cells are organized is important as well."
Obviously. But surely the structure and characteristics of those cells, and the spatial connections between them, is strictly implied in the words 'nothing more than'? Nothing more than also means 'precisely equal to', and you can't have a structured set of data be be precisely equal to some other structured set of data.
The works of Shakespeare may be nothing more than a sequence of Roman letters, but it is the *precise sequence* of those letters which make them the works of Shakespeare. Nobody ever argues that because Hamlet is 'just' a sequence of letters that we could scoop out those letters and replace them with the letters from Dr Seuss' 'The Lorax' and have them be the same work. Any more than one would say that even though the Linux kernel is precisely the same as the sequence of bytes representing it, that you could replace those bytes with /dev/rand and have the program be the same.
So why would you think of arguing the same for the human brain?
However, it seems to me that the mind-brain question is much more interestingly like asking whether the *thoughts* of Shakespeare can be limited to being 'nothing more than' or even 'precisely equal to' the *written works* of Shakespeare, which is a very different thing indeed.
"A number stored on a collection of flipflops is physically represented by their states, but its identity is not physically encoded anywhere. There is no physical connection that makes a flipflop state map to the logical value of zero or one; these are arbitrary, assigned by us for the purpose of computation. Likewise, there is no physical reason to group a collection of bits into a number, no physical reason to interpret them as a 1, 2, or 4 byte integer, no physical reason to interpret them in LSB or MSB format."
That's a good argument, but I don't agree that it's correct. In fact I think a little thought can serve to invalidate it.
If you look at a single instant in a running computation - a snapshot in time of a single register, say - yes, you couldn't determine from that what voltage level indicates '1' and what indicates '0', which ordering LSB/MSB is correct, etc.
However. That's an illusion, because we're dealing with systems embedded in space-time which are processes, not just disconnected snapshots of state. When you look at the changing state of a physically-realised computer over time, you will notice converging patterns of behaviour, and it's that *behaviour* which gives the semantics for the physical representation of numbers.
For instance: a 01 bit and a 10 bit that enter a black box device which emits a 11 bit... after a while, and in context, it would appear sensible that that device is a binary adder. (It could also be a logical 'or', so there's certainly ambiguity here... but if you had more bits and you saw over time that 001 000 == 001, 001 001 == 010, etc... then you would be able to generate from those observations the semantics / truth table of binary addition.
More obviously, if you have, say, a voltage pattern arbitrarily represented as '0101' in a aparticular register and it was always correlated with, say, a motor moving five inches... you now have a direct physical *semantic* definition of number, with no human observer or mind required. In this instance, '0101' in this place literally does MEAN 'move five inches' because there is a causal relationship between the one and the other.
I don't know if philosophers agree with this definition of 'meaning' but it works perfectly well for me. Meaning or semantics is a causal relationship between one entity and another, regardless of any outside entity's ideas about symbol mapping. Meaning is connection, nothing more or less.
That's how debugging programs works, anyway. The programmer's hardest job is clearing their mind of invalid symbol/meaning associations and working out what the *computer* really 'thinks'... in other words, what one entity is *really* causing to happen in another entity. A philosopher or deconstructionist literary theorist might think they can stare at that '0101' and say 'I hereby deem you to mean VANILLA SUNDAE'... but that's not a 'real' meaning because it's not a causal relationship obeyed by physical reality.
OTOH, if a programmer writes in BASIC 'A$="VANILLA SUNDAE" then now they have established a legitimate meaning relationship between "A$" and the string "VANILLA SUNDAE"... because they've create a real, actually-existing, causal relationship.
And that's all we need to create 'meaning' out of 'purely mechanical' components, I think.
However, I believe there's something else going on with the mind/brain connection than with the computer/software connection, because of 150 years worth of evidence about psi and altered states of cognition, where information is being transferred without regard to the normal laws of physics. See http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922 for the gory details and more footnotes than you can poke with a sharp stick. But I think the general idea of 'meaning is connection' is well established.
"As a programmer, I must point out the obvious analogy: "the computer is still nothing more than a collection of transistors", and reply that if that were so, nobody would have to argue whether it is better to run Linux or Vista."
Huh?
See, this is why I am not a philosopher. That statement is trivially refutable, verging on nonsense, to me.
1. A computer - or at least its CPU - IS nothing more than a collection of transistors.
2. And yet, the software it runs DOES determine how it operates.
3. These are the foundations of computer science.
Obviously, the defined behaviour of 'transistor' implies 'a thing which stores electric current and modifies its behaviour based on both its 'hard' interconnections and its 'soft' electrical state. Therefore, the existence of such a thing as a single 'transistor' implies the existence of both 'hard' wiring and 'soft' state - memory. Memory implies storage, and from knowing the wiring of those transistors, the initial state of the storage, and the rules governing how each transistor changes state, we can deduce everything about how they operate together and how they behave as a unit.
We call these 'circuit diagrams' in the biz, you know.
Also trivially obviously, 'software' is very much a product of the physical computing platform it runs on. Any actually existing computer as 'a collection of transistors' - bearing in mind that it is THE NATURE OF THAT CONNECTION which is extremelly important, it's not just a 'bag' of transistors but a 'graph' - but you know the importance of precise logical connection because you''ve done philosophy right? - has certain very obvious properties - discrete voltage levels, which imply a binary code, which imply registers, which plus decoding logic imply opcodes, which plus a sequencer imply a von Neumann machine
I really truly do not understand this argument that 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts'. No, it's not. At least not in this example. The whole literally *is* the sum of its parts. That's the definition of 'whole'. Understand the parts of a computer, and you understand - at least in theory - everything about it. Your understanding may be limited by your capacity for observation and memory and deduction, but not the system *itself*.
Let me say that again. The behaviour of a system does not 'emerge' in some mysterious manner from its configuration. ITS BEHAVIOUR IS ITS CONFIGURATION seen in spacetime.
Now. Difficulties come in because real computers are actually only approximated by their circuit diagrams and real programs are only approximated by the statements we make about what they *should* do and are *attempting* to do. The state space of a computer if you include the atomic-level (not even quantum-level) interconnections of all its bits is pretty darn big so in practice we don't look at it, we make simplified models and look at those models instead.
And 'computer science' as a discipline is less about what *actual* computers do and more about what people think idealised *representations* of computers 'ought' to do. About formal models of functions and computability, etc.
So perhaps in that sense you could say that the *formal model* of an idealised computer is somehow 'different' from *the actual computer* - but to say that there's a difference between hardware and software *themselves* makes no sense to me.
Software (electrical state) is a subset of the properties of hardware. That's how come we can *execute* it on hardware.
"I wonder if Copyright shouldn't be extended indefinitely, but with derivative works permitted and protected immediately so that anyone is free to reinvent anything any time, but nobody is free to reproduce anything without permission ever. It would promote similar, competing works... But still prevent people from gaining from the labor of others. They would have to do something."
And that's why nobody performs Hamlet these days. The licence fees to the Shakespeare Foundation (a TimeWarner/Murdoch company) are just too steep.
On the other hand, "Revenge of the Danish Prince Bob Part IX: Now With Rockets" is doing pretty well in off-off-off-Broadway.
"I drive a bagel slicer to work."
You must have interesting parking stories.