“You’re just a machine, so come clean, there’s rust in your heart.”
What’s All This Then? A.R.Kane
“ Between Zero and One. …
On a deeper level, which we might call the ontological level, the distinction between analog and digital disappears, as both ‘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. … If we were to look closely at what is happening with the voltage on a logic circuit, for example, we would find something quite interesting. One third of the values on a logic gate in a computer circuit lie between one and zero“
Andrew Smart. Beyond Zero and One – Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness. 2015.
“So what can we build with networks of switches? The network of switches paradigm is quite an expressive one. With just two states for each switch, on and off, it might not seem so expressive, but it turns out we can interconnect such switches to perform logic functions. Corresponding to natural language words such as “and,” “or,” and “not.” We can interconnect those logic functions to compare and manipulate strings of bits that represent text and to perform arithmetic on numbers represented in binary. In fact, networks of switches are capable of enormously rich manipulation of any information that is representable as sequences of zeros and ones. “
Edward Ashford Lee. Plato and the Nerd – The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology. 2017