It's sometimes difficult to mentally process how software differs from hardware, once it's stored on the hardware. I guess it's the shape of the memory structure.
It's then considered "virtual", but it's something you can actually look at, in the physical realm, by checking the logic gates. It's just very small.
Is a pattern made out of tiny parts "virtual"? The pattern is very concrete.
I think about this from time to time. We don't often realize it, but software manifests in the physical world, at least in the configuration of the computer's memory hardware. Before SSDs it was all written to disks.
Even electrons have weight.
In some respects, computer hardware is like Aristotle's Prime Matter, and the software contains the Forms. Only together do they have substance.
i'd go further and say the patterns are primordial
arithmetic's rules, for example, addition, this is very primary to many of the more complex patterns, time sequencing too, since i'm bringing up arithmetic, both subtraction and division are reverse temporal operations, the time-mirror of their opposite add and multiply
Yeah you could probably write software—certainly its operations on hardware—in terms of math, just like we can frame any physical system in mathematical terms.
Is the math itself fundamentally real in the same way the electrons it describes are? Or does math exist purely in our minds as we grasp the patterns of the natural world?
real does not mean the same thing as concrete
real and concrete both have effects but real is something that exists in the absence of concrete manifestation
real *should* just mean a thing that concurs with principle, but this also gets muddled up with "subjective" and attempts to cast a net over a "real" phenomena for which you don't have a model (principle) that matches it
Oooh! Another good one! Math is a language, and language is a productive process. Axiomatic systems are the products of math as a language, but math resists a complete formalization because language itself resists a complete formalization - implying that language itself is complex - entangled and embedded from within the context it was born.
From what I've been thinking about - axiomatization of an environment must be done by a system with goals to accomplish them, but by definition it is a simplification and kills complexity. The problem with this is that you can't go from simple to complex because (hyper?) complexity is the state of the natural world.
Thinking relationally, software is what tunes the response of hardware - it defines the 'interaction space', of which any system can be defined in principle through enumerating all possible responses and how they are activated.
That tuning must have a physical manifestation, I should think.
Exactly, the software itself defines the physical manifestation in hardware, it fundamentally constructs and orients channels for electrons to flow through.
Maybe not electrons, but at some level the axioms that govern computer architecture provide a space of possible interactions given a set of iterated instructions and software constrains that space.
it may well do but that is consequential not causal
