Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

A lot of how we conceive of computation today is based on observation of nature. It's the a logical conclusion to the study of logic, which is a line of inquiry that dates back to antiquity when sophistry was becoming a real institution and there was yet no real systematic way of determining if something was true other than whether it sounded true.

View on HN

I'm not sure that nature and logic are related in the way you imply.

A different question: Is not the atomic indivisible of computing no more that a simple switch? A binary? Is there an equivalent for this in the human mind/brain? I suspect not but would like to hear from someone who knows more.

Logical thought is the lines of thought that consistently lets us predict nature. Without nature there would be no such thing as fact, and without fact, there can be no logic, since a proposition can't be true or false.

>Is not the atomic indivisible of computing no more that a simple switch? A binary?

It is for the dominant computing paradigm currently in use, but that isn't a universal truth. As I understand it, we use binary logic primarily because it's more tractable for humans to think about and work with, not because it's the only option or even the best option in all cases. For instance there are plenty of analog computers in history, which are in some ways more closely related to biological "computers".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

To my understanding, the main advantage of digital over analog logic in computing was (and probably still is) its resistance to small errors. Nonlinear components like transistors and vacuum tubes aren't exactly the most consistent parts, and factors like ambient temperature can make even otherwise linear parts a little wonky. The "on/off" paradigm gives you a lot of tolerance of deviations from the ideal. Storage is also a big factor: it's really hard to store analog values, whereas on/off is approximately trivial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com