chapotraphouse

Who decides what a computer is for? The buyer? The manufacturer? The brand CEO? The government? The silicon chip in the CPU?

For the buyer a computer is a gambling and pornography viewer. For the manufacturer a computer is a series of parts assembled to the Brand's spec so it gives them enough money to continue operations. For the Brand CEO a computer is a symbolic token that increases shareholder value. For the government a computer is a surveillance device. For a silicon wafer, a computer is a change in voltage within its molecular structure (but I'm sure it doesn't think too much about that).

Can we say any one of these is objectively correct? If I attach rat neurons to a computer, is the rat a computer? Is the computer a rat? We inevitably arrive at the classic Heraclitus vs. Parmenides to ask whether existence is still or in motion.

If I step into the Mississippi river, and then return a year later to find that same shore is on an oxbow lake instead, am I stepping in the same river twice? If in another year it fills in with silt and is tilled into farmland, can I still step in the same river thrice? Certain US state borders would certainly have you believe so. They freeze old river courses in time to maintain purely ideological separations of physical space into discrete units. A line on a map can't stop the flow of water and silt any more than an engineer's drawing can stop tunneling quantum particles. Is that really a side-effect when quantum particles are meant to tunnel? Is heat generation really a side effect when heat itself is an effect of the chemical processes in MOSFET circuits? If they didn't release energy, they wouldn't work at all now, would they? Dissipation of energy is required to change the states of atoms and molecules. So how can we say a computer isn't meant to produce heat when it very clearly is?