What Makes My Wife Intelligent?

This distinction between hardware and software is, i think, confusing people. It's certainly not obvious to someone who hasn't thought a lot about this that the analogy of computer hardware and software actually applies to biological systems. So i think you need to define what sopware is in this case, and how it relates to the physical world. What is computation, and how is it that thinking about what atoms do, can conserve the facts about what minds do? These are really ortant foundational questions you ask. If you just look at a blob of stuff at first itit seems almost nonsensical to ask whether it's intelligent or not. Yet, of course, if you look at your loved