Multiple Reability

Multiple realizability is an idea that arose in the 60s and 70s because ideas about computation were being developed. In philosophy, this got imported as the idea that it doesn't really matter what kind of hardware you're working with, but matters as the software. So a Turing machine is just a big tape with squares on it and a head that moves around. It's basically a mathematical abstraction. And philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor generalize from this to think that we don't have to think about the hardware.