I’ve been trying to figure out the most sustainable conceptual framework possible for “hardware” and “software” and lately I’ve been thinking in terms of energy and entropy/anti-entropic force. Basically, software is an emergent manifestation of electrons being moved and confined at many orders of magnitude of more volume and velocity than atoms with exponentially less energy required. I think it ultimately boils down to using energy, defined as anti-entropic force, to order the universe to store data and preserve the information they provide.
This is why I think that life, if understood as the naturally occurring application of energy in an anti-entropic manner, can exist as any permutation of something that uses energy. I think it’s entirely conceivable that human beings could exist on alternate substrates, be they carbon or otherwise. Considering every cell in our body is replaced every 13 years, and the atoms that our bodies occupy are constantly changing, it would seem that our existence arises as an emergent property of a very specific kind of order, facilitated by energy, regardless of the physical elements that are used to create that order. Energy and matter are, at their base levels, the same thing, and the universe as we experience it is the subjective realization of math itself.
Disclosure: I have posted this on my personal blog, www.rwhendrix.net. This is not being used for any monetary gain or credit in another academic course.