Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

Yeah, okay, it's an AND gate.  But the inputs and outputs are both arbitrary.

They aren't arbitrary, but they are abstractions.  A could be hooked up to a spectrometer, whilst B is hooked up to an shaped aperture.  

Why should they be said to represent anything?  What do the magnetic states of my computer's RAM represent, in and of themselves?

Whatever the operation they're being pulled for calls for.  Whatever state the system left them in last time they were written to.

It could be a visual pattern, or sound, or anything else.  You need something which will establish context, but you want the RAM to BE that which provides the context.  Circles don't work, dude.

Any particular input could be any of those things, yes.  I'm not sure what you mean by needing something to establish context...you don't, the system works regardless.  

Hail mary, perhaps the difficulty you;re having with this is that when I say a logical operation is performed, or talk about logic, you think I mean the common logic as in debate logic, reason.  I don't.  A computer works -precisely- because it accepts it's input as "true"..particularly those inputs it's created itself, not true in a factual sense, true in the sense of machine logic.  So that bit above, about circles..you're going to hate this..... but, a program is a set of instructions to the system to loop it's own memory against it's functions (it's alu)... a cognitive circle. What you and I would call "irrational" if it were an argument in a debate. That might help explain why human beings are less than rational, their thinking machine begins with assumption which are simply declared to be true or false, feed them through a loop, and then accept the output as true..and probably use it for further input.

 Generally, theres also input from the user in the case of a pc...which would be input from the environment in the case of a human being...if we hold to the analogy.   

Your money is on the ghost in the machinery, then, since ALL those things represent nothing more than the interaction of states.  What gives them THEIR context?  Where does the ability of some states to establish context on other states come from originally?  The Big Bang?

What ghost?  The states are descriptions of physical components.  If by context you mean isolation....that is easily handled by bussing...such as a nerve, for example, running from your eye to your cerebral cortex rather than to your big toe (or for an identifier to be attached to any output from a specific center. Just another line of 1's and 0's).  There is an endless number of ways that the context of a logical operation can be and is established. The context of A AND B is that you have a visual C.  If it was A AND B from your nose...it would be an olfactory C. This sort of context?

Genetics goes to the structure of the components, system architecture. Different structures can be more or less useful, productive. Not just interactions between states but what range of interactions they're capable of performing. Environment goes to which system reps even survive to pass on version 2.0 but this one does, also, presumably, cause interactions of states..and the states of one assembly can be the cause for the states of another. If they couldn't, they couldn't comp..it wouldn't work.

Again, I want to mention that you keep objecting to my "hows" as though they were magical and not in evidence...while they are currently working, in your computer, right now.

@Jorg, the beauty of nets is that they don't -require- command centers. The output of the stages could simply rest, in registers. They're basic memory cells. They can be set manually (by, for example..a "command center") or they can run on a clock.