Silicon Awakes

I have taught many things to idiots. I showed them how to calculate sines and cosines (http;//wehner.org/fpoint ), how to make animate pictures (http://www.wehner.org/tools/animate ) and 3D (http://wehner.org/tools/anna ).

The idiots were made of STONE.

Yes - they were silicon chips. They were "Central Processing Units" (CPUs). They were so dumb that they gave me no help. They just sat there waiting for me to tell them what to do - and I had to understand the procedures down to the finest detail in order to teach them.

If I told them wrong, they would obediently follow the wrong instruction. Then the computer would "hang", or do crazy things.

So I learned patience.

Given enough understanding, there is virtually nothing you cannot do with silicon. In the future there may be other semiconductors - possibly boron trinitride - but for now, silicon is king.

The methods used on one kind of semiconductor, however, will be valid for all time. It is not the details of the program on a specific chip that are important, but the ideas behind them.

Inevitably, we analyse our own minds as we work. We have to learn to distinguish belief from knowledge. Belief is a "feeling" in what Freud called the "Preconscious" (Vorbewu