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Brains and Muscles Amplify Physical Events
And so do computers combined with other machines
Many people, including me, were surprised when the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded recently to some people for their work in Artificial Intelligence. In school we were taught science as a kind of hierarchy of phenomena, with physics at the bottom, then chemistry based on physical laws, and finally biology based on chemistry and physics. So how could artificial intelligence, implemented in computers, affect physics?
Without going into details about the particulars of this Nobel Prize, upon reflection it should become clear that our own brains and muscles, biological as they are, are marvelous amplifiers of physical events. Myriad microscopic events in the nerve cells of our brains combine to cause our muscles to contract and move our bones, leveraging them to move ourselves and fairly weighty physical objects on our own or in combination with other animals.
Furthermore, our brains and muscles produce subtle acoustic events (speech) and other physical events (written language, pictures, diagrams, videos) which affect brains and muscles of other people, ultimately combining to produce such momentous physical effects as the construction of machines, great cities, and computers, or the destruction of them with powerful weapons.
So brains and muscles, computers and machines can and do indeed produce hugely amplified physical effects.
Ponder that as you put your hands on your head and feel the warmth from your marvelous brain.