We can talk to rocks

Last month I reviewed All the Light We Cannot See; one of my favorite elements of the book is one of the youthful's character's fascination with science.  Seen through the open-minded lens of childhood, scientific explanations of phenomena seem to him not to dispel or lessen the fantastical nature of the universe, but rather to make that mysticism even more profound.  It rekindled something that lived in me once, and since then I've been looking at certain aspects of our modern technological life with a rekindled sense of wonder.

silicon - the element from which many computer components are made

For instance, if you really think about it, we've developed a language for communicating with inanimate objects - to communicate our desires to a constructed network of physical elements that will then do our bidding.  That's right - computers are really a way for human beings to talk to rocks.

Just think about it - as a species, we have learned how to manipulate the flow of subatomic particles by clever positioning of electric fields produced by particular combinations of chemical compounds.  We harness that electrical flow to sort human-generated input, push it through multiple layers of interpretation, tracing the flows of these electrons until they actually instigate physical changes in the arrangement of microscopic switches that encode binary information on a physical server perhaps thousands of miles away from the location where our thoughts are being produced.  We have crafted a mechanism for storing millions of thoughts in the rocks that we pull from the ground.  Who can say the world isn't a magical place?

And that really only describes the first layer of digital architecture.  We've moved far beyond the elementary storage of information that can be recalled an interpreted by non-human entities; we've designed non-human entities that can follow commands we issue, that can combine inputs from their human masters with digitally stored information and data collected from its surroundings to execute tasks and make decisions.

I don't know how to go on without belaboring the point, so I suppose I'll leave it at that, but doesn't it just seem like if you squint your eyes enough that science and magic, logic and mysticism are just two different languages for describing the same multi-faceted reality?