[cal85]

I don't get it. I can see the human body as a system that comprises many input/output mechanisms. (And of course it's possible to emulate such a system given enough compute.) But how can you reduce it to a single "input/output mechanism"? Can you give an example input/output pair for this mechanism?

[xprn]

“The human body” is the single I/O mechanism. Everything deeper than that is an implementation detail

[cal85]

What kind of input/output are you talking about?

[gehwartzen]

Isn't it like saying the human body is a PC which has inputs (ports) and outputs (display, sounds) and the brain is like a CPU which has its own inputs and outputs? and you can always go further i.e the transistors have their own inputs and outputs

[cal85]

If that's what is meant by 'an input/output mechanism' then it seems like a pointless observation. It's just saying "you can do things to it, and you can observe things about it", which is true of pretty much anything.

[anthonypasq]

congratulations, you've just discovered the theory of computation

[simplify]

The problem is we don't know all the inputs, and there is much hidden state that we can't observe. So it isn't very useful to try and model a human after how a computer works.