lucaspa I find it harder and harder to take anything you say seriously.
Two questions:
1. Why do I care?
2. Why is that? I notice you didn't give a counter argument or explain how my reasoning is faulty. Let's look at the facts and reasoning again.
Bit: "The bit is physically a transistor or capacitor in a memory cell, a magnetic domain on disk or tape, a reflective spot on optical media or a high or low voltage pulsing through a circuit." As I say, the individual transistor or capacitor is either "off" = 0 or "on" = 1. It is having thousands/millions of these transistors on a computer chip that allows you to program the computer to do things. So the smallest thing in a computer is the transistor.
If you go down to the smallest thing, you can't program it to "anything you want". All you can do is have a 0 or a 1. The only way you are able to program a computer is that it consists of these much smaller things (transistors) and you can get different
combinations of 0 and 1. For instance, with 2 transistors you can get 00, 01, 10, and 11. Add transistors and you get more complexity, finally the complexity you are counting on. But you get that only because you have many small things (transistors) within something larger -- the computer.
The same problem arises when you want to program it to be like a nerve cell or a muscle cell. Each of those works because it is made up of quadrillions of molecules (smaller things). It is the combinations and movements of those smaller things that have the cell act the way it does.
For instance, in a muscle cell you have strands of actin protein and myosin protein. Thousands of such strands. The contraction consists of these strands sliding past each other:
muscle contraction mechanism - Bing Images
That only works because a muscle cell is made up of quadrillions of molecules smaller than the muscle cell. If the cell itself is the smallest thing, then muscle contraction would have to be the cells sliding past each other. BUT, the cells are so large that you can't have that in a 1 inch tall human.