Digital computers basically work on TTL -- transistor-totransistor logic. This means that every choice is reduced in the final analysis to a two-valued decision -- yes or no, 1 or 0, true or false, high or low voltage. This kind of either or thinking has been smoothed over by lots of complex algorithms to imitate life to some degree. There is no quality assessment in digital computation, also. There is only stimulus-response numerical logic.

But when life thinks, it thinks in terms of infinite scales of very large numbers of qualities, not just quantities, and it furthermore (when it is in good shape) can be aware ofitself being aware.

A digital computer can pretend indefinitely, but will never achieve that condition. Setting a flag to "I am aware=true" because, say, there was an input on a video bus input is not the same thing by orders of magnitude.

But from what I know of computer science, it is not the case that we designed computers like we thought our brains worked. We designed them to be von Neumann machines, separating storage, processing, program data and short-term memory. THis was based on high-level design philosophy developed in the early days of cybernetics by John von Neumann, who coined the term cybernetic.

The design decisions are a natural outgrowth of the very binary limitations inherent in switches and transistors. Note that transistors CAN be used for infinite-gradient responses, and are so used in audio systems which are not digital, but they are not used that way in most computing devices. There is a branch of computer science devoted to analog-based computers, but it is not widely known or pursued despite the fact that it offers many possibilities binary systems do not.

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