Computers are one of the greatest inventions of us human beings. Period. Anyone who is alive today, has either witnessed the world-changing revolution led by computers firsthand or were born into the new world.

As such, I don’t need to mention the sheer magnitude of change that computers have brought about in the world in just about every single aspect of human endeavour. It’s truly amazing what has happened in the past few decades.

Sometimes I feel like we are computers ourselves in some way or the other. I mean, if you study how computers and we function, you will find some form of similarities.

At our cores, aren’t we data processing beings ourselves? Let me make it clearer by elaborating further and drawing out comparisons between us and computers.

A Living Computer?

If you look at a computer, it basically consists of two parts. The hardware part and the software part. The hardware part we can all see, touch and feel and includes things like keyboards, mouse, monitor, charging cables on the outside, and microprocessors, RAMs, hard drives, motherboard and the likes, on the inside.

The software part includes the operating system and the different softwares that we have installed on our computers. Together, the hardware and software make the computer possible and the millions of things by extension.

Now, let us take a look at our own bodies. We have the hardware part, like the bones, muscles, all our sensory organs, brains, and some hundred other things. Then there is the software part, which I think might be our consciousness or the soul. I don’t know what it is but there has to be something, I believe.

Together the hardware and software of us, make us alive. And just like how non-living things like plastic, glass, silicon, and other elements make a laptop ‘happen’, similarly, non-living things like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements makes a human come alive.

Are We Designed?

Now, this raises some really interesting questions in my mind. We designed computers. But a computer needs to be told what to do. Without that, it will just sit there, doing nothing.

In the future however, we might design much more advanced computers and systems like AI, that could be autonomous and take decisions on their own. When the robotics industry catches up, we might have human looking robots walking around completely autonomous.

So, could it be possible that we were designed ourselves too? Are we just some advanced computers/robots designed by even higher intelligent beings walking around the planet without realising that?

If so, who could they be? Some people tend to believe that life on Earth could be an alien experiment. Is there any chance that such a thing could be possible? Who knows, right? In any case, it can be really interesting to think about all this, even as a thought experiment.