There are some complexities you seem to be overlooking - especially regarding the direction of motion of currents, and the like. What exactly do you mean by "freeze the CPU"?
Very interesting point. Digital circuitry inputs electricity in analog form and, through the miracle of electronics, outputs a digital signal. So that although at a deep level a computer consists of electrons flowing and sloshing around; but at the level of the computer, it's crisp 1's and 0's.
The way it's done is with a system clock. The clock is a specialized circuit that lets out one tick every tiny time interval. When you hear about the cpu in your computer being rated at 3.0GHz, that means its clock sends out a little tick 3 billion times a second.
Now every other circuit in the computer is keyed to the clock tick. At each tick, a low-level machine instruction executes in the cpu; causing the cpu to flip certain bits in its registers and/or transfer bit patterns from its registers to or from memory.
After the completion of each instruction, we could take a snapshot of the state of the cpu and memory. To freeze the cpu means to just take that snapshot. Hardware engineers who design cpus most likely have a special circuit that does literally freeze a cpu. A computation is just a sequence of snapshots starting from some initial state.
That's exactly what digital computers are, and what they do.
Whether or not the human brain is a digital computer is not relevant - it is a physical object, and it can be in principle "frozen", its every detail of physical status duplicated, as with a CPU.
Oh but this is NOT true; or at the very least, it's very far from being known. We have no theory of how the brain works from one instant to the next. There's no proof it's digital at all and in my opinion it isn't.
You are making a metaphysical assumption about the nature of the world. Your assumption goes far beyond anything known to contemporary physics.
If you would agree that you are making an assumption, I'd grant you the point for sake of conversation. But if you claim this assumption as a scientific truth, you are misinformed about that. In the physical world we do not have a concept of an "instant."
We only have instants in our mathematical models. In the real, physical world ... we simply do not know.
The Go playing computer I mentioned presents the same kinds of "mysteries" to analysts as human Go players present. And knowing all about how its hardware and software are functioning at any given moment does not tell you what you need to know, to explain its play of the game.
This may be true, although in fact even the most advanced neural net runs on conventional hardware and its operation can be described as a sequence of states of the cpu and memory. Sure it's awesome how Alpha Zero works but that does not imply anything about metaphysics!
That would not help you very much in analyzing the play of the game, with the 9-dan Go playing computer.
You would not be able to tell, from that, why it was making the moves it was making.
Yes ok. I agree with your observation, but I don't see this as being as meaningful as you do.
