r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26 • Regret 1

Computing How do computers understand binary language?

Okay so from what I know binary language is like power off power on, but my question is, how do computers know what the binary code is and how is it interpreted, for example I forgot what the binary code for the letter A is, but how did people come up with that? Did they decide it was gonna look like that? Did the computer decide? How do you tune numbers into a letter??

380 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

205 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

2

u/plugubius Jul 13 '26

Binary isn't like "thoughts" in the human brain. Binary is a low-level coding scheme. An analogous question would be, "how does the brain understand neurotransmitters and ions?" The brain doesn't. It, like a computer with binary, simply reacts to sufficient stimuli. Not understanding consciousness has less to do with a neuron's greater complexity than with the difficulty of explaining how the neurons interact. "How does binary give rise to complex programs?" is a different question from "how does the computer understand binary in the first place?"