This question has bothered me for the better half of the last decade and sometimes I wonder if it's best not to question sorcery but curiosity takes over and I go down the rabbit hole.

I think I really understand the crux, the pain with which you’ve posed the question so I won’t be answering with digital logics but rather with analogies.

Let’s try to invent a hypothetical rudimentary computer with..

Bell’s Telephone…

Marconi’s Radio,

Edison’s Kinetoscope (or any motion picture pre world-war 2)

..and a simple calculator (and remember the word Keystroke. It is one of the major concepts which explain the crux of the software-hardware conversion.)

None of the above archaic inventions have software in them yet we can almost imagine a working computer made out of those parts. Combine the telephone, radio, kinetoscope, calculator (this time with more buttons for fancier algebras and calculus which is akin to modern day keyboard) and you ALMOST have a computer with no software but it almost works like a computer for an average joe.

This brings me to my first controversial statement:

THERE IS NO SOFTWARE.

I have been at pain just thinking about this because everytime I ponder upon this question, my eyes are rolling over the screen of my laptop when in fact all this time I should have been looking at motherboard and asked, “Ok I just moved the trackpad, pressed the buttons (which are really sensitive in today’s laptops which complete/block a circuit hence certain 0Vs and 5Vs can or cannot pass through. Every action has a corresponding electro-magnetic phenomenon in this realm) and voila! A program was compiled.

Now let’s combine a few more fancier components on this rudimentary computer with ancient non-software inventions such as network cards, Wi-Fi Adapter, Bluetooth Adapter, Speakers, Storage drives etc which leads me to another important point:

Each major component has a FIRMWARE pre-installed. In other words the 0Vs and 5Vs are etched onto it using lithography and/or other techniques. Again a FIRMWARE is a physical fixed “grooves” of 0vs and 5Vs which ALMOST cannot be changed. Now imagine there is a power button which allows the flow of electrons which passes through these fixed 0Vs and 5Vs aka FIRMWARE which results in our telephone, radio, calculator and now a fancy color tv to BOOT up.

But now we also have Input/Output (I/O) Components such as a mouse or a keyboard. Remember the keystroke I mentioned earlier. Every physical keystroke or a mouse-press combined with the magic in the paragraph above results in the interaction that leads us to believe that there is a SOFTWARE but there is none. Every software is information DECODED from the physical realm and DISPLAYED on screen which brings me to my second controversial statement:

THERE IS ALWAYS A PHYSICAL INTERACTION

And this is the important one. You can pretty much agree that a mouse/keyboard press is a physical interaction.. but how about that application you downloaded over the internet, right? Think about it, even in that case you moved your trackpad and pressed the unzip button on the screen. You MOVED something. But by then these FIRMWARES have given control to the OS (that means a fixed set of 0Vs and 5Vs has now “occupied” your space)

Just a quick sidenote: This is one of the reasons all major manufacturers pre-install the OS. It means the whole firmware giving control to another software (Again 0vs and 5Vs passing/blocking-> Operating Sytem) is ALMOST fixed (you can always switch from windows to linux later) and what we think of as SPACE is nothing but a fixed set of 0Vs and 5Vs occupied. Otherwise there is no real concept of “space” like a physical room has.

Ok back to the main point. These trackpad movement, keystrokes are all PHYSICAL and we get confused because by this time there is a lot of abstraction and layers and layers of it and our eyes are hovering over the screen and not the motherboard.

But what about something downloading over the wifi.. no physical interaction there, right?

Oh.. but there is. Every wifi signal carries with it energy(photons) which can move electrons on the sensitive component present on your laptop. (Think photoelectric effect for a rudimentary understanding). A PHYSICAL interaction between photons (electro-magnetic waves) and electrons.

What about neural computing?

Your brain too sends out current, in this case the components are attuned to other voltage levels. But there is a physical interaction.

So again. THERE IS ALWAYS A PHYSICAL INTERACTION. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS.

Always!

Once you realize that there is no software and there is always a physical interaction, your digital logic, microprocessor, microcontroller and computer architecture subjects explain the rest.