Please don't take this as me dismissing what you're saying or trying to antagonize you, because I understand and appreciate where you're coming from. I'm just saying, on a philosophical and personal experience level, "I disagree and here's why."

Come on, man. We know each other well enough to have a civil disagreement or difference of opinion. Nothing you said is offensive, and I hope you don't think I'm attacking you. Not before, not now.

pretty much not interested in physics and math at all, I start at a deficit in this conversation.

That's the thing, though. We weren't talking about those. At least I wasn't. Philosophy is its own beast and my original comment wasn't really related to the article itself. Just wanted to know your reasons for disliking the hardware/software model.

Where as in physics, if someone says "this is an electron," while there's a lot to an electron and what it does, I often feel like the conversations around them are frustratingly limited.

1. In my – admittedly sophomoric – view, philosophy is about unanswerable things. When a question becomes answerable, it tends to form its separate thing while leaving unanswered bits to philosophy. That's how we got early medicine and chemistry: philosophers asking questions and finding answers so complex and nuanced that it necessitated making them different things. Once you go beyond it, that's philosophy (or pseudoscience, depends on how you go about it, but let's not muddle the picture further). We know that animals can be talked about as complex beings forming webbed relationships that are prone to cycles of change and homeostasis. But I'd bet that the very idea was preposterous at some point before ecology existed.

2. You likely wouldn't see electrons as something simple—or their portrayal limited—if you'd go as deep into physics as you did into biology. That's not me being snooty, it's just the fact anyone who geeked over something experienced at some point. Electrons are complex in their own way and are usually talked about in a specific context, just as you can be asked for the number of wild dogs in a county without losing sight of their magnificence is what I'm saying. You even said so here:

Because both, while being quite different, are genuinely enormous concepts both as individual components as well as their relation to everything else that they interact with.

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In another way, I think we're finally coming to a point, in mathematics, in language, in our ability to explore and discover things literally, and in our ability to explore and discover things conceptually, that we can really try to start understanding and describing things as they are, instead of relying on limiting and often misleading shorthand terms and descriptions.

We'll have to agree to disagree. Not that there aren't times when I would mind switching from what we have now to some direct mind-to-mind transfer of thought-forms.

You'd probably like Prof. Michał Heller, though. He's all about limits of examination and knowledge. Almost none of his books were translated, but this talk isn't far from the style of his books: