Or can the “software” cause changes in the hardware?
Completely flexible.
I will use an analogy of consciousness and the mind, take from it what you will. I have written elsewhere about “quantum holography” being a part of our minds and consciousness.
The mind is as a car, and our consciousness the spark that passes over the spark gap. Yes, Zarathustra and by proxy Nietzsche are inspirations yet there is a more literal point.
By the quantum nature of consciousness, an inverse hyperdimensional hologram of the car would flash in the arc of the spark gap.
By tenacity of will (determination of resolve, in the moment of now) one may bias the potentials of that holographic projection such that the embodiment of the car will “optimize.” With persistence and vision the self may be slowly yet gradually restructured in accordance with will.
The trick is having the right “information” (vectors and their unique vector spaces.) I found that before the Internet, even modernity, there were abundant stories of great characters and their mental capacities. Those most interesting are those who lived the most full lives.
Self is a technology of consciousness.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
The way I would put it is that all those different neurons with different kind of receptors on that are so "colored" that there are a set from one place to another so there is an overall gross wiring diagram in that a green bundle of wires go from the limbic system to the frontal lobe but the detailed wiring plan is not encoded in the DNA the way a CPU or an old school television set has a plan -- there is not enough data in the DNA to do that. Instead the brain self-organizes the detailed wiring by learning.
Circa 1970s there were bands touring (e.g. Yes) with music synthesizers that were made by wiring up voltage controlled oscillators, ring oscillators, filters and similar analog components.
That sort of musician was really an electronics technician who had to keep a fiddly piece of hardware working on the road. And that kind of synthesizer was often monophonic or not very polyphonic.
Yamaha's DX-7 was a digital simulation of that kind of synthesizer which was absolutely reliable and a musical instrument really has to be because you're going to put it in a case that is going to get banged around in shipping and expect it to work just fine wherever you go.
