A virtual machine is what you get when you impose a particular pattern of instructions (more literally, dispositions) on a real machine that has lots of plasticity—interacting parts that can be in many different states. Since a virtual machine does informational work, it can do the same job as a computer whose “moving parts” are state-changes in hardware by making all those state-changes in representations of those moving parts.The concept of a virtual machine is one of the most useful imagination-stretchers to come out of computer science, and having proved its worth in that domain, it is ripe for importing to other areas.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
