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Does Philosophy Have a Role in Computer Science?
Johannes Climacus asks: "It would seem to me that philosophical works of philosophers such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and Tarski could play a central role in a Computer Science curriculum, as they form a mathematical basis of modern CS and Math. Ethicists such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Mill, and Heidegger might also play a normative role in Computer Ethics and technology in general. However, I haven't seen any philosophical discussion in any of my theoretical computer science courses besides some simple logic. Is it the same elsewhere? How often do philosophical concerns play into Computer Science education as a whole? What role does (or could) philosophy have in Computer Science or Information Technology?"
In order to think outside the box of contemporary computer science.
Ummm... Guys?
I think the kind of enlightenment you get from philosophy is not the kind that is ICCCM compliant.
MTW
go read a biography or two of alan turing.
then you will have your answer.
Certain philospohical problems - the Mind/Body problem is one that leaps immediately to mind - have ramifications for CS, especially in AI applications.
On a more general level, logic is an important component of both fields.
Also, on an even more general level, anything worth doing is worth examining a little bit.
The Halting problem is one of those ideas that philosophy can help analyze.
Also discussions of how intelligent a machine is where philosophy can help answer pertinent questions.
Philosophy combined with psychology might also help in the field of software engineering, that is, how should the programs we write be meaningful to developers and users of the software.
If philosophy doesn't help answer those questions, then the ability to think about problems is always a useful skill to have.
..but, if I did, I'd major in philosophy. See, I've been working in IT for 10 years now, can code in many languages, can sys admin, can pretty much do anything I need to do from a practical standpoint. The thing is, those skills are nearly worthless in a lot of small/medium IT departments. The skill that keeps me employed is my ability to solve problems, very quickly and without major fallout.
It keeps me employable even if I'm not the best programmer/sysadmin/etc the world has ever seen, because I can pick and choose from the skills I do have to fix random problems as they come up. I usually have success. But, the neat thing about problem solving is that it's a universal skill that you can always get better at it. For example, once you learn a programming language, you know the language, the problem you encounter in becoming 'better' at that language is figuring out how to deal with problems and flush out theories, which takes critical problem solving skills that are better developed in philosophical study.
Anyway. That's my opinion. Science and Philosophy are very related, they just attract two diffrent types of people who don't always overlap.
So we can think outside the cube
Task Mangler
I just graduated from a Computer Science program at a small christian private school. Part of our curriculum involves a class on Technology and ethics. These etics are addressed in terms of a philosophical standpoint, as well as a Christian standpoint.
While a class on CS and philosophy would certainly be appreciated, it is probably a rare find. So why not do what a lot of others have done and just roll your own so to speak. Take classes outside of CS(which is something that could not hurt anyway) and use them how you see fit. I think you can even get it to count for credit if that is what you are worried about. I had to take 6 credits outside of CS on an *approved list* myself, and it seems that most advisors seem pretty flexible and as long as you can make a compelling case for it(and of course as long as you are not flunking your other courses).
Have fun and remember, study as many topics as you can while you are in college. You will probably be doing CS stuff for the rest of your life, but you may only be able to easily take a class on film theory or comparative literature while you are an undergrad...
Monstar L
IMHO, logic is math, not philosophy. Arguing the nature of reality, mind and humanity is all good, but doesn't have a thing to do with CS.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Xah Lee, is that you?
please, for the love of god.. most computer science departments are borderline invalid as it is, let's not involve the naive philosophers.
Of course.
When I first read textbooks on Object-Oriented Design, I found it amazingly similar to Plato's idea of Ideals, Substance and Attributes.
I think you are looking in the wrong place for an answer to your question. Computer Science and Information Technology coursework at the University level is what it is.
You may find the answer to your question in colloquium talks. My university's math department would hold them on Fridays and I found them very enlightening. The talks were good and the reaction of the audience gave me greater insight to the mind of mathematicians. You should try attending one.
GOBACK.
A couple of years ago this thesis was published at the CompSci department in Lund. It's 200 pages about component-oriented programming, segueing into almost a thousand pages about the moral and ethical ramification on computation in general. He did pass, but only just; many people thought it really was two theses in one, and that the philosophical part really should have been presented at the philosophy department, not in computer science.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
One of the more interesting electives I took doing my CS major was a "cognitive science" course which was basically an intersection between AI, cognitive psychology, and philosophy (PHIL 256 at University of Waterloo, IIRC).
So check the philosophy or psychology departments.
c.
Log in or piss off.
Philosophy is very important to the topics of security according to the good Dr. Spafford's graduate program:
r ogram/
http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/education/graduate_p
This is what The Man said about philosophy:
"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."
Two years ago, I started college as a computer science major at Georgia Tech. I hated it. I had a lot of programming experience before I even showed up, so the classes bored me; however, that wasn't what really bothered me. It was the lack of meaning in what I was studying. Don't get me wrong - the curriculum would have most likely turned me into an excellent programmer, but nothing more. Most problematically, my classes focused on practicality at the expence of exploring the subject in any real depth. I was bored not because the classes weren't interesting, but because they followed the same structure: they explored a single neatly carved-out role, and made damn sure never to leave that role. This was excellent preparation for a code monkey, someone who would be happy sitting at a computer day after day, churning out line after line of code. In a way, this is appealing. It would have pretty much guaranteed a comfortable life, with a hefty paycheck. But, intellectually, it just wasn't satisfying. I dropped out. I took a year off, kept programming in order to support myself, and went back to school at Hampshire College, where I'm studying philosophy, among other things. The among other things is key: the way the school is designed, every student gets to decide what they study and how they study it. In short, the school provides a basic, abstract structure, and lets each student fill in the details however they see fit. The most important part is that students are encouraged to combine disciplines. Why? Because there are connections everywhere. We've fleshed out various disciplines long ago; focussing on them, obsessing about them, is only going to hold us back. Now isn't the time to pick an area and focus on it; we've focused enough. Now is the time to focus on other things: on the connections between disciplines. To spend one's time solely within the computer science department or the philosophy department would be equally limiting. There are plenty of connections between philosophy and computer science, between sociology and computer science, between anthropology and quantum physics and religious studies. These days, we're encouraged to pick a job and stick to it. Highly-specialized labor is efficient. But it's also highly alienating, because once you gain even a cursory understanding of other fields you realize just how much you're missing out by wearing blinders all the time. Rather than honing out skills to one particular task that society demands we do (and for what? for efficiency? efficiency at what cost?), we owe it to ourselves to reexamine and reevaluate what society asks of us and how we might best contribute to society. That might mean studying things in a different way than ever before. The goal is to enrich not only our lives, but the lives around us, by exploring the world with undying curiosity.
Of course philosophy has a place everywhere and it's so ingrained that most of the time when someone stumbles on a philisophical thought they just pick themselves up and pretend that nothing happened (sorry Winston). Computer Science is like "could we do this" while Computer Philosophy is more of "should we do this". For example, Skynet. 8^p
Shh.
Philosophy and computer science are only wishfully held together by a select few in any official way. If you would like a more integrated curriculum I might suggest this.
Although from looking into it myself it looks like the program favors the analytic more. Also from talking with CMU's career office it sounded like most people ended up getting the same jobs that CS majors got. In other words it's not a gateway to something new and exciting except maybe impressing someone at a cocktail party.
Otherwise just do both separately and consider yourself better for doing it. The great philosophers were scientists and the great scientists were philosophers. So if you find yourself being philosophical, you are probably just a better scientist for it. Much of historical and contemporary philosophical literature is just the letters and notes of great scientists.
Proper cross education of philosophy and (hard) science would probably do both fields a lot of good toward bringing them both closer to reality.
I think a basic study of philosophy would probably widen most people's perspectives on life and be a generally worthwhile experience. Also, the study of different types of logic and numerical systems has been useful professionally, which could be considered branches of philosophy, though they're probably more commonly found in mathematics curriculums (in my experience, anyway). However, interesting as they may be in their own right, I've never found that Hegelian dialectics or the basics of epistemology have really helped me build distributed data models or network traffic prediction algorithms.
On the other hand, if I were working in, say, AI research, I can see where a working knowledge of epistemology might be useful, so YMMV.
My undergraduate CompSci degree (at Simon Fraser University, in Canada) actually required a philosophy course.
Having said that, the topic of the required course was philosophical logic. And logic, as we all know, is the foundation of all computational theory. It was pretty important class, IMHO. For instance, we learned of the predicate calculus as a pure logic tool very early (first semester), and later benefited greatly from that knowledge in our first CompSci algorithms course.
A colleague of mine majors in Mathematics and Computer Science and I major in Music and Computer Science. He told me one day that he thought math was most closely related to computer science. I had to argue, saying that math was more closely related to music due to the extensive use of pattern relations (sequences, etc). While this also applies to a computer, I told him CS more closely matched philosophy, where languages (for a human or computer) break down to consensual binary logic. Additionally, it seems that all problems in computer science are solvable by adding (the right) layer of abstraction. In this regard, one could group CS, philosophers, and modern physicists as those who work to find new ways of thinking to solve current problems.
Economics will dominate future chip design and software design. Not on the surface, but the underpinnings.
Imagine a future with multiple entities all operating. Many Adders, Multipliers, etc. Kinda like the cell but legion. Then each starts acting like market participants. eh?
Same with software. Muliptle threads, but in the thousands or millions. That is where the models will become the ones to describe them.
After that, philosophy will become very useful.
Cheers,
-b
I think it might well be. That link, by the way, was very interesting (though I'll admit I didn't read all of it, by a long shot).
And while I agree that it may be the same person, I'm not sure if he/she/it is a "kook" or not. The problem with posts like that is that it takes too long to sort out the "here's a kook making invalid points" people from the "here's a reasonable person making detailed but valid points about something I don't have time to care about at the moment" people.
I guess the upshot is, I'm glad I wasted a little time glancing through the post you linked to, and even more glad that I didn't waste even more time reading it in depth.
--MarkusQ
As it is with any technology, just because something CAN be done, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. Time and time again, history has shown that humanity lacks the wisdom to properly deal with technological advances.
Some philosophy teacher will surely turn this into a course. I imagine GT, where EVERYTHING is subjugated to engineering needs, could be one of the first if it's not already there. You could make it one of your required electives. Of course, a real philosophy person will rain on all our parades by telling us that this is already a class offering under a different name and those who change the name are pandering.
Now, who the hell are these people? Abandon all hope, ye who enter:
Please, God, make it stop.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think it is important to realize that computer science is merely a form of technology. And technology is the materialized form of technique. By that definition, other forms of technology include language, drawings, music, hand tools, agriculture, weapons, and domestication of animals. These very words are the results of a technique of communication that began millenia ago.
Philosophy is the love of knowledge. One must have knowledge to apply it to technology. Otherwise the very idea to bring about a result in a certain planned way would never have even started. Ethics can be defined as a way of living the best life. Or, in Aristotelian terms, to bring about human flourishing (eudaimonia). To live as a human involves applying knowledge in the form of technique. Of which technology, the materialized form of technique, is merely an extension.
And if you do not believe that technology is inherent to human nature imagine if humans were incapable of the ability to even pick up a rock, smash a clam, and realize to do that again if one wanted to get more clam meat? And then see that recognizing to repeat a process to obtain a desired result is not dissimilar to uttering the same words to evoke the same response or putting chips together according to the way physics and mathematics are understood to run programs as expected.
I regret I can't give a more eloquent response. But I hope you can at least see that technology is inherent if not the definitive feature to human nature whereas philosophy is our own attempt to understand our own human nature. Computer science is the technique. Philosophy allows us to reflect on it as it relates to us.
Obviously this is a bigger picture response than what was asked for. But the question was framed in such narrow terms it fails to see the forest for the trees.
Applied critical thinking is how you solve problems. What an engineer does on a daily basis is to take a problem and attempt to come up with an approach for solving that problem. Critical thinking is what philosophy is all about. In many ways, computer science is a specialized hybrid of philosophy and mathematics, and strength in both will definitely make you more effective as a developer and a designer.
One of the best things about studying from philosophy, and in particular from a historical/Continental perspective, is the long-standing tradition of solving seemingly intractable problems by tackling them from a different perspective--Kant solved the rationalist/empiricist debate of whether we can or cannot have ideas that do not come from experience by turning it around and asking instead what the conditions for the possibility of experience were.
Take the Dining Philosopher's problem as a germane example. How much more expensive would it be to give each diner his own pair of forks and let them eat and think as much as they want at their own pace (in other words, why not reorganize the distribution of system resources so that each process can have its own set of resources)? Another is the traveling salesman problem: why does the salesman even need to travel? Can't he use the telephone or the internet or something?
If you answer "But the literal solution to the problem isn't the point", then you've missed *my* point entirely. Coming up with a better algorithm is usually a better way to improve performance than hand-optimizing inner loops, so why not take it to a higher level of problematic abstraction and change the problem you're trying to solve instead of the way you implement a particular solution.
Group Theory
Any questions?
"Examples of philosophical work relevant to AI (besides mathematical logic) include the work of Frege (sense and denotation), Gödel (modern mathematical Platonism), Tarski (theory of truth), Quine (ontology and bound variables), Putnam (natural kinds), Hintikka (formalization of facts about knowledge), Montague (paradoxes of intensionality), Kripke (semantics of modality), Gettier (examples on intensionality), Grice (conversational implicatures), and Searle (performatives)." John McCarthy
Contrary to some earlier replies to this article, philosophy is absolutely not useful for 'answering' any questions regarding the possible nature of AI and its ramifications. The nature of AI will be inherent in the type of AI in question, regardless of what anyone feels/says about it. The only thing that philosophy might be useful for with respect to AI is to help you develop cogent arguments with which you can persuade people to share your perceptions of AI.
The 'skills' you learn as part of philosophy, however, are related to developing internally consistent complex logical 'systems' (for lack of a better word) by carefully designing/choosing a few axioms. Also, you learn the inverse process of 'decompiling' other peoples' arguments to find the primary axioms upon which they're based, which may be much more numerous than the original author realized, and to analyze the axioms for any possibly internally inconsistent/unforseen emergent properties.
Both processes are similar enough to what goes on when developing/analysing software that philosophy is not entirely useless to a software engineer. When using one of the many top-down design/bottom-up implementation development styles, for instance, you need to be able to predict the ramifications of low-level implementation details on higher level abstractions (or even those of lower level abstractions on higher-level abstractions).
Philosophical training is by no means a prerequisite to becoming an excellent software engineer. There are many other more directly relevant fields of study if that is your primary concern. It can't hurt, however, and I've found that the skillsets intersect often enough that it's useful from time to time.
I have a bachelors degree in Philosophy. I was going for my Masters when one of our PHD candidates (total 9 years in college combined) had to get a job at the Piggy Wiggly because she had no skills. Then I switched to computer science. I later dropped out of CS and went into professional IT, and haven't looked back.
The thing that interested me most about both studies is that they seemed to be both sides of the same coin. Not because of liberal arts vs. hard science, but in the way they had to deal with reality.
In a nutshell:
Philosophy tries to develop, enumerate, and proof basic concepts of existence. Platonic Forms, the monads, and Descartes dialouges are examples of literally trying to get the basic concepts of reality and use them to build bigger structures. Eventually, you could prove more and more complex ideas based on those basic priniciples, which hopefully corresponded with reality.
So, Philosophy tries to take reality and break it down into its individual elements.
Computer science taught about programming languages, algorithms, and circuit design. From those basic parts, we were to make mini CPUs, applications, and so forth. Then we would learn about Artifical Intelligence, and the issues with that.
Computer Science starts with the basic blocks, and tries to create 'reality' from it.
So, there is some curiosity (to me) in that one of the hardest issues in Computer Science is how to create 'intelligence' from basic building blocks. Then, one of the hardest issues in Philosophy is to derive the basic building blocks out of 'intelligence'.
Take a look at the kind of discourses on design patterns and pattern languages. Pure philosophy.
Also I'd say computer science people will have a totally different take on Descarte's Mind-Body problem. As in 'what problem'. And I can think of a bunch of other things that CS will change your outlook on.
Bitter and proud of it.
I think you are a little unfair to old Leibniz.
A little further down the article Leibniz is credited along with Newton with inventing infinitesimal calculus. He was actually a prodigious mathematician that formalized many of the concepts in calculus and other branches of mathematics.
More closely related to the topic Leibniz also credited himself with "discovering" the binary number system. Used in *cough* all digital electronics today. He even built a binary arithmetic machine some 150 years before Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.
He also made great contributions to the field of library science. His early proposals, though unsuccessful, predated similar institutions like the Library of Congress by hundreds of years.
To say nothing about his contributions to science, he was widely considered an all around genius. He has written on so many subjects in such breadth and depth most professional historians could not spend a lifetime and take them all in.
So yes, thanks to Voltaire and his book Candide, Leibniz will be remembered as the butt of the joke in a satirical novella. At least outside of mathemeticians who only know Leibniz as the guy that has college level math classes named after him. It is a good thing Leibniz lives in the best of all worlds. I'd hate to see what it could have been like.
In all seriousness, Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" defense of God actually works quite well as a variation of Kirkegaard's existential philosophy. Although atheists also agree with Kirkegaard's philosophy as it does not apply exclusively to God fearing individuals.
I was a CS major at 2 different universities. One had Gödel, Escher, Bach as required reading, and the other had a required Philosophy of Science class which included Kuhn's Copernican Revolution along with Newton's Philosophy of Nature and Brecht's Galileo.
Maybe you need to find a school with a more well-rounded curriculum? They're out there...
This sig intentionally left justified.
He said that before the days of computer science degrees, there were two disciplines that were sought after when it came to finding programmers.
#2 was mathematicians.
#1 was philosophers.
Enough said.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
A number of academics in domains like ethics, speech act theory, and philosophy of mind (among others) have been contributing to journals and having conferences related to computing and philosophy for a good while. I imagine that the interesting discussions on issues like free-will as well as models like functionalism will probably gradually enter the wider computer science curriculum.
What is objective knowledge for a given science? How do you demarcate what is a meaningful statement in computer science and what is meaningful in biology? How do you allow knowledge from one field to be objectively considered by another field with a different domain? These are meaningful questions in the domain of philosophy. All objective knowledge relies on logic, Gödel and Tarski showed us that while we can find truth in a domain, we can never be certain that the truth we have found will not be falsified later. There is no certainty to objective knowledge, no justification. At best, we can determine meaningfulness and test meaningful statements for falsity content. That was the innovation of Popper and the Critical Rationalists.
The goal of philosophy is methodological correctness, logic is at the heart of philosophy because that's how we describe method. Philosophy can only explore what the limits of lawfulness and order are. Without the ability to demarcate meaning, we cannot determine order. Why we seek lawfulness and order is a metaphysical question, it cannot be answered by philosophy, thus making philosophy incomplete and paying the price for objectivity.
Since computers are all systems of logic, we can use philosophy to determine what each system's limitations are and how differing systems can interact. Take the theoretical in computer science, how did we develop quantum computing? How will we integrate it into the rest of our systems? As we search for innovative ways to look for solutions to these questions, philosophy guides us, by maintaining methodological correctness, forcing us to maintain the integrity of the identity we have chosen.
Ethics is not philosophy. It is the application of objectivity to another set of goals, a different domain. If ethics is the domain of how to best get along with our neighbors and avoid creating unnecessary confrontation, then we can apply methodology to determine which statements are meaningful within this domain. For instance, Richard Stallman is a computer ethicist. His goal is to provide a particular ethical view of how we should integrate computer systems into our lives. Some statements are meaningful to these goals and others are not. Out of the meaningful statements, I can test which are most efficient at reaching specific goals, such as those of the FSF. I may not agree with those goals, I may oppose those goals, but since Stallman and the FSF have stated what their goals are, I can properly scope a domain. Once I understand the domain, I can test proposals and conjectures to determine which are most efficient towards reaching those goals. This is how objective knowledge grows, our motivation is always metaphysical. We cannot rationalize or justify inspiration. By understanding this, by enforcing methodological separation, we can concentrate on growing objective knowledge about our metaphysical goals. There is no natural imperative to understand the quantum structure of matter or to understand biological systems. We simply find these things useful, fulfilling.
If it is philosophy that you want to study, then study Critical Rationalism. The works of Popper, Bartley and Miller should keep you busy for a while and give you a thorough tour of just about everybody, as they've managed to falsify quite a few names in the summary. If it is ethics you are interested in, I can really only recommend who to avoid. Those who hide from criticism are unethical. Plato and Hegel are primarily useless. Both hid their ideas from criticism, attempting to fool the reader into prematurely aborting their attempt to rationalize their proposals. Plato taught 9 tyrants, Hegel was courtier to his own and the father of the Nazi lies. I would also avoid the spawn of these liars, Leo Strauss, Barth and Schaeffer. All of these have either embraced the Noble Lie or Nihilism. Either path is a cover from criticism; nihilism absurdly denies the capabilities of criticism, while the Noble Lie invokes paradox of the liar. One can never determine when a liar is inserting chaos into order to avoid criticism. Integrity is indispensable.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Asking if philosophy should have a role in computer science is like asking "Should economics play a role in computer science?" You don't need to know anything about economics to learn about computer science - but there may be parts of computer science that are similar to economics, and you might even use economics in a potential job in computer science. You might even borrow ideas from economics.
Similarly with philosophy: some concepts are similar (halting problem), you can borrow ideas from philosohpy, and you might even use philosophy in a potential job.
Basically, it doesn't need to play a role in computer science, it just shows that a liberal education will prepare you for life and make your skills in computer science more complete than any single-track course ever could.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I'm quite interested in this discusson, almost specifically because I'm just entering into an undergraduate program majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Philosophy. In my mind I've always seen a connection between the two subjects; it really began because the the logic behind most philosphy that is the underpinning of all computer science. Howver, the connection has grown, and I'm often at a loss to describe exactly the connection. In my mind it's there though, and that's enough for me.
In a way, philosophy is the ancestor of sciences. We had to get magic out of our minds and create a scientific method. How can you develop an understanding of the world if you believe in Faerie fire and run away because you fear for the sanctity of your soul?
Now we are past that (at least most of us - see below), and we don't need it for science anymore. But it still helps to get around the sophistry of politics, consumerism and other brainwashing sources.
I still hate it, but hey.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Wittgenstein versus Turing
I think the comments here are very interesting. One common theme seems to be the importance of ethics in, for example, determining the normative quality of our technological advancements. Such thinking is certainly important, but I don't really consider it deeply philosophical -- philosophers of ethics are often actually studying meta-ethics (the study of the practice of making normative judgements, or of what normative -- i.e. good and bad -- judgements might mean) and when they're not they are far more often studying the general principles behind good and bad judgements (does good mean creating the most pleasure?)) rather than applying rules to determine the goodness or badness of any particular situation.
Of course, other parts of philosophy (besides ethics) have been cited here -- logic is one of the obvious ones of course: as a Philosophy major interviewing at Microsoft I was frequently asked what Philosophy had to do with Computer Science and I cited philosophical logic and how Russell's logical discoveries are the basis of NAND gate chip design. But I'm also interested in the application of epistemology to AI (the cognitive science side in particular).
But I think the connection between philosophy and computer science ought to be made more generally than attempting to apply specific philosophical results to problems of computation. (I certainly don't deny that such application can and should be done -- and the McCarthy quote cited above suggests several promising lines -- but I think it should not be the only focus for philosophy's use in computer science.) My view of it (as a philosophy major about to start a job in software development) is that the methods of philosophy rather than the results will be useful to me in computer science. Much of philosophy, the actual practice of making arguments, explaining phenomena, drawing conclusions is I think very similar to computer science, which I frequently see as just the abstract description of a problem.
An example: sorting algorithms aren't just practical ways to achieve a goal, the algorithms are descriptions of what it is to sort something: sorting requires a certain number of comparisons, which it can be shown is on the order of n log n. That seems to me an instance of philosophy -- taking a phenomenon, investigating what it means abstractly and precisely. And I think (and hope) that much of real-world software development (not just the deep theory around algorithms) is the same sort of thing -- a precise and abstract description of a problem: from determining requirements from the user to writing the code for particular algorithms. Software developers may not be keeping copies of Plato or Russell on their desks for regular reference, but I think a philosophy background is a great help.
After class, you might encounter considerably more interesting philosophies-- interesting because they are controversial. The big one is the philosophy of Freedom as advocated by folks such as RMS, and the opposing philosophies of Intellectual Property and censorship. But hey, if you read Slashdot, you can't have missed all that.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Does philosophy have a role in computer science?
No. And even if it did, you philosophy majors still wouldn't get a job.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Science can say how the big-bang happened, but it is no more or less sane than the psychochristian standpoint that the world was created 6000 years ago as it is today. Why? Because both theories require something to pop out of nothing.
Philosophy answers what you use and do not use a computer for; at a high degree of refinement, philosophy becomes a religion and at a higher degree still when mixed with conviction and application on a personal level, a skill boardering on a martial art. Having a personal philosophy is important, especially for IT workers, because without a personal philosophy, you are best lost and at worst taken advantage of.
When your boss tells you to do the morning cheer instead of attending to the work you were hired for, to work overtime even though you have stated you can't becuase of other obligations, etc, and backs that request up with a threat, philosophy mandates what you do; you can take it up the ass, tell your boss "I need more notice if you need me to work overtime" and "I came here to participate in a company, not a cult; if you want a cult, count me out right here, right now.", or you can make a deal, ect. Computer science will tell you how to fix that broken wire in a dell laptop, network 20 computers together, or even how to talk to customers to do some sales, but it can't answer the question of what to tell your boss and how.
starts with this:
Was sich überhaupt sagen läßt, läßt sich
klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden
kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
"So, Philosophy tries to take reality and break it down into its individual elements."
What you describe is a single philoshpy known as reductionisim. Scientific reductionisim is why you find science and philosophy so similar. The basic difference is religion looks for God, philosopy looks for truth and science looks for proof, everything else is an art.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The tragedy is that there has been nearly a half century of computer science -- much of it involving relational systems such as RDBMS -- and only one real attempt to go back and revive relation arithmetic as a formal basis for computer systems. Imagine the mathematical rigor, simplicity and elegance of arithmetic applied to such complicated systems as RDBMSs and you get an idea of where something fundamental like this could go -- not in the far future but quite soon.
Seastead this.
You can leave politics alone, but it won't leave you alone. That's why the GNU philosophy was necessary.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It turns out that a medieval philosopher named William of Ockham may have provide the route to artificial intelligence in his famous Ockham's Razor. As it turns out, this has now been shown to be central to very definition of abstract intelligence and could provide the basis of a prize award like the X-Prize that could solve the AI problem far more effectively than the Turing Competition.
Seastead this.
The correct spelling is 'German'. For Goodness' sake get a dictionary.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
I would phrase it this way: Logic is a branch of mathematics which is a core "tool" of philosophy, similar to calculus being a "tool" of physics. In general, mathematics simply tells you "if I choose these axioms, what can I deduce?". It is up to philosophy, physics or whoever uses mathematics to describe something to set the right axioms and use mathematics correctly. It is true, that historically, this took some time to be sorted out, but today, the roles of mathematics, philosophy and logic are pretty well distinct.
how about a course on design philosophy?
yeah, I know design is barely understood (formally) even in literature, but would be a fun course...
when I say "design", I'm talking about a few things, user interface design, arcitechture design, data design.... but could be others too...
basically a bootstrap class to bring the newbs into a pseudo-senior mindset... (yeah, I know, dangerous, because when they get out then they're overconfident, and not experienced, a bad combination).
Basically try to expose them to a subset of the bredth of problems and throught process a senior dev goes through after 10yrs+ of time in industry (i.e. tough problems like OS design, game engine design, art/sound tool design, etc..)
One problem I see is not all (many?) profs have that much industry experience under their belt to be able to teach at that level... (i.e. maybe the suns would have to align to make this course happen).
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
I am currently a undergraduate at Muhlenberg College, and have been notably unhappy with their program. What appeared to be a friendly, small liberal arts college when I applied a year and a half ago has so far been rather disappointing. As a matter of background, I should note that my whole life I have been a chronic underacheiver. Grade school was a joke, middle school was tediously easy, and in high school I averaged B's in what were the most "challenging" courses available without batting an eyelash. I've rarely needed to do homework, and have been dubbed "gifted" by both my teachers and my peers. Despite my potential, my last semester GPA was only slightly above a 1 and my return to the college for the fall semester hinges on a last-ditch appeal to the college president to overturn a judicial ruling of a semester's suspension.
Why is this, do you ask? Well from my year's experience at the college, the "liberal arts" philosophy was difficult to find. While the school offers a variety of courses from a vast array of disciplines, so far the courses themselves have been relatively one-dimensional. Even as a math major, there's only so much vector calculus and normal distribution I can take. As a result, I slacked off entirely too much and got distracted with not-so-wholesome extracurricular activities.
Obviously I would be wrong to put the blame for my failures (entirely) on the academic program at Muhlenberg. However, I do attribute some of it to a schism in the way that I prefer to learn and the way that I was taught. Don't get me wrong, I truly enjoy learning. I've have easily spent hours of my time reading Slashdot for the lastest tech "news." Even more tellingly, I'll often get sidetracked by a link to Wikipedia regarding some obscure technology. Many times I'll find an interesting article, and several middle-clicks later, I'll have a dozen tabs open on a variety of tangentially related, yet incredibly interesting and informative topics. As such, I find rote regurgitation of facts and formulas to be wholly uninteresting. Quite frankly, an equation in my calc book is irrelevant to everything that isn't calc. More importantly, that equation will be in my calc book for all eternity, and if I ever need it, I'll know where to find it.
AFAICT, most sciences are only useful as they pertain to other sciences. As a math student, I know that math for the sake of math, as interesting as it may be, is generally irrelevant to anyone but a mathematician (and only for curiosity's sake). It doesn't matter what the deriviative a given function is; what matters is the significance of that finding. For example, without leaving the realm of mathematics, we know that the derivative of a function is its slope at a given point. Similarly, the integral represents the signed area between the function and the axis of the independent variable. On its face, this knowledge is relatively useless. If we travel into the realm of physics, however, we learn that the derivative of an object's position function gives us its velocity, and the integral of a force/distance function gives the amount of work done. In context of physics, math has a tangible meaning.
For those slashdotters keeping score, here comes the ever-insightful car analogy. Suppose you built a car from scratch, and knew everything about its operation as confined to your garage, but never had an opportunity to drive it. Sure you were intimately familiar with engine timings, gearbox ratios and what have you, but were completely oblivious to its operation under normal road conditions. After spending time with the car on a test track, your world opens up to learn how to actually drive the car. But still, were you to be thrown into midtown Manhattan traffic, you would be hopeless. See where I'm going w
I only mod funny =D
Haskell monads are good example of a crazy philosophic concept in a purely functional programming language. A must have, because pure functions do not match the reality. The same reason why procedural languages evolved to object ones, because we humanly percieve natural processes as objects.
We need a machine consciousness. That would be a truly breaking point in philosophy.
There you are, staring at me again.
Incomplete is not the same as inconsistent.
No. Philosophy has no role in anything.
The game of Mornington Crescent, on the other hand, as a great role to play in Philosophy.
If you really want an insight into modern philosophy, read or catch Jumpers, by Tom Stoppard.
After that read a bit of Kant, J L Austin, Nozick. Maybe have a look at some Strawson. Read Thought and Action by Hampshire. Several times.
Try to write down new thing you have learned. You will not be able to.
It is generally admitted in informal conversations between philsophers that they are engaged in a sort of sophisticated parlour game. A friend of mine once went to see his old Philosophy teacher. "Why did you give it up?", his teacher asked. He smiled and said, "because I stopped believing there could be meaningful synthetic a priori propositions". "I know what you mean" his teacher replied.
If you don't understand, be thankful. Or start reading. The student was deliberately committing an elementary philsophical howler. The teacher was saying, yes, I understand, it really is all a load of rubbish.
To paraphrase Hofstadter on propositional calculus: P and not P implies Q, where Q can be anything. The way I see it, the fact that the natural world (i.e., superposition of eigenstates) and mathematics (choose omega-complete or omega-consistent, but not both) seems to imply that there is both a physical and a logical justification for believing whatever you want to believe, so you are in fact free to pick the "best" belief system. Reductionism/Occam's razor is a terrific tool for scientific inquiry, but one can probably do better when figuring out how to live your life.
My only major complaint about religions is when they exist at the exclusion of other belief systems - and not all do, by the way. I realize this seems to declare a set R of acceptable relgions defined as all relgions that aren't members of R, but I guess that's in the spirit of my point above (it is possible to define a consistent set R, but unfortunately that set is incomplete ;)
One final point about this comment: "there is a correct answer, and it is X". First, this is exactly what mathematics is concerned with -- more specifically, that it is X and I can prove it. Second, as it applies to religion, it is worth noting that about 90% of the world's population agrees on the biggies. Do a little reading on Buddhism (about 3 billion believers), Christianity (almost 2 billion) and Hinduism (almost 1 billion), specifically on theology, and you'll see some striking similarities (most easily seen with Hinduism in the middle as Buddhism and Christianity are a bit further removed from each other). Then try Googling the term collective intelligence and see if maybe we as a species haven't known something for a long time that might not be known individually.
I'm told that one of the reasons ontology is a current growth area in philosophical research is its possible computing applications; at any rate that was one of the ways in which my university's new Ontology module was advertised.
Philosphy has a place anywhere a boundary exists between what is known and what is unknown. That's pretty much everywhere.
I'm not sure there is a class that fits neatly into a given curriculum, and there certainly doesn't need to be a philosphy of web shopping carts, but there is a place for it somewhere.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
We also have these ones and zeros and know we can make them perform calculations for us. Calculating seems to be the start to true intelligence (making a connection and thinking "Aha! I just figured that out! Look how intelligent I am!") It doesn't necessarily follow that these complex calculators are going to think (see Searle's beer cans, for example) but it's interesting to postulate that they might.
I needed an extra humanities course my last semester in college, so I took a philosophy course. Until then I figured philosophy was pretty useless. I thought that about English courses until the 11th grade too. I was wrong about the English courses. So I figured maybe I was wrong about philosophy too. I had an opportunity to find out and I took it.
The professor described philosphy as the birthplace of science. That was one of only two valuable things I learned in the course.
The course introduced me to a few of the so-called great philosophers. They were, one and all, completely full of shit. Any creative thinker can an interesting discussion about the meaning of life or another such topic. If the discussion moves in a usable direction it can be put to the test with the scientific method. If it doesn't, its pure proselytizing regardless of whether you apply rigorous logic.
Philosphy's utility in Computer Science is even less. We have an added advantage over the pure sciences: the computer tells us pretty quickly when we get things wrong. If we're smart enough to identify the corner cases, it tells us 100% of the time. We don't have to guess or make logical connections. Its all right there in the computer and our ideas either work or they do not.
So the second thing I learned in the philosophy course was this: how to recognize the difference between when scientists or developer knows what they're doing and when they're spouting philosphical bullshit that almost sounds good.
So now I know how to keep the BS out of CS. A useful skill to be sure, but not one that gives me a great deal of respect for philosphy.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
at scsu, im pretty sure that computer ethics was a required part of the computer science curriculum.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
While this "old timer's" opinion is interesting, something someone said at sometime does not a rule make.
Enough has not been said
One big difference between modern (post XV century mostly) philosophers and the ones that came before is that the moderns had a big desire to explain everything about everything by themselves in what we nowadays call "systems". So one have the cartesian system (how Descartes explained everything), the humean system (idem), the hegelian system (idem), the kantian system (idem) and so on. No wonder then that these guys made BIG mistakes. If you don't worry with first getting the details right, how can your "big picture" be correct? If you just take that "marvelous insight" you had and try to explain everything based on it, what happens when someone else discovers a glitch in the insight itself?
In contrast, older philosophers, as well as a handful of XX century ones (very few, and most of them aren't studied in Academy), take the opposite approach. They investigate a small problem "a" until they reach a meaningful conclusion. Then they investigate a small problem "b". Then a small problem "c". And so on. Then, if they perceive that the different solutions they found for "a", "b", "c" etc. have similar characteristics, then they investigate this problem and, with luck, find a slightly more general solution that encompasses the previous, smaller ones.
If a CS course included courses on this second kind of philosophy, which we might call "scientific philosophy" (Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Leibniz, Husserl, Voegelin, Zubiri etc.), then it would be usefull, for it would tell you how to think in a very structured way while still fully imersed in the real world. Otherwise, if it included courses on "systematic philosophy" (Descartes, Hume, Spinosa, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Sartre etc.), or if they taught the scientific philosophers as if they also were systematic ones (a very common mistake which unfortunatelly happens all the time on the Philosophy college I'm taking), then it would be very useless, for instead of learning how to think about the world, you would just learn how to think about what this or that guy thought about the world, a completely different subject.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Dissatisfied with a perceived dearth of philosophical content in the computer sciences, Johannes Climacus sought to provoke debate on Slashdot. Upon reading the discussion however all he found were "frist psots", GNAA trolls and unfounded accusations that he was a Usenet kook.
"Try browsing the site at 4 or 5," suggested a friend.
In that moment Johannes was enlightened.
The "Never-land" philosophy... for never landing on solid ground when playing in teh world of teh abstract.
Never make something so simple that anyone can do it, otherwise you will be out of work.
Never create a perfect program because it leaves no room for selling upgrades.
wheNever someone comes along and exposes simplicity where there was complexity in your
application of the above, use your skill at abstraction manipulation to discredit and
dismiss their claims.
Never admit that you apply the Neverland philosophy.
there is more.... but I'm Never going to tell you.
Finally, an Ask Slashdot question I'm qualified to answer! My undergraduate CS degree (Harvard) probably wasn't as rigorous as it would have been at MIT/Carnegie Mellon/Berkeley/Stanford, but my Philosophy Ph.D. (Berkeley, doing philosophy of mind with John Searle) was reasonably hard core.
Having worked as a developer for 5 years since finishing grad school, I've been discouraged to find that the points of contact between philosophy and CS are VERY few and far between. Studying philosophy will definitely sharpen your reading, writing, and analytical skills, all of which are (or should be, if you're doing your job right) useful for programmers. But those are all general skills; my knowledge of philosophical theories or history or personalities are, frankly, never a part of my work life.
I can imagine scenarios where the two would be more closely intertwined: heavy duty academic logicians probably work in the intersection of CS and philosophy, and philosophy of mind may have some (tenuous) relevance to cutting-edge AI research. But here's the problem. Philosophy is really about defining terms and asking questions. As soon as terms are successfully defined in such a way that everyone (or most people) agrees on the definitions, and as soon as theories are deemed reliable enough to use in real-world situations, that particular line of inquiry leaves philosophy and is re-branded as science. (Chemistry and astronomy are two particularly clear examples of sciences that started out as philosophical topics way back with the Pre-Socratics.) So any "philosophy" that is concrete enough for CS researchers, developers, or sys admins to use would, most likely, no longer qualify as philosophy.
But even if philosphy is not all that relevant to people working in CS, I think it can be enormously useful to students who are focusing on CS. Besides the improved reading/writing/thinking I've already mentioned, the study of logic (which generally falls under the purview of philosophy) is a good thing for CS majors (though even it is less directly relevant to programming than you might imagine), and it's good to get practice in questioning the definitions of fundamental terms in any field (which, again, is what philosophy is all about). And of course, reading the work of people like Turing and Godel is crucial to understanding what computers can do, what their limitations might be, and how they might be fundamentally different (or similar to) human minds. But those are not areas that professional developers are likely to spend any time thinking about when their main concern is cranking out another 500 lines of Java before lunch. So I'd encourage CS students to study as much philosophy as they can in order to become smart, thoughtful, well-rounded people, but not to expect to use the content of their philosophy courses all that much once they're in the working world.
A final caveat: there are vast areas within the philosophy landscape that are completely irrelevant to programmers as programmers, though may be relevant to programmers as human beings. Ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, all of continental philosophy (think Sartre or Heidegger or Derrida) fall into this category. There are, of course, many more.
First, philosophy is the foundation upon which logic, math and science are built. For example, without Parmenides' principle of Identity, the law of non-contradiction cannot be formulated and without the law of non-contradiction there is no basis on which to build the equals sign in math for being equal to something has no evening. Further, it was philosophers such as Descartes that formulated the modern scientific method.
Second, a proper symbolic logic class is the possibly the single most important class any position that has to do with computer science could take. A proper class on this topic will provide the `why' of logic, a rigorous approach to translating human language into assertions that can be evaluated for truth, and the technical skills of evaluating logical constructions for truth or falsity. All of these are paramount not only to the programmer, but to the requirements analyst, the computer engineer, the comp. sci. researcher and more.
Third, a proper upper level class in philosophy will teach more about analysis than any business or comp. sci. class that I've ever heard of. The technical skill of teasing the full implications out of a given text is greatly undervalued in most comp. sci. programs.
That said, is it possible for someone to be a good computer scientist without a background in philosophy? Certainly. Most comp. sci. programs will teach the Cartesian method of scientist, even if only implicitly. Logic will still be taught. Analysis will still be taught. They just aren't usually taught to their fullest extent and, in many cases, are taught without looking at the principles upon which they rest.
No. Any argument to the contrary is just self-important twaddle.
I haven't seen any philosophical discussion in any of my theoretical computer science courses besides some simple logic. Is it the same elsewhere?
Yes.
How often do philosophical concerns play into Computer Science education as a whole?
Very rarely.
What role does (or could) philosophy have in Computer Science or Information Technology?
Huge. Aside from logic and mathematics, compiler design is built directly on language theory defined by Chomsky and his contemporaries, artifical intelligence research is built directly on theory of mind, linguistics, etc, and so on. However, the role of Philosophy is almost completely overlooked in computing circles and, in my experience, is traditionally regarded as useless pseudo-intellectual garbage. But then most of the people I've talked to who feel that way aren't folks I would consider Computer Scientists--a term I reserve for folks like Donald Knuth. However, nearly all university level CS professors I've met also don't realize the connection between Phisolophy and Computer Science, probably because Philosophy is typically categorized as one of the arts these days and so very few actually have any direct exposure to the field.
In a nutshell:
Philosophy tries to develop, enumerate, and proof basic concepts of existence. Platonic Forms, the monads, and Descartes dialouges are examples of literally trying to get the basic concepts of reality and use them to build bigger structures. Eventually, you could prove more and more complex ideas based on those basic priniciples, which hopefully corresponded with reality.
This is what impresses me so much about philosophy: its attempt to define the building blocks of existence. Philosophers try to nail jello to a tree -- and succeed.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It was mentioned by another poster that mathematics and philosophy are close neighbors of computer science--that is true.
When I was young, I always enjoyed mathematics and excelled in it, but I never thought seriously about studying it in college. After I had learned to program, computer science became the most obvious choice to me, because I discovered that I could take one of my favorite academic subjects (math) and use it to further one of my favorite hobbies (computing).
From then on, I looked at computer science not as a study of computing, but a study in applied mathematics.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's not about the computer--it's about studying something that computers just happen to enable us to learn more about. We can build the machines, but there is a lot out there to discover that we aren't aware of yet.
Part of my undergrad studies have been to take a course in logic and critical thinking. This course was part of the philosophy department, but introduced students to a manner of thinking that would be useful to exercise when undertaking an endeavor such as programming.
Mathematics are interesting, and so is philosophy, but I will always like computer science best because I like to feel that I am actually using what I have learned to produce something concrete and functional. If I were born before computing, I'd probably have become an engineer.
I'm currently a student in the Cognitive Science & AI program at the University of Toronto--for those of you who aren't familiar with Cognitive Science, it's the "Interdisciplinary Study of Cognition" and involves studies in Computer Science, Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology.
... ...
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;-)
I have to say that, rather than putting some philosophy into computer science departments, or vice versa, there should be more focus on establishing good Cognitive Science departments, where students are encoraged to find the right mix of these diciplines for themselves. Before Cognitive Science got started (in the 70s), many of these fields worked in total isolation, and repeated mistakes that had already been made in the other fields. Sadly, the amount of communication between departments is still insufficient, and many students are unaware of the relevance of other subjects to their major.
Here's a story about Computer Science and Philosophy:
I once attempted to form a logic chatroom on Dalnet (i'm now content to idle in #logic on freenode... perhaps it will become a real logic channel soon), because people in the math chatrooms kickban people who discuss philosophy of mathematics or logic, and people in the philosophy chatrooms are generally not academics and know zilch about logic, preferring to rant about abortion.
I advertised the channel in a Computer Science logic class I was in, and at one point someone showed up to 'compare answers' (*yawn*... suprise, suprise). Anyway, they asked me why I created the channel, and I explained what I explained above, and that Logic is a subject which is relevant to a wide variety of disicplines, such as Linguistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Psychology, and Philosophy.
And he said, "Wait, what would Philosophers need Logic for?"
I responded, "Uhh, Aristotle, the Philosopher, *invented* Logic."
And his response was "... You have too much free time..."
Make of this what you will, but my best analysis is that knowing about Java is work, but knowing about Aristotle is a passtime, because only the former will get you a job at Google? *sigh*
So yes, I'd love to see Computer Scientists forced to do some Philosophy
It's all in what you mean when you are using the word philosophy. If you take a classic definition of the word, as referring to aesthetic, ethics, and metaphysics, there is absolutely a role for philosophy in computer science cirriculums.
Aesthetics is the study of what is beautiful and is expressed in the tech industry through studies in usability and human factors engineering. There are numerous applications which can be used to automatically determine colors pleasing to the eye. Facial recognition systems can identify combinations of human traits which would be recognized as the most beautiful (although this is not an innate apprehension of beauty, just an understanding of what is commonly perceived as beautiful).
Ethics is the study of good and evil. Ethics has been applied to computer science fictionally (such as in the case of Asimov's rules for robot behavior) and literally in the consideration of applications for technology. For instance, what are the ethical implications for systems used to track the behavior of large numbers of people? Is it right to use technology to prolong the lives of people past the cessation of brain activity? These are the kinds of questions which apply here.
Metaphysics is the study of the rules underlying the universe, and it's original expression is in what we now know simply as physics. It's the study of existance, ontological meaning, categorization, perception, and to some extent what we mean when we say God. Consider the idea that the ontological meaning of the word chair applies to many things which vary so widely they don't really look like one another but everyone recognizes them to be examples of what a chair is and you have a good idea on where to start. Tagging systems, taxonomies, many of the forms of online social networking and personalization are based around ontological rules defined thousands of years ago.
Of course, if you mean philosophy as conformance to a single agenda or set of ideas about computer science, that has no place in the world. There are simply too many options and opportunities out there for rigid dictums about the nature of science for this to apply.
M
At least, here in Crete, at the first Philosophical convention (International Conference on Ethics & Politics, http://www.philosophycrete.edu.gr/dyncat.cfm?catid =1018), a 5-days event has no speaker with a CS curriculum.
Isn't that provokative ?
Philosophy and Computer Science are related in that Philosophers seek to explain us, our thoughts and motives and position in life and record their reasoning in a precise language, and Programmers attempt to codify the thoughts and methods they reason out while explaining and solving the problems they face.
Just how much are we supposed to have to know in order to do anything at all? Give it a rest.
E Proelio Veritas.
My sister has a a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science from Durham University.
That's a lot of capital letters in one sentence...
--
you forgot "rigerous".
you sound like a highly obsessive spelling nazi, so don't ruin it by only jumping on the first and most obvious misspelling.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
My Reply, with shields on says, that like anything, once you know the 'how', it isn't hard anymore. Then the problem then becomes one of implementation. More about me: I create artificial 'intelligence' from basic building blocks using Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). My legendary discoveries in Ingrid tell of a fascinating story of proscribed inequality directed by the real evil at the heart of hardship. To cut a long story short, my doctor told me the problem that others at the bottom of the heap had that I didn't have was their lack of something similar to my life's work with Ingrid and its interesting goals and skills. I asked my friend Nigel, "Why then can't Ingrid clubs be set up for them?". He said it was because the established religions who look after the poor would object to an Ingrid mediated neuroeconomy and the lack of privacy implied by ascribing the purpose of the universe to be mind-uploading. I said, "Well, persons who choose to upload into their lifeboat of a mental prosthesis are still able to survive without any gray matter and should still be allowed to believe in their god. All, that is except for Orthodox Jews because of their would-be violating of Number One (Thou shalt not engage in idol worship), wherein photographs or anything that could be construed as an icon would not be allowed." As a mind uploader I take exception to such a ban being reinterpreted in light of CGI and wish to know if such a proscription be devised specifically to include uploader types like me. A good-luck part has to do with the fact that there is a solution that has a silver lining. I call that solution a neuroeconomy. I thought, "If that's the case then their banks are going to be hearing from me regarding their highly unorthodox devaluing of my Lifetime Premier Internet connection." I am considering staking a claim in my ISP, in return for leaving them, in my will, sub-licensing rights to Ingrid, as an endowment to go with a possible formalized position concerning my Lifetime Premier Internet connection. In September of 1996, I negotiated my purchase of a Lifetime Premier Internet connection from my ISP for $2000. It was fully recognized by both parties that this was in reality a response to a public plea for venture capital. It has come to be estimated that this sum represented approximately 2% of the ISP's net value at the time, and therefore if my Lifetime Premier Internet connection is for any reason unable to be honored on such and such a date, I will from that circumstance stake a claim for the GREATER OF: the original investment plus compound interest at the average business interest rate; OR the present value of the remainder of my Lifetime Internet connection; OR an estimated 2% of the ISP's (future / current) net value. To be fair I put a 1000 year time limit on uploading before unloading. Not unknown was I to the immediate consequences of three compound interest curves intersecting over such vast time spans, but my sister Liz, who became a Carmelite nun in 1964, has no comprehension of the implications to my ISP's value, but she thinks a goal to digitize one's soul as a mental prosthesis is more good than bad. Would they change her mind spouting this doctrine? As I am now suffering from something like glaucoma. Or something maybe worse where, it seems my tear glands are producing cells that are in a war with my immune system. Something called Androgen Tears looks promising. I am desperate to create the brain/computer interface to allow me to still program Ingrid, should I ever go blind. Waking up for me is like being peppered sprayed in the face, made all the worse by lack of sleep. I have it on good authority that medical marijuana gives relief inside of 30 seconds after the onset of pain. I need another's human typewriter skills to go with my photographic memory and an open voice channel. I have a highly developed mind's-eye onto which I hope to mentally slide "Minority Report" type icon screens. I'm only just starting but on occasions can successfully tra
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
it is the theory that intelligence and consciousness are nothing more than an instance of a algorithm, which is or could be hardware-independent.
but thanks for your input. it's good that ignorant people get to have their say too.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
A CS degree may teach you how to do things; but, without some foundation in
Philosophy, programmers may be less likely to stand up against being asked to do unethical things.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
You start badly saying: ... the philosophical works of ... form the mathematical basis ...
This sort of error is called conflation. Look it up.
Other problems you gloss over:
1. Some of those philosophers were generalists. They did work in what today are separate, distinct fields.
2. Some of those philosophers were logicians, they worked on logic. Look it up.
Why not ask: Those philosphers left behind mounds of paper. Paper forms the basis for paper currency. What might be the role of ethicists in the design of modern currency?
look up the curry howard isomorphism
it says that programs are proofs in certain logics
and types are formulae in those logics.
Unfortunately, the history of philosophy has been riddled with morality arguements presented as "ethics." Plato's exploration of the question: "what is the good life?" is drenched with pederasty, slavery, and the art of sounding smart without actually having any examples to refer to. This problem occurs with almost every academic philosopher. For example, Descartes invents a God that necessarily exist, but only serves as a receptical for empty concepts like perfection, essential substance, and extention. Leibniz invents the term "monads" to attempt to explain the perception of space, but this term still lacks any actual reference. And Heidegger, well... he swore his allegence to Adolf Hitler and wrote a ton of psychobabble for a whole generation of pseudo-existential fascists. The problems concerning philosophy is that to the untrained ear, it's hard to distinguish it from sophistry. Seneca (4 BC-66 AD) defined philosophy as the "love of wisdom." His writing were concerned only with confronting the very real phases and transitions of human experience (growing up, being responsible, actualizing one's potential, raising children, friendship, and facing death). He was concerned with the ethical approach to such things, and railed against the sophists for making a mockery of and devaluing life and the individual experience of it. He was also very critical of death revelling and the sophists obsession with tragedy. I think the only concern philosophy should have with CS is in the ethical application of it. I would say that true philosophers would say that the only ethical application of CS is open sourcing. By allowing individuals and corporations to hold patents and lisences, the government maintains a stranglehold on the entire industry, and I have yet to see the government employ anything with good intentions. To insure the safety of people everywhere, all CS and R&D in any scientific or technological field should remain in full public view. The private sector has little concern for the common good, and that needs to be the concern of all philosophers.
IMHO, logic is math, not philosophy. Arguing the nature of reality, mind and humanity is all good, but doesn't have a thing to do with CS
Logic is not math - math is a particular kind of logic, the other kind being verbal logic, which is all programming languages are. And logic, together with experience, is the basis of all philosophy. From logic and experience are formed epistemological methods like the scientific method (science used to be called "Natural Philosophy"). From epistemology come metaphysics and the hard sciences like physics. Chemistry reduces to physics, biology to chemistry, and psychology to biology.
Some metaethical naturalists (like me) hold that ethics reduces ultimately to psychology and really to biology - that ethical statements are simply statements about what is good for individuals and societies (the good of society being generally good for the individual so long as it's not explicitly bad for them), in the sense of what makes them happy or, more deeply, what contributes to their survival. (This is not to say that 'traditional morality' is good for survival - ethical statements can be false, too). And political science and economics are really just applied ethics.
Philosophy is nothing more than the reasoned investigation of things - all things. Every specific academic and political discipline ultimately has it's roots in philosophy. Religion too ties in here, in that philosophy and religion cover the same topics - the fundamental principles, ultimate consequences, and essential natures of both reality and morality. The difference being "religion" (in the sense of organized, traditional religions) usually offer answer to those sorts of questions and demand that people simply accept them (or ignore them in the case of less pushy religions), while philosophy is continually and explicitly open to questioning.
All that said, I think a lot of contemporary, "postmodern" philosophy is bullshit, along with the whole postmodern, anti-rationalist movement, and given the subject matter a lot of earlier philosophers have had a heavy religious bent too. (The latter group's problem being mostly that they fail to restrict their ontology to things accessible to experience, and wil try to explain the phenomenal universe in terms of things fundamentally beyond experience, or sometimes even contrary to it). So not all philosophical theories are well-grounded and scientific. But in philosophy if you *are* well-grounded and scientific you can usually refute them easily enough and do away with all the superstitious fluff that most people think of today when they think "philosophy".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
cwcowell here is doing some interesting thinking. I would like very much to reflect on it from a slightly different educational perspective.
The last philosophy I studied before I was don-ragged out of St. John's College was Wittgenstein.
Roughly Wittgenstein said: We know that philosophy can be done. Similarly, in program design, we have modeling languages and we can arrange actions or semantic outputs that are as close as we please to the design.
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From Donald MacKay's Information, Mechanism and Meaning we have a very provocative proposal that very simple chunks of language can have a much more meaning due to the situation or context in which a message is sent. The same expansion of meaning appearing the output of a program would be a bug.
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One could imagine a Turing Machine that could be programmed to make semanitc outputs imitating my writing here. We could imagine that a really big program could eventually converge on making outputs that looked like any given philosopher.
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So one of the interesting problems is, even if a philosopher and a computer program use the same logic tables, and the same tables of premises and conclusions and so on.... They still do not look alike. And they are not doing the same thing. The philosopher is still doing an inquiry and the computer is still executing turing machine steps.
I'm glad someone responded to that comment with a mention of Wittgenstein... its too bad you missed his whole point.
he destroys any hope for a coherent metaphysical argument. to him they are all built upon 'houses of cards'. he was the least optimistic about philosophical discourse.
I'm an electrical engineer grad student, and I'm having a Groknitive Sciences course too, in my own school, and I'm totally dissatisfied with the way I'm seeing people approaching philosophy.
The teacher in my course brought up Kant, for example, and tould us about his views on the way the mind works, and on logic, but he NEVER EVER said a line about his concerns over MORAL VALUES and ETHICS! How could he treat Kant that superficially??
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I'm studiyng the life of many older scientists and philosophers, and I'm discovering that they have always been "interdiciplinary", in all the lavels, from studying different physical phenomena, to study physics, math, engineering and philosophy at the same time.
For example, only the other day I read in wikipedia about Leibniz and his views on computation, logic and knowledge... This is awesome!...
Only recently I found out too that Shannon was the one to bring Boolean logic to electronics (or "electromechanics" if you will), and that Boole himself was deeply concerned about matters of statistics and epistemology.
We don't even have to walk too far away to see that people are misinformed about science history. My teacher demonstrated that he didn't even know the basics about Charles Babbage!!... And the most interesting for me was to find out the other day that Ada herself had written once about the possibilty of a "machine like that" to ever think!!!
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The thing is that the university was corrupted by the industrial revolution. Industries demanded specialized labourers, and university became their apprentice school. Now nobody knows for certain wether they are concerned about "deep philosophycal tought" or not. When things start to become "interesting" (read: hard), people simply say that "it doesn't matter"... See our friedn's example up there...
So sad... But someday all old teachers will die, and we will be the ones to teach thing as we like it. Someday when I will be between 60 and 80 years old...
I'm surprised nobody mentioned J.D. Stone, who holds the title "Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy" at my alma mater. Regrettably, I took none of J.D.'s classes and only participated in his Exotic Programming Languages Study Group in the mid-80s. But I have it on good authority that I missed out.
And ignored them both. So there!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
In the mid-80's I was doing a Bachelor of Informatics degree at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. This combined Comp Sci with group theory (communications & operations of humans in groups) and philosophy. At the time, it seemed odd but the "soft stuff" really has helped in my IT career, perhaps more than the Comp Sci stuff.
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Plus, you *have* to respect a subject that mainly involves sitting around in pubs drinking booze and arguing with each other
Of course, if I'd only stuck around and finished the degree, maybe I'd have more to say on it. Sadly, reality struck and I ditched it to chase lots of really cool fun work (and a girl
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I was going for my Masters when one of our PHD candidates (total 9 years in college combined) had to get a job at the Piggy Wiggly because she had no skills
For many years the most important question in philosophy has been "Do you want fries with that?"
I know that he wrote a lot about what he called cybernetics, but again, this was a discription of a certain kind of ontology.
He was no luddite, as some make him sound. Further, even though he sometimes rails against modern technology, these are slips that find no good theoretical basis in his philosophy as a whole.
I can see him adding precisely nothing to computer science. And to consider any possible contribution of his as normative - that's just crazy.
The way I see it (as a math, philosophy, and computer science triple major), philosophy does have something to say about computer science. If you look back at the development of mathematical logic around the turn of the century, starting with Frege and tracing up to at least Church, etc., you will see that there's quite a lot of philosophy involved at certain points. Most of the mathematicians involved in developing mathematical logic where philosophers of mathematics, at the very least. Many of the issues they dealt with on the way toward developing the formal systems that we take for granted today (classical first-order predicate logic, intuitionistic logic, type theory, modal logic, proof theory, model theory, the lambda calculus, combinatory logic, etc., etc.) had to do with concerns about the foundations of mathematics, which very much is a philosophical issue. Most "practicing mathematicians", with no taste for philosophy, could probably care less.
Why is any of this relevant? Because computer science is a direct outgrowth of mathematical logic. At least it was. That has changed since the rise of "software engineering," which seeks to focus on the utilization of results from theoretical computer science without regard to where these results came from (in my opinion). However, even with "software engineering," there are still some areas of computer science that are more philosophical than others. A good example of this is the development of functional programming languages. Most of these languages are formalized in various mathematical systems (structural operational semantics or denotational semantics being popular choices), and many of them make use of advanced type systems with some connection to type theory. Both of these are connections to mathematical logic, and although mathematical logic itself has been refined to a point where one can often ignore philosophical issues, the *motivation* of these logical systems in the first place has usually been driven by the philosophy of mathematics or the philosophy of logic.
So yes, philosophy does have a role in computer science. The connection will probably seem roundabout to anyone not interested/experienced with theoretical computer science (in the area of, say, formal semantics for programming languages, etc.), but it is there just by virtue of having a connection to the source of computer science in the first place, and certainly to the foundation of computer science in general.
Philosophy has several roles wrt computer science (CS):
Papers, books, and conferences on the philosophy of computer science: http://pcs.essex.ac.uk/