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Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited
Soren Kierkegaard writes "While reading the two-and-a-half-year-old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"
While reading the two and a half year old Slashdot post
Get out much?
Actually, a course in the philosophy department on logic got me into computers. Years later I took a programming course and discovered it was the same thing as symbolic logic, mostly. The rest is history. It made my career. :-)
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
This is one of the first websites I discovered when I first started getting on the internet back in the early to mid 90s.
Technoli
Now, whether that's in a formal course like "Philosophy 101" or whether it's embedded in other courses, like ethics course content spread throughout an engineering curriculum or programming philosophies spread throughout programming courses, isn't all that important.
What is important is that by the time you graduate, you understand both why there are so many different world views for "big picture" things like the responsibilities of citizens, the rights of individuals vs. the rights of the collective or state, etc. as well as why there are different views on "details" like different coding standards and different standards of business ethics.
By knowing many of these views and by understanding why different people have different views, you will be better prepared to know why you adopt the views you adopt, and be able to explain your reasons to others. You will also be better equipped to understand why your boss or coworker may have a different view, and whether that difference is a reason for you to re-evaluate your views, agree to disagree, or circulate your resume.
This is why philosophy should be taught in school. Graduates should also continue a lifetime of self-study.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hofstader's GEB:EGB?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Understanding how to model real life objects into a database taught me alot about what an object truly is. It also taught me alot about relationships between entities, parent and child and 'many to many' relationships. I made leaps and bounds in development just by understanding data modeling.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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 think that still holds true in all but rare cases. It's unfortunate but I made a reference to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a few months ago at work. Someone had just read The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins and I asked them if he was referring to Kant's "Prime Mover" or "Watch Maker" ... and everyone promptly drew a blank. My actual work is even further from it.
... even in C that stuff is resource intensive.
Although that is primarily the 'classic' idea of philosophy and I'm well aware of increasing fields related to computer science like information law (or whatever they call it) and AI. I became disheartened as I tried implementing some rudimentary NLP/AI programs
Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?
No offense but you just took two positive sentences about two arbitrary majors and tried to pull them together for reasons unknown to me. The same could probably be said about any two majors:
Is a merger of Home Economics, a discipline steeped in making home life better and easier, and Mathematics, a discipline of rigorous proofs, the best way to improve the common man's life?
Yeah, it's romantic. But aside from logic, predicate calculus and the philosophy of mathematics, could you help me out in how this is supposed to meld with my Java monkey job?
... where has a major application of Philosophy developed in Computer Science in the last 2.5 years?
Don't get me wrong, I love to read AI papers on arxiv and tinker with a local copy of Wikipedia at home but
My work here is dung.
...wonder whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of welcoming our new AI overlords or not; that is the question.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Philosophy is indispensible to all science. Even though calling computing a science is a tad of a stretch, the need for philosophy still applies. Perhaps even more so.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Because we'll end up with programming examples that involve the use of methods named Cogito.Ergo.Sum() for adding two numbers together.
Hint for those of you not forced to study such things while you were taking CS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Computer Science needs to go. 95% of the students majoring in Computer Science should actually be majoring in Software Engineering.
It's a sad mistake of history than CompSci is the major most widely available in a world that needs software engineers, not more academics arguing about p=np.
There is nothing wrong with Computer Science, it's just being applied incorrectly in the education system today.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before
Maybe computers have a more prominent role in philosophy than ever before. Not in the physical sense of typing up long winded papers, but in the sense of creating models to simulate ... stuff.
Just asking.
Infuriate left and right
I have a philosophy degree and I am a DBA and I have recently been rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I personally think it should be required reading for any first year Computer science students.
I can understand why studying both might be quite popular(many philosophers have also been involved in mathematics, and CS gives you hope of getting paid that philosophy generally doesn't); but I don't think that the two fields have all that much to do with each other. There are some results in CS that are philosophically relevant(the halting problem qualifies as epistemology); but they don't really grow out of philosophy in any particular way, nor does progress seem to be impeded by lack of interaction.
I'm not sold on the ethics connection, either. Ethics is a very interesting philosophical field; but I'm not at all sure that it is relevant to the vast majority of situations where unethical behavior is a problem. Virtually nobody is dissuaded from bad behavior by the Kantian imperative or any other theoretical device, and virtually nobody falls into bad behavior because of ignorance of such a device. Ethics is a fascinating way to work on curious edge cases; but it doesn't have much to say about real world "ethical" problems, which are mostly about people doing things they know are bad, not doing things they know are good, or rationalizing things one way or the other. Psychology and social systems stuff are really what you want there.
May I add:
What is science, if not applied philosophy?
Or, slightly more specifically, it depends on what parts of symbolic logic you focus on. Given a specific system of symbolic logic, working out its technical implications is yes, essentially mathematics or theoretical computer science. Using it to implement automated reasoners is artificial intelligence (a branch of computer science).
Designing logics can go either way, though. You could do it purely as a technical matter: you want a logic with a particular property, so you design one that has that property. Most logics are designed from a more philosophical perspective, though: logic basically as a way of formalizing statements and ways of reasoning about statements. From Aristotle through the middle ages people had catalogued valid and fallacious methods of reasoning; a system of logic encompasses a formalization of such a system. It also has ontological implications, depending on what you decide to make representable in the logic, and what you view as the implications of doing so. For example, W.V.O. Quine's works on logic, while they contain technical results as well, are mainly philosophical in nature. Bertrand Russell's research program in logic, while it contained a lot of technical results, was also primarily philosophical in nature.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is a lot in computer science that has long ago been worked out in philosophy, but for which most computer scientists have but a fuzzy grasp.
Computer Science operates under certain philosophical assumptions which have consequences -- but if you don't even know that you're operating under a DUALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS -- you will not be able to deal with those.
For example, Cognitive Scientists are often are not very precise in their use of the words 'knowledge' and 'understanding', as John Searle so brilliantly explains:
(Exerpted from 'Minds Brains and Programs')
"First I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': in many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding." My critics point out that there are many different degrees of understanding; that "understanding" is not a simple two-place predicate; that there are even different kinds and levels of understanding, and often the law of excluded middle doesn-t even apply in a straightforward way to statements of the form "x understands y; that in many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on. To all of these points I want to say: of course, of course. But they have nothing to do with the points at issue. There are clear cases in which "understanding' literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument 2 I understand stories in English; to a lesser degree I can understand stories in French; to a still lesser degree, stories in German; and in Chinese, not at all. My car and my adding machine, on the other hand, understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. We often attribute "under standing" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. We say, "The door knows when to open because of its photoelectric cell," "The adding machine knows how) (understands how to, is able) to do addition and subtraction but not division," and "The thermostat perceives chances in the temperature."
The reason we make these attributions is quite interesting, and it has to do with the fact that in artifacts we extend our own intentionality;3 our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples. The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English. If the sense in which Schank's programmed computers understand stories is supposed to be the metaphorical sense in which the door understands, and not the sense in which I understand English, the issue would not be worth discussing. But Newell and Simon (1963) write that the kind of cognition they claim for computers is exactly the same as for human beings. I like the straightforwardness of this claim, and it is the sort of claim I will be considering. I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing. The computer understanding is not just (like my understanding of German) partial or incomplete; it is zero.
[This has certain consequences...]
IN MUCH OF AI THERE IS A RESIDUAL BEHAVIOURISM OR OPERATIONALISM. Since appropriately programmed computers can have input-output patterns similar to those of human beings, we are tempted to postulate mental states in the computer similar to human mental states. But once we see that it is both conceptually and empirically possible for a system to have human capacities in some realm without having any intentionality at all, we should be able to overcome this impulse. My desk adding machine has calculating capacities, but no intentionality, and in this paper I have tried to show that a system could have input and output capabilities that duplicated those
I'm almost 5 years out of school now and got degrees in both CS and Philosophy. In my humble opinion, there's a lot of intersection between the two, especially in regard to philosophy of the mind, but the really interesting part, I think, is how it helps me in my day to day work.
No, I'm not discussing the Critique of Pure Reason, espousing empiricism, or wondering if I really am just dreaming.
What I learned from my other major was discursive thinking: dissecting an idea to see what it means and what its ramifications are and how to deal with having more than one way to do it (TM) by choosing the best one.
Philosophy, for me, was all about discussion, so I'd had years of practice putting ideas up on the white board, understanding them, and maybe shooting them down years before I ever joined my first programming team.
(That, and being able to write incomprehensible comments vis a vis the English challenged folk with whom I sometimes work;))
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Yes, by the time you graduate 12th grade or even 1st grade you have some level of understanding of these concepts.
Formal training in philosophy carries it to the next level.
An "educated" person, someone who has a 4-year degree, should have the brains and training to think at that next level.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's particularly relevant in areas of CS research with significant philosophical implications, like AI. In some cases knowing relevant philosophical problems can point out likely technical problems and potential approaches to solving them.
For example, machine learning repeatedly bangs its head against the age-old philosophical problem of induction, and in my view (as an AI academic), the people who know about that and the relevant literature are more likely to make non-naive technical contributions.
Reinforcement learning (a specific branch dealing with learning how to act in an environment) bangs its head against issues like the relationship between something we might call "the real world", the data from your senses, and how to infer between them. Specific technical proposals have largely recapitulated some of the philosophical debate: for example, there was a semi-recent and somewhat influential proposal to replace a priori "states", which represent a view of the "real" states in an environment, with phenomenological state, constructed on the fly from sequences of sensor values clustered based on their ability to predict future sensor values (Predictive State Representations, or PSRs). This is essentially recapitulating the empiricists' "sense-data" view of the early 20th century, which they proposed as a replacement for metaphysical ontologies of the world.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wait...computer science is the practical application of symbolic logic. Western science as we know it is rooted in Western philosophy to the point that science didn't become it's own little domain until that Renaissance thing. Philosophy has zero practical real world application except as philosophy (i.e. the study of knowledge). I say this as someone with a philosophy minor and my wife has a masters in philosophy...believe me, nobody has ever quizzed us on Kant's moral imperative in a job interview or expected anything on dualism.
How could you possibly go from electrical engineering, where you might actually create something useful, to a lawyer and philosopher?
What philosophy use to be, and what philosophy amounts to today, are very different animals.
What has philosophy taught you if I may ask?
I have a BS in CSci, a BA in the liberal arts, and have taken a few philosophy courses.
I've become much more jaded about philosophy because it began to dawn on me after taking a grad course in philosophy that engineering/IT is about SOLVING general computational problems. We're looking for relationships between numbers, values, methods of computation, etc. which have a general purpose utility. In most cases, these pipes/algorithms are designed to be somewhat blind to the content going through them. It's a quest to solve general problems.
Philosophy, on the other hand, often "forgets" that its problems are often computational/logic, perhaps even totally unrelated to the subject being treated -- rather, there is a more general and underlying logical problem that gives rise to what appears to be a problem in ethics, a paradox in something or the other. Philosophers, in my experience, can get mired in a specific subject domain, when the problem is actually a general logic issue. I could provide many examples from the philosophy of mind, but I don't want to distract from this basic distinction between what computer science/algorithmics tends to be about -- and how philosophers tend to get mired in circular/uncomputable particulars. The last problem with philosophy is that, I think, it doesn't actually WANT to solve problems -- lest it put itself and its faculty out of business as a relic of a previous age.
I'm an undergrad at Stanford University and I just declared the major here that most embraces this idea: that Computer Science and Philosophy have a lot in common. It's called Symbolic Systems (or SymSys) and really is an intersection of CS, Phil, Psychology, and Linguistics. In short, our focus is that there is more to CS than designing algorithms. It's about the thought behind it - purely logical and human alike.
http://symsys.stanford.edu/
as someone who suffered through two semesters of computational theory i have to say that philosophy and computer science are made for each other.
In 1983, as an undergraduate, I started at DUKE on a pair of B.S degrees in Psychology (emphasis on Human Learning) and Computer Science but later expanded my undergraduate scope to include a Philosophy degree. I was durn early in crossing these disciplines and still remember how little they used to talk to one another (during the late 80s and into the early 90s it was frustrating and amusing to watch the C.S. AI researchers painfully re-discover stuff that Psychologists had known for decades).
After so many years of studying all 3 disciplines, I believe there's plenty in Psychology that Computer Scientists (at least, those concerned with HCI or AI, and *please* leave HCI to the pros) can benefit from melding in to their work but durn little in Philosophy that benefits C.S. The glaring exception is that I think everyone in C.S. ought to be educated in the Philosophical Foundations of Statistics (a course which is sadly often relegated to graduate programs). We work with statistics so often, but so few people seem to understand what we're *really* trying to express when we look at "1 standard deviation out" or when a particular statistic is appropriate to our computing goal.
Sure areas of Philosophy such as Modal Logic are fun (what? the rules of boolean logic don't always *have* to apply? cool!) but most of the things Philosophy studies have little application to the work of Computer Science.
There's a lot of branches to philosophy, most are basically entire disciplines unto themselves. I think in terms of logic and ethics, yes there's some overlap -- as those are two branches in the field.
But when talking about areas like phenomenology, epistemology & cosmology I don't see any real connection, or any kind of overlap (without really forcing it). Not that it's a bad thing -- it's just an apples and oranges kind of thing.
Ethics is relevant anywhere imo, not only CS and certainly in the business world it's valuable. I would say the one place where philosophy and CS overlap the closest is in Logic, for pretty obvious reasons.
But, there's simply too many areas of study in philosophy for the disciplines to merge entirely
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
It wasn't that many years ago when I read an article that universities were pushing liberal arts majors toward taking cs courses. so this connection may be simply a result of the .com bubble.
Define 'useful'. The mundane work of most EEs I know drive them to insanity, bitterness, and over-specialization. Ugh. Philosophy any day. I'm not the OP either. I have my own question for the OP. Did you plan on getting a a Ph.D. before you started law school, or did you change your mind in law school, and decide to finish anyway?
I'm not joking, that's actually what it says on my diploma. I majored in CS, minored in Philosophy. And yes, cognitive science does have a lot to do with both fields. I tried to get the two departments to get together and discuss this when I was in school, but the professors in both departments were completely uninterested in the proposition.
Philosophy is a good source for dealing with abstract ideas. The truth is Philosophy is part of all science, and computer science being more abstract and mathematics oriented than some other science is even closer to philosophy.
Consider the field of Artificial Intelligence. Computer Scientists are trying to solve a problem, which they know exists, "How do we make machines think?" However, in order to proceed to the solution to this they have to answer other questions of a philisophical nature such as "What is thought?" and "What is free will?"
Heck, I know the Rootless Root is semi-humorous, but I still find Master Foo Discourses on the Graphical User Interface to be a good way to explain the value of a command line to people who don't understand it.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It is the only way to not turn out like the Bryyonians.
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As someone who studied both philosophy and psychology in college, I think that psychology was more useful in the practical application of computer science. Logic is useful, but not really a philosophy IMHO (more of an interdisciplinary subject, like the scientific method). And human "logic" and computer logic are very different subjects, to the point of having almost nothing to do with each other except some concepts and syntax.
Psychology helps with understanding team dynamics, what motivates different kinds of people, dealing with interpersonal politics, how to get customer buy-in, how to influence people, how to cope with people whose roles are beyond their skills, etc. I have found developmental psychology to be especially useful in teaching others about technology.
What specifically does philosophy help with in rolling out a system? Maybe some AI stuff, but I can't think of how it's helped me get anything done in the real world. How does philosophy help me build a control system for a nuclear reactor?
Philosophy teaches you how to think and learn in ways previously unimaginable. It "teaches" (or allows for the learning of/encourages the learning of, I guess I'd say) wisdom.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
We've had that in IT for awhile now. Just go to your UNIX sysadmin and start reading the features list for Windows Vista-- Instant holy war. So philosophy in IT would actually be an improvement. ^_^ (grinning, ducking, running)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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They both studied philosophy. If you don't understand what they have to do with your every day job, then you don't really understand what you are doing every day.
In Aristotle's day, it may have encompassed all of abstract knowledge and thinking, but the spin-off of Natural Philosophy into Science left a big hole. Nowadays, is there any more coherent a definition than 'that which is taught and studied in philosophy departments'?
When I was in college (Computer Engineering), I needed 3 courses to finish my humanties electives.
I took Logic, Advanced Logic, and Philosophy and Logic. All thru the Philosophy Dept. They were cross-listed using Math and Computer Science, too.
But as a Philosophy course, well, you get my drift!
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
i.e., Programming is Logic.
Logic is big and consists of more things than programming.
Programming though, fundamentally, is logic.
4 years of Undergraduate Philosophy = $30K 2 years of Graduate School, Philosophy, with a GTA = $20K 8 years of Unix Sysadmins saying, "So... what can you do with a degree in Psychology" = Priceless. The double majors are growing because people need to make money. And Philosophy really isn't a money maker. Sure there is some serious overlap (logic, programming, semantics and search engines). But when it comes down to the actual use of my degree for my work? Nihil, unless you count naming my desktops after Platonic Dialogues.
Are computer science and philosophy related? Yes! I have BA in philosophy, and I focused on cognitive science and artificial intelligence, where the two meet head to head. Computer science needs philosophy in order to help evaluate the status of machines in terms of whether or not they have consciousness. And philosophy needs computer science to help answer open questions in the philosophy of mind.
Also, the two have a mutual interest in the study of information--what is it, how do you use it efficiently, how do you organize it, how do you process it, etc. If you have any interest in it, you should definitely check out Luciano Floridi--he's part of/started a movement he calls The Philosophy of Information that encompasses but AI and the philosophy of computing in general, including questions in ethics.
Currently I'm taking courses in computer science (and I work in IT), and I hope to start grad school in cognitive science next year. So yes, for me philosophy and computer science are intimately entwined.
It gives you the warm and fuzzy feeling that you feel when you think you understand something. Hopefully, you later grow up, seriously read a lot more stuff (and by "seriously" I mean "charitably"), and realize that it's not a very good book after all.
Are you adequate?
A politician with a sound concept of Metaphysics, Anthropology, and Ethics would be a valuable addition to society. We need more of your kind.
This page was generated by a Flock of Attack Kittens for you.
Considering that my degree in Philosophy has done nothing to get me past working on a help desk for $20/hr, and one of my co-workers makes a bit more than that with her C.S. degree, maybe the problem is that we should have combined our degrees into some sort of super-hybrid. Then we'd really be rolling in the dough!
The clearest connection between Philosophy and Computer Science lies in the intersection between formal logic, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of computation - namely the field of Artificial Intelligence, understood as a sub-field of Cognitive Science. [shamelessselfpromotion] My book 'Minds and Computers' (EUP 2007) - mindsandcomputers.net - is an accessible introduction to the philosophy of artificial intelligence and gives a sustained account of the relation between philosophy, computation and cognition! [/shamelessselfpromotion]
I couldn't get past the first sentence of the post. There are people who read two and a half year old Slashdot articles? Talk about concepts the mind can't grasp! It's bad enough to spend your day reading the current posts. Two and a half years. Jeez. I'm sorry, I have to lie down for a while.
So roles are basically interfaces, but with type-checking whether an object satifies the interfaces deferred until runtime. That's a good idea; I've personally actually wanted very long to have something like this in Java. But it's basically a small improvement on interface specifications, which comes down to type systems.
Why do you Perl folk like to talk about every simple thing as if it was the product of your profound knowledge of something else that's only tenuously related to computer science? For example, Larry Wall is pretty insignificant as a linguist, yet him and a bunch of other Perlfolk keep attributing all sorts of hare-brained ideas to the supposed fact that he's a linguist, and therefore supposedly has some great insight into how natural languages work and how people think. Um, no.
Are you adequate?
What I'm trying to say without sounding too self-absorbed is that philosophy makes everything better!
and I refute it thus: If philosophy makes everything better then where are the philosopher kings that Plato spoke of and if they are not here yet then how have things gotten any better since the time of Plato?
With the notable exception of advanced degrees at Harvard, most fields of study terminate at a "Doctor of Philosophy" degree for this very reason.
Um, I think you will find that lots of universities around the world have higher doctorates, not just Harvard. *All* the Australian universities I attended or have even looked at - major and regional - had PhDs but also had the higher degrees of DLitt, DSc, etc which are only awarded to scholars with extensive and outstanding research publications in their field.
I am anarch of all I survey.
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This question is a red herring, because by answering it the way it is written it allows us to avoid the question that is taken for granted: does philosophy and computer science have little to no overlap? You have to believe that both fields don't overlap if you want to start answering the post's question as it is written.
But consider just some of the branches and topics of philosophy: aesthetics, reality, truth, ethics(!), logic. I have yet to see anyone try and demonstrate that these topics have no relevance to certain fields. At bare minimum, the social nature of all knowledge implies that these topics will have relevance to your field, occupation, or program of study.
Furthermore, take just one branch of philosophy: ethics. Essentially asking the question, "how then shall we live together?", the only way you could prove that a topic under consideration had little relevance to ethics is if you could prove that the topic under consideration has nothing to do with how we live our lives. I have yet to see anyone attempt to prove this about any topic.
Maybe it was just a poorly worded question, and the poster was asking about ways to make explicit how deeply connected both fields are. I'm not certain. But it's troubling to see such a huge assumption about philosophy and computer science pop up here and have so many people agree to it without proof.
It is my opinion that people should read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to understand philosophy's role in Computer Science.
Money is the root of all evil?
and it's quite different than logic studied in philosophy classes.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
We usually call this notion the Curry Howard correspondence.
Am I the only one who needed a second glance to figure out why a post with Curly mentioned in it would be modded Insightful instead of Funny?
but we do ostensibly select our best and brightest to "rule."
Then how was Bush the younger ever selected to "rule"?
You're going to have to be more specific here.
Lets go with your technology example, on the one hand you believe that it has made things better but some things, probably connected with technology, are arguably still worse or have been made worse. If philosophy is a necessary, although perhaps not a sufficient, condition for modern technology AND modern technology does not always make things better, even in the aggregate, then how can philosophy always make everything better?
John Searle is rubbish. His argument simply isn't cogent. Lets look at it this way. Obviously your brain has a vast array of capabilities, it is highly complex. Furthermore it performs a function (assisting your biological survival and reproduction) which is an ongoing constant task, it never ends, and it does not break down into any one closed set of sub goals.
Now, lets consider your calculator. It is quite simple and performs only a few specific functions. Furthermore its function is quite limited, it performs arithmetical operations on numbers which are input to it. Seems fairly safe to say it has no 'intentions'. These functions it performs are quite 'closed ended', addition is a procedure which begins at one state, and ends at another, at which point the machine simply halts and displays a result.
Those are rather the extreme cases.
Now. Lets look at your thermostat again. The thermostat is at least as simple as the calculator. It is a BIT more interesting though in that its function is open ended. There are states, but it doesn't ever halt.
Now, what about an ameoba? Obviously considerably more complex than the thermostat. Yet in essence there are simply a lot more states and a lot more outputs. In both cases inputs translate to outputs and there is feedback.
I challenge you to demonstrate to me that there is a QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE between the thermostat, the ameoba, and you. There is absolutely a QUANTITATIVE difference. You're far more complex, you have a lot more states and a lot more inputs and outputs.
So the differences appear to be a matter of degree, not kind.
As for the rest of Searle's argument, it is just silly. Computer programs DO have states. One can make his argument with reference to a particular algorithm, but then all you're doing is looking at a tree and concluding it isn't a forest...
Now, it would have been a cogent argument to point out that a 'program' in the abstract isn't a system, but I could as well argue (and as meaningfully) that fictional characters in books don't have minds. Duh. The program certainly has to be instantiated in hardware to THINK.
Certainly seems to me that it is and can be valuable to study the characteristics of software programs in a cognitive sense. It is not 'mind' without instantiation, but nothing in Searle's argument suggests to me that we can't write software and study how it executes as a way of approaching general principals of intelligence.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Philosophy as others have remarked is a pretty broad subject. Some things like symbolic logic are very similar to the methods used in Computer Science which have a lot to do with software development and problem solving (although we are definitely living in the age where formal views of program correctness are not the norm).
Other things about philosophy like "intentionality" as a field of study are farther off, perhaps to the point of inconsequential.
That said much of the posting is full of things you find in fluff pieces.
it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before
It seems to me that that statement would be true even if you added just one "philosophical thing" to Computer Science. So the real question isn't "Is it more than ever before?" but "Has the rate of change increased significantly?". It's certainly possible that that's what the author meant but a) Where's the supporting information? b) Who cares what some anonymous joe on the internet thinks?
and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing
Assuming this is true it could easily be due to trends in education rather than reflecting some kind of merger of the two. For example it appears to me that Colleges and Universities are becoming much more flexible in program requirements. This would make all sorts of minors, double-majors, etc... climb in numbers since it was difficult to impossible to enroll in these programs in policies prior.
Also it again misses the point. It's more important to know the rate which they are climbing relative to the past.
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I am nearly done a double degree, B.Sc in Computer Science and a BA in Philosophy. So many people tell me that "that's an interesting combination" and roll their eyes slightly, but I think that the two are more closely linked than most other fields of study, besides some of the obvious, like Math and CS. Especially when you consider the impacts that advances in AI will bring in the next decade or two, and many other aspects as well. I haven't done much to combine the actual studies of the two, besides the obvious commonalities of logics in the two, but I'll at least be able to finish my CS degree with the ability to properly write down my ideas and convey them to other people in a clear and concise manner, and that alone is worth the Phil. degree. It's not for everyone, but I think people should look into at least a few Phil courses in any of their studies.
The unexamined life is not worth living
"1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things." --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
That's the best short description of relational modeling I've ever found, for somebody used to object-oriented modeling. Basically, it's a change of ontology: the OO modeler tends to think of the world as being made up of things, each of which has some repertoire of properties; the world is a big set of things, related by a few universal laws. The relational modeler, on the other hand, conceives of things as unanalyzable wholes, and everything interesting about things is how they are related to other things by facts, and how those facts are related to other facts by logic.
Here's a very condensed outline of the Tractatus ; the parts you want to see are primarily (1) and (2).
Are you adequate?
"Soren Kierkegaard writes"
I find that very hard to believe. He's been dead for how long now?
Every field of study... that is, every single field of study... was once a branch of philosophy, or a branch off a branch of philosophy, et cetera.
Actually-- this is untrue. There are plenty of fields whose genesis was in practice, and the refinement of that practice became the study, including many scientific fields. Metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, to name a few. To use [abused] philosophical terminology: certain things cannot be known a priori, therefore knowledge of them must be gained through experience. Modern scientific thought borrows Hegel's dialectic ("thesis, antithesis, synthesis") from philosophy, but it is not solely derived from that branch by any stretch of the imagination.
Disclaimer: I have a Philosophy degree and am currently working on my CS degree.
I have a BA and Masters in philosophy of Language and AI, and I just happen to work in an IT field. I Still find my philosophical training to be the intellectual Swiss Army knife for solving just about any problem I might encounter in my life. I use it from running a company to just knowing when I should kick my hard drive vs cracking a beer.
Science is about how the World IS. Philosophy is about how the World OUGHT to be. We deal in the norms. Once you know how the World "ought" to be, figuring out why the hell the World IS NOT that way is much easier.
Living in Chile
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Any academic discipline that has technical terms like "raw feelies" can't be all bad.
Sure, why not. Clear thinking will be at a premium in unraveling the mechanisms of cognition. And in AI, some people (COUGH, Kurzweil) seem to talk like sentience will spontaneously emerge if you can fill a large enough barrel with nanobots. More in the Hofstadter camp myself that building a mind is going to be a long slog through thick terrain.
If philosophy makes everything better then where are the philosopher kings [wikipedia.org] that Plato spoke of and if they are not here yet then how have things gotten any better since the time of Plato?
Has the thing that makes us human has gotten any better, can it ?
A leader cant make his followers "better", he can show them a path of self improvement.
But if you are just being superficial, then yes. Im sure you have lots of stuff, and having lots of stuff makes you better than people in Plato's time....
After the very early enlightenment (late 1700s - early 1800s), philosophy was put to use to reconcile reason with religion and despotism (Hegel, Kant) or to explain why the two could not be reconciled (Nietzsche). Finally the quest ended in defeat and nihilism with the existentialists during the mid 20th century.
This of course has nothing to do with computer science.
There are some ignored philosophers who might tangentially be of interest to computer science like some of Von Mises's technical methodological works such as "Theory and History" but no one will teach that to you at any university.
If the following link doesn't get you there, just access the organization's home page & search for "Code of Ethics"...
http://acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=show&conID=coe
I'd be interested in other IT (or Engineering) societies' Codes of Ethics (or similar)...
Kindly post links in a reply to this post, thanks.
I feel like if I ever met someone with a double major in computer science and philosophy, I would immediately have the desire to punch them in the balls.
Because I'm not letting that reproduce.
Well, they could be trying to secure a job after graduation because, for better or worse, Philosophy grads are not exactly in high demand these days.
Philosophy is the most vital field of learning in all of the sciences. It pre-dated the sciences and gives the person studying it extremely good logic and understanding.
I used to have the feeling that philosophers were useless and that the solution to the dining philosophers problem should be to let them starve - they deserve to die! 2000 years of work and they still can't agree on any answers!
Then when I was reviewing everything I had learned during my 1st year as a graduate in CS, last Summer, I was shocked that I couldn't explain what an algorithm is in a clear, mathematical way. After some thinking, I arrived that the essence of an algorithm is expressing an arbitrarily large function in terms of smaller, finite functions that a computer can evaluate. But this opened up so many cans of worms for me.
An algorithm seems very similar to a real world process (e.g. baking a cake). The former deals with imaginary inputs and outputs while the latter uses physical states as inputs and outputs. Being a perfectionist, I was at a loss trying to reconcile the two. The implications of this question are very serious:
1. Does an algorithm/function exist independently of anything physical or can they be completely explained in terms of physical processes (e.g. charges on a capacitor)? I certainly wouldn't like it if the things I've spent years studying don't exist.
2. Are physical processes real or are they imaginary. Basically, what is more primitive? mind or matter, or do they both exist?
Trying to find the answers to these metaphysical questions, I began my search, but had to stop because of all the complexities, but I definitely gained a good understanding of idealism, materialism, and Cartesian dualism. I found it enlightening trying to find the meaning of existence, probably because I've never been part of any religion.
Now I can see why philosophers can't agree on anything. It's because reality is whatever we perceive and not everyone perceives it the same way - allegory of the cave.
I'm currently in a Computer Ethics class, which is required for the CompSci major. We discuss privacy rights and open software and copyright law and what have you, but it's in reality the required "writing intensive" class to ensure that you can write a cohesive sentence by the time you graduate. It's actually requiring more work than all my other classes this semester. "Read 5000 word article. Write 1 - 2 pages with a summary and weather you agree or disagree. Due in two days." That sorta thing. Basically it's like /. only more intellectually grounded and far less fun.
I'd say mathematical logic classes tend to be more detailed but less broad: they focus on the rigorous mathematical treatment of usually one or two relatively well-behaved logics, like propositional logic or first-order logic.
Philosophical logic classes, by contrast, study these logics in less depth, but put more emphasis on comparisons between logics, the relationship between logic and natural-language argument and thought (and science), and so on.
Which of these is watered down I suppose depends on your perspective. Introductory philosophical logic classes typically have much weaker treatment of issues such as decidability, model theory, interpretations, syntax vs. semantics, and so on. On the other hand, introductory mathematical logic classes typically have much weaker treatment of issues such as nonmonotonic logics, higher-order logics, autoepistemic logics, the relationship between logic and science/mathematics, the ontological commitments inherent in a choice of logic (if any), etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
depending on your point of view.
About now, I am thinking the latter.
well.. you have to be an advocate for your studies, look how much you spent on it. philosophy is giving reasons to justify who and what you are and why you do what you do.
... because it challenges all forms of knowledge. Math is actually an extension of philosophy, what George Boole and other mathematicians did, was they began to develop systems of logic under a mathematical style.
Most people here have no clue of what has been discovered in Cognitive linguistics in the last 30 years and it's implications for wester thought and mathematics as a whole. The mind does not use symbolic computation at all. Therefore it does not use the symbolic logic mathematicians developed over the centuries, and this has a lot of philosophical implications for math and scientific method as a whole.
For those up for it you should begin you adventues here:
What has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years undermines the enlightenments view of reason and enlightenment's view of education., most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason:
(quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg [tinypic.com]
Longer version:
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142 [linktv.org]
Philosophy is important and is highly under-rated, those who disdain it know nothing much about it. You can tell people who are intelligent from who is not, from their opinions about philosophy and the kinds of things they know or say about it. I think Ibn Al-Haytham expresses the need to always question societies sacred dogma's.
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-haytham [wikipedia.org]
This is what too few human beings do, they always trust in what they have been taught... when much of what they know is fraught with error. I am weary of anything I say as well as anything any other man says, that cannot be demonstrated. Therefore, I only defend what can be demonstrated.
The majority of people do not take the above view, they are overconfident in what they think they know when they hardly know anything at all.
Speaking as someone who majored in ancient Greek and Latin as both an undergraduate and in graduate school at U Cal Berkeley, IMHO computer science is now at the cutting edge of philosophy.
Now that AI has been solved [google.com], the philosophy of mind has switched from theory-mode to practicum-mode, just as AstroNomy switched from theory-mode and observation-mode to practicum-mode when ManKind ventured into SpaceTravel in the nineteen-sixties.
Even NeuroScience is moving into computer science, as a Theory of Mind [sourceforge.net] for artificial intelligence gets implemented in Open-Source AI SoftWare.
Your kidding right? AI has NOT been solved, nor has the modeling problem attached to Cog Sci (the premise "the brain is a computer"). AI is still a very hard problem, that has had made very little progress since it was declared imminent and crucial to understanding cognition. Recently, even, some of the big old AI guns have been decrying the lack of progress in the field.
Also not all of the community (any community) is absolutely sure that "solving" AI will be as insightful to Phi of Mind as some seem to think.
If you want to clarify, please do.
I'm not sure what an Astro Nomy is, either.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Hot chicks, lots of pictures and multiple choice tests, here we come! I can't wait until the football team is taking CS 101.
Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"
Philosophy is in many ways the father (or mother, if you prefer) of the modern sciences, but I think it is becoming increasingly irrelevant in itself. The tendency seems to be that philosophy is defined more by what it isn't than by what it is; this is because it has kept losing parts over the years: maths, physics, psychology, sociology, economics, law etc - I tend to think of it now as theology without God.
So, in a way you can't study any science without studying philosophy, but on the other hand, modern philosophy has little to offer, really, apart from opinions about ethical matters. Cognitive science sounds more like psychology and ethics in general is rapidly becoming a subject in psychology and biology, rather than one of philosophy, since we are beginning to understand more about both the physiological basis for our ethical choices, and the origins of ethics in groups of social animals.
first came mythology, then came philosophy, then came science. philosophy was the beginnings of science. science is the culmination and the future to answering the so called questions of philosophy.
I have a degree in Philosophy, but my career (with a brief interlude into journalism) has been in IT. Shortly after I graduated, I met a guy who started a software company. he was a Phil grad and he said most of his programmers were as well. There's something in the logical functionality of computer science that appeals to us brainiacs. :)
If computer is something similar to human's body or/and mind, then I suppose that not only Philosophy but everything is worth for computer understanding and I prefer to say that computer is everything.
What, nobody has read Anathem?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
With the notable exception of advanced degrees at Harvard, most fields of study terminate at a "Doctor of Philosophy" degree for this very reason.
And, of course, the notable exception of your own Juris Doctorate degree.
I would encourage anyone of any major to seriously consider the study of philosophy, whether as a major, a minor, or an elective. Few other courses have so much potential to improve your life, to say nothing of your ability to think.
Although, speaking from personal experience, I must say that a major in philosophy does very little to improve one's ability to pay back student loans incurred while studying philosophy. For your own good, double-major in one of the "natural philosophies" (chemistry, engineering, etc.)!
Depending on the relative frame of reference the two ideas are neither mutually exclusive nor exactly identical. The are complementary parts of a whole. Like light as a wave or light as particles. Depending on what standard you use to measure you will find the opposites are both true. The exclusion of one idea over the other as truth is a mistake. Both truths are equally true and complementary. Thus opens the door to quantum computing.
Claims that CS is quaint, and a 'good geek' science ring hollow when more likely than not the author of this statement would not be able to formally prove that the sum of two reals is real given that the reals are closed under addition. Claims to study what is 'knowable' also ring false. I put this to the author: prove that you can. Aristotle said it well in Nicodemian ethics that the young man should sharpen his mind on mathematics, and only the old man should study philosophy. A person who avoids the study of mathematics or reduces it to a quaint curiosity to rationalize his own inabilities I contend will have too dull a mind to make any significant contribution to the study of what is knowable. Descarte showed us his own sharpness when he argued for a systematic axiomatic study of knowledge, and that is exactly the tradition that Computer Science continues along. Philosophy is an excellent course in reading the thoughts of great minds, and it should be taught early and deeply, but _not_ at the expense of learning to think formally and learning to make reasoned arguments that follow by necessity from their lemmas. Without this latter, the former will wash over the mind of the reader, leaving a residue of a pretentious education with no real mass.
Fair warning and full disclosure: I majored in Mathematics as an undergraduate, and hold a Ph.D. in Computer Science. My dissertation is in algorithms for logic programming.
I don't disagree. You are quite right that philosophy is the root of the tree of intellectual inquiry, and that all subsequent fields started as branches of philosophy. But there is a deeper connection than you may realize.
Mathematics is the language of logic. Without the system of notations that we call mathematics, logic simply cannot be precise. The notations of mathematics denote meanings. Computation is just the process of doing mathematics -- that is, of manipulating the symbols that denote the meanings. And, finally, programs are just the mathematical expressions that precisely denote those manipulations.
The part that I find amusing is that many, perhaps most, "computer scientists" do not even realize that they are doing mathematics, must less that they are doing symbolic logic or philosophical reasoning.
Philosophy departments tend to offer two flavors of logic courses, for which my pet names are "baby logic" and "real logic."
"Baby logic" is a lot easier, and involves things like showing people how to do proofs in a relatively friendly proof system, some discussion of Aristotelian logic, relationship between logic and natural language, etc. Very much like what you describe. This course is normally a requirement for a degree in philosophy.
"Real logic," on the other hand, involves the rigorous definition of the language of first-order logic, its semantics, its proof theory, and the main metatheorems about the system. The tour the force is normally the completeness metatheorem for first-order logic, with a smaller emphasis on results like Löwenheim-Skolem and compactness. This is a very hard course, but not a requirement for all study tracks in a philosophy department; it also does serve as a weed-out for people who were looking at those tracks. This sounds like a "mathematical logic" as you describe it, but you seem to imply that this course would be taught in a math department, and not a philosophy department.
In fact, in my experience, mathematics and CS departments are less likely to teach this second kind of course as an end on its own. They tend to touch the material while discussing other stuff.
Are you adequate?
The computer science departments I've been in have generally had at least one or two researchers specializing in logic, and they've typically taught a class on it, similar to the second class you describe, with a bit more emphasis on things like applications of automated theorem proving towards the end of the class.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes, I know that boolean algebra is just a trivial subset of set theory, and as such it could be considered mathematics as well... so I guess you could say CS lives in overlap between philosophy and pure mathematics.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
IMPOSSIBLE! ;)
Naturally that leads to the question of emergent behavior. There are of course several ways to look at that as well. Not all of them admit of a qualitative difference.
Still, I disagree profoundly with the assertion that one is required to assert dualism. I think there is a misunderstanding of terms.
Certainly I would not expect a program which simulates chemical reactions in the breast to produce MILK, but I would certain assert that such a program might tell us much about the dynamics of the process. Likewise software can tell us much about the dynamics of thinking. Furthermore milk is a physical substance, thought on the other hand might be better considered as an information processing task, and it would be a fallacy to assert that a program cannot be expected to process information.
There are certainly other issues related to the question 'can a program think', but I would classify them as being related to the nature of consciousness and its relationship to sense input amongst other things.
Frankly I would say that it no more surprises me that AI research has not produced results on the order of something we would define as intelligent than it would surprise me that no child has built a 50 story sky scraper out of Lego bricks... The current technology is simply inadequate by MANY orders of magnitude. The most powerful machines available today by my estimation aren't deploying processing power any greater than your average flat worm. And they operate at roughly similar levels of intellect.
Nor do I in any way shape or form believe we are even close to understanding the algorithms which would be required for some hypothetically human brain level capability machine to actually think.
However, I do posit that were I in possession of such a program, and had I two machines I could run it on, that given similar inputs I would end up with similar minds, and what would stop me from transferring the state of one to the other and executing the copy? It would be in some essential character the same mind IMHO.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Yes, computer philosophy is important, but it's not like it's unusual these days:
But I submit that what we really could use is some "computer social science":
There are lots of interesting and relevant threads here (some...not so much). I'm definitely down with GEB as being somehow of relevance to this, and of course the Formal Logic/CS connection should be obvious (and yes, CS/Logic is Math, which is why Waterloo is pretty much the only place I know of that has CS in the right faculty...and no, I didn't go there).
But I think the best answer to this question is Cantwell Smith's book The Origins of Objects . It's explicitly about the epistemological and ontological commitments of computation. What is it we're doing when we "compute"? Is the notion of "computation" definable? (please don't give me half-arsed definitions of algorithms in response). It's quite a read...I've gone back to it a few times now and still haven't made up my mind about it.
In case you don't know who Cantwell Smith is and are the kind of person who likes/wants/needs credentials: he was a co-founder of Stanford's CSLI, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, and (a short quote from his Wikipedia entry) "Smith is currently based out of the University of Toronto, where he is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information. Additionally, Smith holds a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga."
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun