[HN Gopher] The Philosophy of Computer Science
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The Philosophy of Computer Science
Author : olalonde
Score : 111 points
Date : 2020-03-17 17:35 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plato.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (plato.stanford.edu)
| DSingularity wrote:
| Yeah I wish we would explore the ethics of computer science in a
| deep and provocative way.
| kragen wrote:
| We _have_ explored the ethics of computer science and a deep
| and provocative way: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
|
| Unfortunately, many people don't like what we found, so they
| frequently shoot the messenger.
| dang wrote:
| 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451072
|
| 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8685971
|
| 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227620
|
| (Links are for the curious. Reposts are fine after about a year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
| gregfjohnson wrote:
| A framework I have recently found useful for thinking about my
| work as a computer programmer is a classic set of philosophical
| concerns:
|
| Truth, goodness, and beauty.
|
| That is to say, software development has an intellectual
| dimension, a moral dimension, and an aesthetic dimension.
|
| For me, the intellectual questions primarily concern program
| correctness. Is this code bug-free? Is it robust and stable? I
| tend toward the "computer science as mathematics" epistemology of
| Dijkstra and Hoare. Invariants; inductive reasoning; temporal
| logic. At least at the level of individual functions, I find that
| it is feasible to express with rigor and clarity what the
| function is intended to do, and to reason with precision through
| to a conclusion that the implementation fulfills the intent. And,
| there is a test for every line of code. A favorite quote from
| Knuth: "Don't trust the following code. I have only proven it
| correct, I have not tested it!"
|
| The moral questions concern the uses for which the code is
| designed, and the uses to which it will be put. I work on medical
| device embedded software these days, and the moral dimension of
| this work is a very meaningful and concrete benefit of this
| choice. I used to work on software development tools to support
| avionics development for the B-2 bomber. While I don't dismiss
| the latter as unambiguously immoral, it certainly was more
| problematic for me, an ongoing source of angst and struggle.
|
| The aesthetic issues seem to me to be two-fold: how beautiful is
| the software from the standpoint of the user? And, how beautiful
| is the source code? I have seen (and written) much code that is
| frankly an ugly mess. I have also upon occasion had an
| inspiration about how to re-write a piece of code. Tons of code
| gets deleted, and the new code is simple, clean, elegant, and
| inevitable. I would go so far as to claim that at times I have
| been graced to write code that turned out to be beautiful and
| aesthetically pleasing. It seems to me that the "Clean Code"
| movement encourages creation of code that is elegant and
| beautiful.
|
| I find that this triad of concerns inter-relate. Beautiful code
| is more likely to be correct, and conversely. Mindfully written
| code that is done with clarity and integrity tends to be both
| more beautiful and correct.
| User23 wrote:
| These relate directly to the three normative sciences:
|
| 1) Logic, the normative science of what is true.
|
| 2) Ethics, the normative science of what is good.
|
| 3) Aesthetics, the normative science of what is beautiful.
|
| I believe the above formulation is due to Dijkstra, but I can't
| recall precisely which work I saw it in. He certainly held all
| three in high esteem and that philosophy was at the root of
| many of his insights. For example, he explicitly made a
| distinction between correctness and pleasantness. The former is
| a matter of logic and the latter is a matter of aesthetics. It
| follows that they are separate and independent concerns. The
| vast majority of software is not logically correct, but is
| nonetheless more or less pleasing to its users.
|
| As for ethics, it's not just for things like the defense
| industry and medicine. For example the change to the C standard
| from having a set of permissible responses to undefined
| behavior to the actively hostile anything goes situation we now
| have is a matter of ethics. That behavior is both correct in
| that it satisfies the specification and pleasant in that it
| allows for aggressive optimization, but it's not very good for
| the users who get their NULL checks optimized away. Arguments
| that the bad behavior is correct or allows optimization don't
| address the ethical concern at all or deny its existence
| altogether and thus can never refute it.
|
| The normative sciences are remarkable in their broad
| applicability across domains, which makes them worthy of study
| by all educated persons, but they are especially important for
| software developers since we can potentially affect so many
| people's lives. They even apply here on HN. We should all try
| to make our contributions true, good (nourishing for
| intellectual curiosity), and elegant.
| igravious wrote:
| Ah, a Peircean I see.
| crispinb wrote:
| Nice. Seems like a satisfying approach.
|
| The ethical dimension has been a struggle for me. For reasons
| not relevant here projects I have worked on have tended to be
| either trivial or for companies whose ethics are actively
| dubious (business in my country is in general actively hostile
| to non-mercenary concerns). I've pretty much dropped out of dev
| work in large part for that reason.
| SarikayaKomzin wrote:
| I like this. Reminds me a bit of another useful triad for
| software, the Vitruvian principles in architecture: firmitatis
| (stability), utilitatis (utility), et venustatis (beauty).
| kaanmutlu wrote:
| good
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See also William J. Rapaport, emeritus professor of computer
| science at SUNY Buffalo, _Philosophy of Computer Science_ :
|
| http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/phics.pdf
|
| Discussed:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603 (2015)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718 (6 mos ago)
|
| Rapaport is cited numerous times in the Plato article.
| dnprock wrote:
| There's an emerging field of Computer Science as Economics
| Discipline. That's the field of cryptocurrency. It is currently
| plagued with (pseudo) economists and scammers. Or people don't
| really understand system design (but they don't know it). It
| deals with money so there is a lot of misinformation and greed.
|
| People in crypto don't understand the design tradeoff between
| centralization and decentralization. So they end up selling fake
| dreams like decentralization can fix everything. Bitcoin is
| decentralized at layer 1. But in layer 2, people still want to
| have the same level of decentralization when they design the
| Lightning Network. Then, some will buy into the idea that LN will
| fix everything and still be decentralized.
| jeromebaek wrote:
| Philosophy of Computation at Berkeley: http://po.cab
| solidist wrote:
| For those that enjoy these explorations, I'm currently reading
| the humanistic side of CS:
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-arts
|
| There is navel gazing and equivocation in some of initial
| reading, but probably worth the read. I'm on the first chapter
| and intrigued to read more.
| ganzuul wrote:
| This is a bit surprising since it doesn't treat information as a
| totally human concept. It discusses 'semantic interpretation' but
| for some reason concerns itself with implementation, which I
| think should be irrelevant.
|
| I discovered this independently and soon after found it echoed in
| an important textbook (Datalogi, Hans Lunell) around these parts,
| around 20 years ago.
|
| In short; only data exists in the machine. The patterns we coax
| out of the machine are only meaningful to us, as humans, after we
| have interpreted the data and turned it into information. A
| computer never processes information; only data.
|
| If one deeply desires a deeper structure to data one can look at
| processes of convergence, which naturally leads one to study
| artificial neural networks for their working examples.
| Implementation however must be irrelevant to information because
| they are not in a bijective relationship.
| yters wrote:
| Information is objectively described by notions such as
| entropy, algorithmic information, randomness deficiency, etc.
|
| Information is mind independent and has empirically describable
| characteristics.
| omeze wrote:
| Someone hands me a thumb drive and it consists of one byte,
| 0000 0001.
|
| On Monday, the owner of the thumb drive tells me the contents
| are a counter of how many apples they had in their kitchen on
| new year.
|
| On Tuesday, the owner tells me the contents are a boolean for
| whether they took a vacation in 2014.
|
| What is the entropy of the data?
| fossuser wrote:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing
| -...
|
| You can deduce that the order of some data implies it's
| likely information.
|
| A person can also have a small amount of data be
| information even if it would be hard to deduce otherwise.
|
| Seems like arguing about this is just arguing about the
| definition of a word.
| frenchyatwork wrote:
| Unfortunately, the reason why it seems like arguing about
| the definition of a word is that there are there are more
| concepts at play here than we have words to describe
| them. When people talk about information as in
| information theory, what they're talking about is devoid
| of actual semantic contact, but when normal people people
| talk about information, that normally implies some sort
| of semantic content.
| yters wrote:
| Information theory addresses semantics through mutual
| information. 'Meaning' entails reference, and when A
| refers to B they have mutual information. Mutual
| information is how Shannon measures the carrying capacity
| of a channel.
| yters wrote:
| A better example is the difference between the contents of
| a normal English book vs a randomly generated string of
| letters. The former has a lot of structural properties the
| latter lacks, plus shares a large amount of mutual
| information with a source independent from the physical
| properties of the book.
| ganzuul wrote:
| Approximated perhaps, but I would argue that in evaluation it
| is subjective because it is always compared to something
| else.
|
| The issue abstracts to determinism vs. infinite and unbounded
| physical entropy because we can't separate ourselves from the
| system. Decoherence and mixing of quantum 'information' is
| part of the puzzle, and I would like to claim processes of
| convergence are another.
|
| It becomes difficult to not overload terms while discussing
| this topic.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >The patterns we coax out of the machine are only meaningful to
| us, as humans, after we have interpreted the data and turned it
| into information.
|
| I disagree. The number of processes that do something
| computation-like out of the space of all processes is
| vanishingly small. That we can input some informative sequence
| of bits into a computer, and the computer transforms that
| sequence into output which is then a different informative
| sequence of bits, tells us that computers are intrinsically
| information processors, and that information is not in general
| subjective.
| carapace wrote:
| "Computer science could be called the post-Turing decline in the
| study of formal systems." (One of my favorite jokes. Dijkstra's I
| think.)
|
| FWIW, the foundation of it all is the act of making a
| _distinction._
|
| "In the beginning was the void, and the void was without form."
|
| Operationally, if the thing in your brain that makes distinctions
| is suppressed (by e.g. a stroke) you literally lose the ability
| to distinguish between your body and the world and enter into an
| "oceanic bliss".
|
| > "My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey",
| (2008) is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning book
| written by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained and published
| neuroanatomist. In it, she tells of her experience in 1996 of
| having a stroke in her left hemisphere and how the human brain
| creates our perception of reality and includes tips about how Dr.
| Taylor rebuilt her own brain from the inside out.
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Stroke_of_Insight
|
| (There's also a TED talk.)
|
| Semantically, distinction is the sole act required to produce
| logic (and therefore computers and teh science thereof.) See
| "Laws of Form".
|
| > "Laws of Form" is a book by G. Spencer-Brown, published in
| 1969, that straddles the boundary between mathematics and
| philosophy.
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form
| gen220 wrote:
| Coincidence, but this is also the first lesson in the Tao Te
| Ching! :)
|
| The lesson is our desired things (beauty, wisdom, wealth) are
| defined by their contradictions, and are therefore not self-
| standing. The only thing which is self-standing is
| contradiction itself.
|
| When you step back, it argues, you see that contradiction
| (distinction) is that from which all things stem. If you remove
| "desire" from the equation, you can see things for what they
| are: mystery. Removing desire from your actions, however, is
| not very desirable in practice!
|
| The recommendation (i.e. the behavior of the sage) is to
| _practice_ doing nothing, and not-talking. The implication
| (IMO) is that, without their contradictions, action and speech
| have no meaning.
|
| What is new is old :)
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| "Harvard-trained" is a really weird way to say you did your
| postdoc at Harvard.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| 'Training' is a perfectly conventional way to describe a
| postdoc role.
|
| > So, What is a Postdoc? > [...] A postdoc is a temporary
| position that allows a PhD to continue their training as a
| researcher and gain skills and experience that will prepare
| them for their academic career.
|
| https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/what-is-a-
| postdo...
|
| See also https://www.nature.com/articles/ncb0711-735a
| HeavenBanned wrote:
| I have a Bachelor's in Philosophy and now I'm studying Computer
| Science formally.
|
| I must say having the Philosophical background helps immensely
| when thinking up of novel, ethical and utilitarian projects to
| build. Computer Science and Philosophy truly do go hand in hand.
| yters wrote:
| Comp sci is a good upper bound on materialism, and provides a
| rigorous basis for distinguishing material and immaterial
| substances. E.g. if we detect a halting oracle we can conclude
| it is immaterial, insofar as materialism is bounded by that
| which is computable.
|
| In that sense it is a way to scientifically address the
| philosophical concept of substance dualism, without getting
| lost in a bunch of speculative arguments. Also is a good avenue
| for making substance dualism a technologically useful theory.
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