Philosophy and Computer Science Revisited 204
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?"
Logic is programming (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :-)
Data Modelling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Logic is programming (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't this backwards? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Everyone should study some philosophy (Score:1, Interesting)
Just FYI: I worked my way through school as a programmer and chose philosophy on purpose because I found that's where the logic courses were.
(I also took a lot of physics and math which no doubt helps, but the degree is philosophy) I feel the study of various logical abstractions helped widen my perspective. Not to mention you are trained to diagram any set of concept/relationships, which is also quite useful. My diagrams have consistent grammer, and I'm sure this is because I was trained how to create a legend that maps directly to real concepts (e.g. an arrow means something, and is only used for truly identical relationships. Of course, the arrow might mean different things in different diagrams, but within a given diagram: consistency). I'm not sure all Philosophy programs are so rigerous about logic... but it is the one thing, the only thing, that philosophers have any agreement over.
=Smidge=
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing, and you talked about this in your post, that pisses me off most is the people who decide that all philosophy is about long dead philosophers, and fuzzy-headed problems without real solutions. The cogito is shit. It's a linguistic oddity, and it has nothing to do with the world.
I majored in philosophy, and the logic classes I had were brain-crushingly difficult. The theory classes I had were very heavy on the theory of cognition, perception, semantics. I took some ethics (because it interested me), and I took a couple of fluffy 18th century philosophy courses, but the vast majority of what I studied was very modern.
And when I picked up CS people looked at my indifferent math grades and predicted I wouldn't be able to handle programming because my background was in a froofy liberal art. I didn't have a single class where my programming scores weren't in the top 5% of my class. In principles of programming languages; 8 languages in 16 weeks, my average score was 40 points over the fucking curve.
I don't keep up much with philosophy these days...A book every now and then, and that's about it. But there isn't a day that I'm not thankful for the the tools I developed in studying it.
I did it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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;))
Backwards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Logic is programming (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not in college now, but, if I were, 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.
=Smidge=
After 25 years ... No. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Writing as somebody who likes philosophy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Say rather that all mathematics stems from philosophy and you'll be more correct. The foundation of modern mathematical thought was a philosophical work called the Principia Mathematica [wikipedia.org]. Deductive logic is pretty much the foundation of all programming languages, its relevant to chip architecture, everything.
As far as ethics go, I'm more ambivalent. There is no great ethical theory out there these days, it's just varying forms of crappy, intellectually bankrupt relativism. Kant may have had his problems, but at least he was trying.
There were these guys, Godel and Turing (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:I Think You're Reaching There (Score:4, Interesting)
But those are all general skills; my knowledge of philosophical theories or history or personalities are, frankly, never a part of my work life.
You could say the same thing about physics. I use neither theories of gravity and electromagnetism nor knowledge of famous physicists as part of my daily programming. But in the process of learning those things, I learned valuable lessons about experimentation and scientific thinking. Physics problems are well suited to the scientific method, philosophy problems are well suited to philosophical methods (well, sometimes).
Writing computer programs and writing analytical philosophy papers are more or less the same thing except computer programs are easier to test and may have better documented assumptions (APIs).
There are also striking personality correlations between computer scientists and philosophers. So if a CS major takes some philosophy courses, he may make some interesting new friends. But there's certainly no reason to merge the departments (unless they're also joined with the math department).
Yes! The philosophy of information! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [philosophy...mation.net]--he's part of/started a movement he calls The Philosophy of Information [blackwellpublishing.com] 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.
Minds and Computers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ignorance is bliss (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, you're saying the same kind of stuff I was saying in another post [slashdot.org]... Needless to say, I agree!
And I think the best objection to that is that the perceived need for a separate "substance" to cover the "mental" comes from the assumption that natural sciences like physics and biology are complete descriptions of a substance, call it "the physical." But basically, if you regard the results of the natural sciences as incomplete descriptions of something that bears predictively powerful structural correspondences to a socially-shared Lebenswelt [wikipedia.org], the difficulty disappears. Natural science's descriptions of first-person experience always fall short of first-person experience simply because they're descriptions, and not actual first-person experiences.
The strong AI problem is then trivial because it really only comes down to whether we can believe folk-psychological [wikipedia.org] accounts that attribute first-person experiences to machines in the same way we do when they're predicated of other people. And I don't think there's any serious reason why we couldn't--remember that our shared belief that other people have first-person experiences is the result of social training, not a foundationalist rational justification (i.e., the other minds problem [wikipedia.org]).
Bah humbug... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Wittgenstein (Score:2, Interesting)
"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 [btinternet.com]; the parts you want to see are primarily (1) and (2).
Re:Yes, but formal logic is part of mathematics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Logic is programming (Score:3, Interesting)
The basics of logic look like a tool, but if you study it at the graduate level, you quickly realize that it is a philosophical pursuit.
"If A then B" might sound like simple math, but that statement makes many substantial philosophical assumptions. What is A? What is B? Does A really cause B? Can anything be said to cause anything? And so on...
Re:Logic is programming (Score:2, Interesting)
~Richard Feynman
Re:Principa Cybernetica (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm - do you think it was CS driven advances (say, production automation; or the easy ability to offshore call-centres) that cost more jobs, or advances in other areas?
I would think that CS directly or indirectly cost more unskilled jobs than any other higher skilled area -- though, I'd love to be proven wrong. So, if you know another higher skilled area of jobs that contributed more to losses in the lower skilled work sector, please post here...