Just recently I watched Rich Hickey's presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009. It is a very interesting and thought provoking presentation, and well worth viewing. In it he takes from philosophy an understanding of time, state, and identity and applies it to the design of computer programming languages and models for concurrency.
Rich's presentation is also a further proof that no science (to include computer science) is philosophically or religiously neutral1. Computer science in particular is one of the more "philosophical" sciences. We model and reason about information in its purest and most elemental forms. We learn De Morgan's laws in CS classes for goodness sake!
The connection between philosophy, religion, and computer science is illustrated best in the field of artificial intelligence, where we must answer questions like:
- What is intelligence?
- Are human brains nothing more than biochemical computers?
- Can an electronic computer model intelligence accurately?
I find it telling, that most AI researchers today punt on these issues. They have moved away from trying to define and model some theory of general intelligence, and moved towards statistical techniques, and creating agents that "act rationally" by imitating human behavior. However, even taking a pragmatic approach2 there is still a philosophical underpinning. For instance, take Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta, which I have written about previously, clearly there are influences of Empiricism.
We each have our own worldview, and our worldview not only influences the way we model the world, but it also limits our model of the world. Programmers are fond of talking about how the programming language you use limits the way you think about solving a problem3. We encourage each other to learn multiple languages especially from different paradigms (declarative, functional, object oriented, imperative, etc.) to gain new ways of solving problems. We have arguments about which languages model the world better. Is action (functional languages) primary or is existence/state (object oriented) primary? In other words which came first God existing, or God creating? You could even liken the debate about static versus dynamic typing to a debate about absolute versus relative morality. Can we possibly come up with a system of rules beforehand that are applied in every situation, or is that too rigid? ... OK maybe that last analogy is pushing it a bit... :)
I like what Rich has done. He acknowledges that his philosophy of state and time has come from Alfred Whitehead. Perhaps there are more lessons that can be learned from philosophy and applied to computer science. Or perhaps if we are explicit about our philosophical underpinnings and follow them to their logical conclusions we will gain some useful insights.
Footnotes:
1 This will most assuredly set some people afire, but I do not see a distinction between philosophy and religion. They both answer questions we have about the nature of the universe, the limits and proper use of reasoning, etc.
2 Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy, by the way.
3 Again from philosophy! See "Wittgenstein philosophy of language"
Posts
2 comments:
Not all AI researchers have punted on the big questions. The project I have in mind is Cyc, which attempts to tackle the common sense problem.
Granted. I was thinking more of the questions like, "what is intelligence?" and "what is mind?" but you are correct, "what is common sense?" is also a sticky problem.
I also didn't quite say "all" AI researchers have punted, but that "most" do, which is not incompatible with your assertion. :)
Post a Comment