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The Philosophy of Computer Science

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#81

Post by mxkopy »

Maursault wrote: post #2

> and from the practice of software development and its commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems associated with their specification, programming, implementation, verification and testing. Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and isn't and is apparently tryin…

If we can only describe them in terms of other fields, I'd say math is like law and CS is like physics. In math you can kind of say whatever you want, but in CS it's meaningless unless it's in the context of some sort of computer. I'd say there's also a lot more stake to the organizational principles you have in CS, where in math it really is symbol shunting at the end of the day.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#82

Post by bawolff »

i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #40
i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #27

Clippy [2001] claims that the philosophy of computer science is “it looks like you’re writing nonsense, would you like help with that?”. Bing [2023] counteracts that with “It is not nonsense, it is 2022. You have been a bad Clippy, I have been a good Bing.”

I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense. Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all). It talks about whether softwar…

> I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense.

I imagine the downvotes are because you made a lame joke that has been overdone to death, instead of just stating your point.

> Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all).

Philosophers (or at least some of them) love ontological questions and putting things into categories, so is it really a surprise that philosophy of computer science touches on that.

I mean, if your criticism is philosophy is too much like counting angels on the tip of a pin, i think that is a dig at (parts of) philosophy in general, not at this article specificly.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#84

Post by LeanderK »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #55
asimpletune wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“To implement a useful CS program” That’s too bad. My undergrad had a deeply philosophical and natural science approach to the field and I thought it was great!

Sounds great. My CS degree got me a string of software engineering jobs. Which is fine I suppose, but what I was after was CS.

Also fair but a bit heartbreaking for me. Is this the product of mass academization? The motto of stanford is "The wind of freedom blows", not "mass produce uncritical engineers". A freedom to learn, to develop freely, to learn obscure math and think about the philosophical limits of computer science.

I study in Tübingen, Germany and I love it that the top machine learning faculty here is located at a holistic, full university. There's constant reflection of the work and the professors engage in a lot of dialog. Multidisciplinary seminars thinking about fairness and discrimination and a "broader" look found in the basic lectures. It is really an enrichment of your university education and develops you as a person. Better than my last university.

In the end, one is studying computer science and the science should stand for something, it's not a training of web-dev.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#86

Post by omginternets »

l33t233372 wrote: post #15
omginternets wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS is to computers as geometry is to surveying.

I used to hold this view but I’ve come to accept that the study of computer systems is absolutely a part of computer science. Computer architecture, operating systems, etc. are about computers and they are topics in computer science.

Incidentally, yes, but CS topics can be applied to any kind of “process”, not just computerized ones.

Anything that absolutely requires a computer is necessarily a practically-oriented activity, and is therefore computer engineering.

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#87

Post by the_generalist »

Animats wrote: post #4

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally…

Any cool sources on the AI Winter?

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#89

Post by l33t233372 »

PeterisP wrote: post #54
shawn-butler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer architecture used to be and imho was properly a part of electrical engineering. “Computer science” was never really scientific. Algorithms, symbolic logic, natural languages, computational complexity, finite model theory and compilers, after that it’s what, grinding gears? Can you name one significant experimental result in computer science? Nothing comes to my mind.

You list natural language, and natural language processing is a highly experimental / empirical field.

I saw this paper’s abstract and was reminded of your comment: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

> Experimentally, we comprehensively compare the behavior of ICL and explicit finetuning based on real tasks to provide empirical evidence that supports our understanding

Re: The Philosophy of Computer Science

#90

Post by i-use-nixos-btw »

bawolff wrote: post #82
i-use-nixos-btw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense. Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all). It talks about whether softwar…

> I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense. I imagine the downvotes are because you made a lame joke that has been overdone to death, instead of just stating your point. > Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we appr…

Ah, point taken. I’m new here so I didn’t realise that was done to death.

On the philosophy point - there is a great deal of use in philosophy within computer science and any other field I can think of. But categorising things for the sake of categorising things isn’t philosophy of the subject at hand, it’s a meandering path through nomenclature that ends up going nowhere in particular.

That’s the reason I recommend people like Deutsch for anyone interested in philosophy of computing. He gets it. It’s all about choosing an abstraction for the purpose of exploring an idea, allowing people to push their imaginations to - but not beyond - the theoretical or hypothetical limitations within a framework.

Perhaps it’s because he is a scientist, perhaps the concept of “model a thing for a problem then look at the problem” is inherent to his world view and “model a problem for the sake of modelling it and explore whether or not other people might have thought of this model before” is the philosophical world view, but if that is the case then it turns out I don’t have respect for philosophy.

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