Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Counterfactuals in Programming and Language

A counterfactual is something that is discussed as if it exists but does not. I can talk about the bald king of france and people will follow my flight of fancy knowing there is no such person. In one sentence i have conjured up a world different from our own. Many talk about the multiple world hypothesis and attribute this some more tangible meaning than i think it is due. Just because we can discuss an alternative reality does not mean that one can, or should, exist "out there." These counterfacturals hinge on a capacity of human minds to imagine that which is not.

If Speech Act Theory does one thing well, it explains how the very real abstract objects of social life are created. Property, money, and justice all depend upon these human created objects which would have no existence in our universe without people. These are human constructs but real and important to us even without any corporeal presence.

Programs too conjure things into existence. The objects instantiated by a program are mere potential or real energy captured as information on some substrate. Through multiple layers of representation we come to attribute meaning or social reality to these strings of bits. Is it accurate to look at these ontologically? to suggest that we are recognizing a new metaphysics? I am beginning to believe we should.

The human mind continually engages in imaging alternatives to the world we perceive. We can see improvements in our mind's eye. We wreck havoc on our enemies to satisfy an urge we must not act on. And we spin tales, fiction that generates many billions of dollars of US revenue by making more real something that is not.

When writers invite us into a fictional universe, they do so with conventions. A book is understood to be fictional before the first page is read. A movie, already something understood to be at minimum a dramatic retelling of some historical truth, may tip into magical realism with sone scene that defies the rules of physics. We willingly enter into the consensual hallucination of the story and are entertained by it. But when Searle talks about fiction and its speech acts, it all becomes hopelessly muddled. It seems that recognizing this alternative reality more directly makes the whole enterprise much easier as a theory.

While the multiverse may be entertained by some as a form of cosmology, it is undeniable that we can imagine a multi-verse whether or not one exists. Why not allow this human capacity to exist in multiple realities into the theory of language? By casting myself as an author and speaking as the author of this reality, I am relieved of the usual burden of truth. I am free to populated by universe with whatever rules and objects I like. I take on God-like powers there and can create heroes and demons at will. And these objects become real in the minds of the readers, the audience at a play or movie and in the players of games. The consumer of these products willingly pushes the one reality we cannot deny into the background enough to allow this alternative reality to consume their attention.

In this way creating computer systems is very much like taking some small bit of physical space and spinning an alternative universe for some purpose. Prosaically we build formal models of the social realities we want. We create accounting systems to reflect the economic systems we have, land registries, policy and procedure manuals and they record the various roles individuals play in the myriad organizations we create. These systems do more than make tangible the concepts we have. In important ways they become that reality. If the bank shows a balance, that is my money and there is no point in arguing one way or the other at that point of time. There have been many interesting cases of bank errors that enriched an individual and sometimes the money cannot be clawed back by the bank due to some accounting error on their part. Their accounting error created a reality and it is only in the most obvious cases where that windfall is understood to be theft when acted upon.

As our world become more determined by these cybernetic realities, it is important to heighten our philosophical notions to match this encroaching reality where cyber objects become as real, or even more real, than the older forms of social reality that preceded them. I suppose one hopes that it is still only human speech acts that create the cyber reality that transcends the older one. But like the Buttle/Tuttle mixup of the movie Brazil, that veil is thin. I want to dwell on this metaphysic for a time and come to my own understanding of the relationship between human language and the socio technical systems we create.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

The Ontology of a Java Program

To someone who cannot let go of the physical world, ontology is an odd subject. It is the philosophical study within the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. Or as Wikipedia says, "Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations." But for my purposes I will go no further than to talk about objects and their existence.

For anyone immersed in the objects relations school of computer programming objects is a weighted term. And it is exactly that overtone I wish to look at. But let me take one step back for a moment and observe that until one has successfully strung together a file of symbols that will pass a Java compiler, there is not yet a software module. The moment the compiler first accepts that text file and generates a byte code file, a new module is brought into existence in that file namespace. It has been summoned into existence.

The object-relations school of thought looks at a software module as an object that possesses attributes and behaviors. The byte code object can be copied, moved, executed and deleted (destroyed). Yet does the byte code file have any behaviors? Does any purely descriptive object be said to exhibit any behavior? I am going to say no. But of course the purpose of a byte code file is not to merely exist like some artifact lost in the desert of a file system. It is the essence that imparts some special magic into the machine with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) running on it which will take that descriptive text and use it to create objects within the memory of that computer. And the original intent of the creator was that this object in the machines memory takes over the capabilities of this machine in a virus like way and bends it to the hidden will of the creator. It transmits the design of a virtual machine to this physical machine and then

 Computer Science is no more about computer than Astrophysics is about telescopes (E.W. Dijkstra)

Ontology is one of the prime areas of metaphysics. How did I end up reading about metaphysics when I intended to understand what makes programs readable? I am here because while we blithely talk about instantiating objects in a Java program, I am taking it in a more literal sense and finding that the language of ontology and then the later issues of sense and reference applicable to these. It cannot be mere coincidence that the two fields overlap in this way.

I am not alone of course. There is this post which directly asks the same question and gives a rather good answer. I found in in June 2018. 
http://www.mathema.com/philosophy/metafisica/is-metaphysics-relevant-to-computer-science/

But let me race on to the thought that sparked this entry, the famous sentence in philosophy about the bald king of France. Is this true or false?

in Java terms, we have two predicates. One would answer the question of whether x is the King of France. The other would answer the question of being bald. The first predicate could never be answered, could never be true, since there is no such person. This gives a null referent for the second predicate. And null referents defy the precondition of any predicate giving an indeterminate response. So in programming terms we exactly see the philosophical notion of the presumed referent.

When listening to the lectures on the philosophy of language and specifically the discussions of fiction that I came to what I think may be a metaphysics different from Searle's. I need to read more about this to see if it is a distinct metaphysics and if so, learn to describe it. 


References:
Ontologies: Principles Methods and Application, Mike Uschold Michael Gruninge, 1996,  The University of Edinburgh
http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/publications/documents/1996/96-ker-intro-ontologies.pdf 

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9780387370194-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-495101-p173670217

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-871-knowledge-based-applications-systems-spring-2005/lecture-notes/lect22_ontolog.pdf

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/



Friday, June 1, 2018

Charles Sanders Peirce - philosopher, logician, mathematician

For anyone who has studied formal logic, Peirce (pronounced like "purse"), is remembered for his binary operator, the Peirce arrow which, as it turns out, is functionally sufficient to derive all the other logical operators. This math fact gives us the ability to construct entire computers using only a single logic gate.

Charles Sanders Peirce (/pɜːrs/,[9] like "purse"; 10 September 1839 – 19 April 1914) was an American philosopherlogicianmathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.


Peirce's most important work in pure mathematics was in logical and foundational areas. He also worked on linear algebramatrices, various geometries, topology and Listing numbersBell numbersgraphs, the four-color problem, and the nature of continuity.
He worked on applied mathematics in economics, engineering, and map projections (such as the Peirce quincuncial projection), and was especially active in probability and statistics.[79]
Discoveries
Peirce made a number of striking discoveries in formal logic and foundational mathematics, nearly all of which came to be appreciated only long after he died:
In 1860[80] he suggested a cardinal arithmetic for infinite numbers, years before any work by Georg Cantor(who completed his dissertation in 1867) and without access to Bernard Bolzano's 1851 (posthumous) Paradoxien des Unendlichen.
The Peirce arrow,
symbol for "(neither) ... nor ...", also called the Quine dagger.
In 1880–1981[81] he showed how Boolean algebra could be done via a repeated sufficient single binary operation (logical NOR), anticipating Henry M. Sheffer by 33 years. (See also De Morgan's Laws.)






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

W Ross Ashby

One of the new names that popped up in my research is W Ross Ashby.

W. Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 in London – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.Despite being widely influential within cyberneticssystems theory and, more recently, complex systems, Ashby is not as well known as many of the notable scientists his work influenced, including Herbert A. SimonNorbert WienerLudwig von BertalanffyStafford BeerStanley MilgramKevin Warwick, and Stuart Kauffman.[5]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby



It has been a few years since I used this blog. I had started posting things to Facebook but I am going into a deep dive on a topic and I want to try to gather some posts on that topic. I am currently interested in trying to establish a foundation in how language is used when dealing with computers and how it is used when computers interact. I am going to make a series of posts on influential thinkers as a form of annotated bibliography although the posts are about the people and not their works per se. I may go back and fill in the appropriate writings that I need but for now their brief bios will meet my needs.