On the Relation of Computing to the World (original) (raw)

2017, Philosophical studies series

I survey a common theme that pervades the philosophy of computer science (and philosophy more generally): the relation of computing to the world. Are algorithms merely certain procedures entirely characterizable in an "indigenous", "internal', "intrinsic", "local", "narrow", "syntactic" (more generally: "intra-system") purely Turing-machine language? Or must they interact with the real world, with a purpose that is expressible only in a language with an "external", "extrinsic", "global", "wide", "inherited" (more generally: "extra-" or "inter-"sytem) semantics? If you begin with Computer Science, you will end with Philosophy. 1 I was simultaneously surprised and deeply honored to receive the 2015 Covey Award from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy. 2 The honor is due in part to linking me to the illustrious predecessors who have received this award, but also to its having been named for Preston Covey, 3 whom I knew and who inspired me as I began my twin journeys in philosophy and computing. 1.1 From Philosophy to Computer Science, and Back Again Contrary to the motto above, I began with philosophy, found my way to computer science, and have returned to a mixture of the two. Inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's review [Hofstatder, 1980] of Aaron Sloman's The Computer Revolution in Philosophy [Sloman, 1978], which quoted Sloman to the effect that a philosopher of mind who knew no AI was like a philosopher of physics who knew no quantum mechanics, 4 my philosophical interests in philosophy of mind led me to study AI at SUNY Buffalo with Stuart C. Shapiro. 5 This eventually led to a faculty appointment in computer science at Buffalo. (Along the way, my philosophy colleagues and I at SUNY Fredonia published one of the first introductory logic textbooks to use a computational approach [Schagrin et al., 1985].) At Buffalo, I was amazed to discover that my relatively arcane philosophy dissertation on Alexius Meinong was directly relevant to Shapiro's work in AI, providing an intensional semantics for his SNePS semantic-network processing system (see, e.g., [Shapiro and Rapaport, 1987], [Shapiro and Rapaport, 1991]). 6 And then I realized that the discovery of quasi-indexicals ('he himself', 'she herself', etc.; [Castañeda, 1966]) by my dissertation advisor, Hector-Neri Castañeda 1 "Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy). If you begin with "Computer Science", you will end with "Philosophy" (in 12 links). 2 http://www.iacap.org/awards/ 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covey Award 4 "I am prepared to go so far as to say that within a few years, if there remain any philosophers who are not familiar with some of the main developments in artificial intelligence, it will be fair to accuse them of professional incompetence, and that to teach courses in philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics, and other main areas of philosophy, without discussing the relevant aspects of artificial intelligence will be as irresponsible as giving a degree course in physics which includes no quantum theory" [Sloman, 1978, p. 5].