Ask HN: CS as a philosophy

3 points by jaddood 8 years ago | 6 comments

I think of CS as a sort of philosophy, art, and sometimes a religion.

For me, the manipulation of ideas in CS and Math are the stuff that make me interested in these two disciplines in the first place. This feels more or less artistic and powerful. Think of lambda calculus for example, or linear algebra (in it's geometric interpretation) or even ordinary calculus with limits and stuff. These things represent reality and are so beautiful they almost seem godly, or at least to me.

I always have this feeling and it's what pushes me everyday to turn on my computer and stay all day constantly looking at millions of tiny light bulbs and hitting plastic buttons with my fingers.

Personally, I have never felt any other thing pushing me to CS (or Math) and I have a tendency to infer that this is the only reason (or at least the main one) why people love CS.

I would like to hear stories of other people about that matter.

davelnewton 8 years ago |

Art, sure. I don't see how it is a religion, and only barely a philosophy--it doesn't address any of the questions those attempt to answer.

(Noting that some aspects of philosophy are involved, the same way they're involved in math or science. But not a philosophy like Buddhism or Hegelianism, for examples.)

pizza 8 years ago |

allow me to make your day:

- Computational trinitarianism, or how 1.) propositions as types, 2.) programs as proofs, and 3.) the relation between type theory and category theory are one and the same thing [0]

- Scott aaronson's excellent "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" [1]

- "From Philosophy to Program Size" by Greg Chaitin. Arguably Chaitin's work (notably Chaitin's omega) is a quintessential example of what lies at the intersection of mathematics, computation, and philosophy.[2]

- From the inimitable Juergen Schmidhueber, "Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes" [3]

- A computational biology paper that presents a meta-learning scheme for cognition and emotion. This paper's idea has really stuck with me.. That and the whole notion of the "Dark room problem" (you could, probably, really easily come up with a strategy for living life according to a hybrid of what this article presents + any kind of philosophy there is) - "Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle" [4]

[0] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/computational+trinitarianism

[1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0303352

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

[4] http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...

jaddood 8 years ago | |

Wow! That's a lot of stuff to dig into! Thanks a lot for sharing. xD

pizza 8 years ago | | |

enjoy, I think these are good ideas

jaddood 8 years ago | |

Wow! That's a lot of stuff to dig into! Thanks a lot for sharing! xD

itg 8 years ago |

If this interests you, I recommend reading more about the theory of computation. Turing machines, finite automata, NP hard problems, etc.