That last comment is absolutely golden. Once upon a time I had the privilege to spend a few years working in Swansea University's compsci department, which punches above its weight in theoretical computer science. One of the moments that made me the programmer I am today (whatever that's worth) came when I was meeting with the head of the department to discuss a book he was writing, and while we were discussing this very point of data vs code, I said to him, realising the importance of choosing the right structure, "so the data is central to the subject" (meaning computer science in general" — to which he replied emphathically that "the data IS the subject". That was a lightbulb moment for me. From then on I saw computer science as the study of how data is represented, and how those representations are transformed and transported — that's it, that basically covers everything. It's served me well.
That's great. It reminds me of a comment by Rich Hickey, the inventor of Clojure:
" Before we had all this high falutin' opinions of ourselves as programmers and computer scientists and stuff like that, programming used to be called data processing.
How many people actually do data processing in their programs? You can raise your hands. We all do, right? This is what most programs do. You take some information in, somebody typed some stuff, somebody sends you a message, you put it somewhere. Later you try to find it. You put it on the screen. You send it to somebody else.
That is what most programs do most of the time. Sure, there is a computational aspect to programs. There is quality of implementation issues to this, but there is nothing wrong with saying: programs process data. Because data is information. Information systems ... this should be what we are doing, right?
We are the stewards of the world's information. And information is just data. It is not a complex thing. It is not an elaborate thing. It is a simple thing, until we programmers start touching it.
So we have data processing. Most programs do this. There are very few programs that do not.
And data is a fundamentally simple thing. Data is just raw immutable information. So that is the first point. Data is immutable. If you make a data structure, you can start messing with that, but actual data is immutable. So if you have a representation for it that is also immutable, you are capturing its essence better than if you start fiddling around.
And that is what happens. Languages fiddle around. They elaborate on data. They add types. They add methods. They make data active. They make data mutable. They make data movable. They turn it into an agent, or some active thing. And at that point they are ruining it. At least, they are moving it away from what it is."
Many decades ago I was coaxed into signing-up for an APL class by my Physics professor. He was a maverick who had managed to negotiate with the school to create an APL class and another HP-41/RPN class with full credit that you could take instead of FORTRAN and COBOL (yeah, it was a while ago).
One of the things he pounded into everyone's heads back then was "The most important decision you have to make is how to represent the problem. Do that well and programming will be easy. Get it wrong and there isn't a force on this world that will help you write a good solution in any programming language."
In APL data representation is of crucial importance, and you see the effects right away. It turned out to be he was right on that point regardless of the language one chose to use. The advise is universal.
I also really like this quote and his has influenced the way I work a lot. When I started working professionally as programmer I sometimes ended up with quite clunky data structures, a lot of expensive copying (C++ :-)) and difficult maintenance.
But based on this, I always take greatest care about the data structures. Especially when designing database tables, I keep all the important aspects of it in mind (normalization/denormalization, complexity of queries on it, ...) Makes writing code so much more pleasurable and it's also key to make maintenance a non-issue.
Amazing how far-sighted this is, when considering that most Web Apps are basically I/O - i.e. data - bound.
I think part of the confusion stems from the word “computer” itself. Ted Nelson makes the point that the word is an accident of history, arising because main funding came from large military computation projects.
But computers don’t “compute”, they don’t do math. Computers are simplifying, integrating machines that manipulate symbols.
Data (and its relationships) is the essential concept in the term “symbolic manipulator”.
Code (ie a function) is the essential concept in the term “compute”.
But what is math, if not symbolic manipulation? Numbers are symbols that convey specific ideas of data, no? And once you go past algebra, the numbers are almost incidental to the more abstract concepts and symbols.
Not trying to start a flamewar, I just found the distinction you drew interesting.
Well, the question of whether there's more to math than symbolic manipulation or not was of course one of the key foundational questions of computer science, thrashed out in the early 20th century before anyone had actually built a general computing machine. Leibniz dreamt of building a machine to which you could feed all human knowledge and from which you could thus derive automatically the answer to any question you asked, and the question of whether that was possible occupied some of the great minds in logic a hundred years ago: how far can you go with symbolic manipulation alone? Answering that question led to the invention of the lambda calculus, and Turing machines, and much else besides, and famously to Godel's seminal proof which pretty much put the nail in the coffin of Leibniz' dream: the answer is yes, there is more to math than just symbolic manipulation, because purely symbolic systems, purely formal systems, can't even represent basic arithmetic in a way that would allow any question to be answered automatically.
More basically and fundamentally, I'd suggest that no, numbers aren't symbols: numbers are numbers (i.e. they are themselves abstract concepts as you suggest), and symbols are symbols (which are much more concrete, indeed I'd say they exist precisely because we need something concrete in order to talk about the abstract thing we care about). We can use various symbols to represent a given number (say, the character "5" or the word "five" or a roman numeral "V", or five lines drawn in the sand), but the symbols themselves are not the number, nor vice versa.
This all scales up: a tree is an abstract concept; a stream is an abstract concept, a compiler is an abstract concept — and then our business is finding good concrete representations for those abstractions. Choosing the right representations really matters: I've heard it argued that the Romans, while great engineers, were ultimately limited because their maths just wasn't good enough (their know-how was acquired by trial-and-error, basically), and their maths wasn't good enough because the roman system is a pig for doing multiplication and division in; once you have arabic numerals (and having a symbol for zero really helps too BTW!), powerful easy algorithms for multiplication and division arise naturally, and before too long you've invented the calculus, and then you're really cooking with gas...
It involves symbolic manipulation, but it’s more than that. Math is the science of method. Science requires reason.
If one were to say computers do math, they would be saying computers reason. Reason requires free will. Only man can reason; machines cannot reason. (For a full explanation of the relationship between free will and reason, see the book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology).
Man does math, then creates a machine as a tool to manipulate symbols.
You make some interesting points. There was a time I was intrigued by Objectivism but ultimately it fell flat for me. I sort of had similar ideas before encountering it in the literature, but these days I'm mostly captivated by what I learned from "Sapiens" to be known as inter-subjective reality, which I also mostly arrived at through my own questioning of Objectivism. I'm not sure we can conceive of any objective reality completely divorced from our own perceptive abilities.
> Reason requires free will
isn't it still kind of an open question whether humans have free will, or what free will even is? How can we be sure our own brains are not simply very complex (hah, sorry, oxymoron) machines that don't "reason" so much as react to or interpret series of inputs, and transform, associate and store information?
I find the answer to this question often moves into metaphysical, mystical or straight up religious territory. I'm interested to know some more philosophical approaches to this.
Your comment reminds me of the first line from Peikoff’s Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR): “Philosophy is not a bauble of the intellect, but a power from which no man can abstain.” There are many intellectual exercises that feel interesting, but do they provide you with the means—the conceptual tools—to live the best life?
If objective reality doesn’t exist, we can’t even have this conversation. How can you reason—that is, use logic—in relation to the non-objective? That would be a contradiction. Sense perception is our means of grasping (not just barely scratching or touching) reality (that which exists). If a man does not accept objective reality, then further discussion is impossible and improper.
Any system which rejects objective reality cannot be the foundation of a good life. It leaves man subject to the whim of an unknown and unknowable world.
For a full validation of free will, I would refer you to Chapter 2 of OPAR. That man has free will is knowable through direct experience. Science has nothing to say about whether you have free will—free will is a priori required for science to be a valid concept. If you don’t have free will, again this entire conversation is moot. What would it mean to make an argument or convince someone? If I give you evidence and reason, I am relying on your faculty of free will to consider my argument and judge it—that is, to decide about it. You might decide on it, you might decide to drift and not consider it, you might even decide to shut your mind to it on purpose. But you do decide.
Last idea, stated up front: sorry for the wall of text that follows!
It's not that I reject the idea of objective reality–far from it. However I do not accept that we can 1) perfectly understand it as individuals, and 2) perfectly communicate any understanding, perfect or otherwise, to other individuals. Intersubjectivity is a dynamical system with an ever-shifting set of equilibria, but it's the only place we can talk about objective reality–we're forever confined to it. I see objective reality as the precursor to subjective reality: matter must exist in order to be arranged into brains that may have differences of opinion, but matter itself cannot form opinions or conjectures.
I'll assume that book or other studies of objectivity lay out the case for some of the statements you make, but as far as I can tell, you are arguing for objectivity from purely subjective stances: "good life", "improper discussion"... and you're relying on the subjective judgement of others regarding your points on objectivity. Of course, I'm working from the assumption that the products of our minds exist purely in the subjective realm... if we were all objective, why would so much disagreement exist? Is it really just terminological? I'm not sure. Maybe.
Some other statements strike me as non-sequiturs or circular reasoning, like "That man has free will is knowable through direct experience". Is this basically "I think, therefore I am?" But how do you know what you think is _what you think_? How do you know those ideas were not implanted via others' thoughts/advertisements/etc, via e.g. cryptomnesia? Or are we really in a simulation? Then it becomes something like "I think what others thought, therefore I am them," which, translated back to your wording, sounds to me something like "that man has a free will modulo others' free will, is knowable through shared experience." What is free will then?
"free will is a priori required for science to be a valid concept" sounds like affirming the consequent, because as far as we know, the best way to "prove" to each other that free will exists is via scientific methods. Following your quote in my previous paragraph, it sounds like you're saying "science validates free will validates science [validates free will... ad infinitum]." "A implies B implies A", which, unless I'm falling prey to a syllogistic fallacy, reduces to "A implies A," (or "B implies B") which sounds tautological, or at least not convincing (to me).
I apologize if my responses are rife with mistakes or misinterpretations of your statements or logical laws, and I'm happy to have them pointed out to me. I think philosophical understanding of reality is a hard problem that I don't think humanity has solved, and again I question whether it's solvable/decidable. I think reality is like the real number line, we can keep splitting atoms and things we find inside them forever and never arrive at a truly basic unit: we'll never get to zero by subdividing unity, and even if we could, we'd have zero–nothing, nada, nihil. I am skeptical of people who think they have it all figured out. Even then, it all comes back to "if a tree falls..." What difference does it make if you know the truth, if nobody will listen? Maybe the truth has been discovered over and over again, but... we are mortal, we die, and eventually, so do even the memories of us or our ideas. But, I don't think people have ever figured it all out, except for maybe the Socratic notion that after much learning, you might know one thing: that you know nothing.
Maybe humanity is doing something as described in God's Debris by Scott Adams: assembling itself into a higher order being, where instead of individual free will or knowledge, there is a shared version? That again sounds like intersubjectivity. All our argumentation is maybe just that being's self doubt, and we'll gain more confidence as time goes on, or it'll experience an epiphany. I still don't think it could arrive at a "true" "truth", but at least it could think [it's "correct"], and therefore be ["correct"]. Insofar as it'll be stuck in a local minimum of doubt with nobody left to provide an annealing stimulus.
I will definitely check out that book though, thanks for the recommendation and for your thoughts. I did not expect this conversation going into a post about Git, ha. In the very very end (I promise we're almost at the end of this post) I love learning more while I'm here!
One problem is that, at least for certain actions, you can measure that motor neurons fire (somewhere in the order of 100ms) before the part of your brain that thinks it makes executive decisions.
At least for certain actions and situations, the "direct experience" of free will is measurably incorrect.
Doesn't mean free will doesn't exist (or myabe it does), but it's been established that that feeling of "I'm willing these actions to happen" often times happens well after the action has been set into motion already.
Starting at 1:12:35 in this video, there is a discussion of those experiments with an academic neuroscientist. He explains why he believes they do not disprove free will.
There is a lot here. For now, I will simply assert that morality, which means that which helps or harms man’s survival, is objective and knowable.
I’ve enjoyed this discussion. It has been civil beyond what I normally expect from HN. From our limited interaction, I believe you are grappling with these subjects in earnest.
This is a difficult forum to have an extended discussion. If you like, reach out (email is in my profile) and we can discuss the issues further. I’m not a philosopher or expert, but I’d be happy to share what I know and I enjoy the challenge because it helps clarify my own thinking.
Yeah, I expect we're nearing the reply depth limit. Thanks for the thought provoking discussion! Sent you an email. My email should be in my profile, too, if anyone wants to use that method.
I’ve always thought that dator was just a short form of datamaskin. But some other comments suggested otherwise, so I had to look it up. Apparently, dator is a made up word from 1968, from data and parallels the words tractor and doctor.
Yes, it's "dator". The word was initially proposed based on the same Latin -tor suffix as in e.g. doctor and tractor, so the word would fit just as well into English as it does in Swedish.
It also helps identifying journalists that don't know what they are writing about. They frequently translate "computer science" literally as "Computerwissenschaft".
The Mythical Man-Month, published a year before Wirth's book, provides the most well-known quote on the subject (though he uses now antiquated language):
"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."
But I don't think Brooks was trying to suggest it was an original idea to him or his team, either. I imagine there were a decent number of people who reached the same conclusion independently.
