Toward a Philosophy of Computing

The crisis and the default. Consider the present Information Technology staffing crisis in the United States. Why has there been such a failure in supplying the IT workforce with new recruits? Can this be linked to problems at the heart of the metaphysics of computing? IT work is frustrating, often repetitive, and spiritually vacuous. While philosophical topics pertaining to various aspects of computing abound today, there is a metaphysical wilderness at the heart of computing technology itself. On the one hand, without connection to an accessible intellectual tradition, there can be no rigorous philosophical study of computing by technologists. There is little reason to delve this deep when the state of the art is in such an excited frenzy. Outside of academic philosophy there are, at best, books written by megalomaniacs and computer technologists waxing philosophical, such as Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musing on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond. On the other hand, traditional academic philosophy is not prepared to confront computing technology at the level of an expert participant rather than a critic (or, worse, a would-be system architect devoid of a real technical skill set). The quintessentialpractical mental discipline is itself time-consuming and ineluctably compelling, posing an apparently endless program of study in order to gain a comprehensive perspective. Its "state of the art" bristles with impossible demands that seem incompatible with the already busy agendas set for philosophical research. Therefore the rift betweenfoundational philosophy and computing technology can only widen as the latter continues to progress. The present crisis in technology education in America may be a symptom that we are, with respect to computing, philosophically "in default."

More Like Writing Than Calculation

In terms of niche markets I wish to operate in the philosophy of computing taken from a classical approach.  Ancient computing is presently associated only with calculation tools.  Our own modern experience has demonstrated that general purpose computing exists that has very little to do with mathematical calculations.  On the macro level there is a host of high-level applications and programming interfaces; on the micro level, we must substantially extend the notion of "mathematical" if we are to include (..).  I would like to posit that apart from shared foundations in mathematical logic, and the hysteresis of their original design purposes, modern electronic computing technology has more in common with writing than it does with numerical calculation.  When viewed in this manner, it is much easier to draw connections between ancient and modern computing activities.

Thinking and Virtual Reality

It seems strange to juxtapose philosophy and computing, for how can the journey of self understanding progress by contemplating electronic computing technology? How can this pursuit be anything but a distraction from the Socratic task to know thyself? Curiously, the history of science reveals the reasonableness of their convergence striving to understand human beings as natural automata. If Plato's methodology for a science of rhetoric (leading the soul with words), as presented in Phaedrus, the history of modern philosophy in its struggle to understand the logic of intention, through Freud's investigation of dreams and slips of the tongue are any indication of the extent to which scientific philosophical production seeks to understand natural automata, whether they are referred to as soul, mind, cognition, neural activity, then we are a short step away from getting a green light to conjoin the study of ancient texts to the philosophy of everyday digital electronic computing. A brief meditation upon the metaphysics of information helps make this relation by revealing that the concept of representation implies computation, so too does information require a means to exist, if not a consumer to become informed. Once opened, this undiscovered territory lends itself to the nascent TCP/IP based worldwide virtual reality we call the Internet, for such texts contain a minimum of pictures and no sounds at all, and they are mostly static objects. What I am saying is that ancient written knowledge is the easiest for virtual reality generation machinery to process today for the very reason that it was for ancient virtual reality generation machinery to process when the invention of alphabetic writing caused a qualitative information processing performance increase over vase painting. The philosophy of computing can readily incorporate the long tradition of western thought, which it has shunned believing it began with the recent proliferation of electronic machinery. Let ancient texts be read by technologists. Ease resistance to the suggestion that thinking is virtual reality, and the mind is a computer.

The Link between Computing and Philosophy

Computing has been in the grasp of the individual for a long time when the truth of this fact is measured in terms of human lifetimes. However, the proliferation of (as in Gates' "ubiquitous") computing by artificial automata is new. I am suggesting we focus upon computing machinery rather than the phenomenology of symbols. Otherwise, we fall prey to the argument that philosophers have long contemplated computing by citing the critique of writing in Plato's Phaedrus. However, this computing was done by human beings, natural automata--the term used by John von Neumann--when they are speaking, reading, and writing. Therefore, it is not surprising that ancient thinkers merely fantasized about artificial automata, if they included them at all within the scope of their work on computing. That is not to say that a great deal of their work does not seek to understand the workings of the human mind. As a representative of ancient philosophers of computing, Plato's Socrates dared not venture into low level psychodynamics, but instead suggested beginning with the approach outlined in later parts of Phaedrus analyzing the ambiguity of words. You can imagine they wished they could comprehend the mechanics of the human soul, but knew better than to try. We come to an anchoring quote of von Neumann that will be a recurring theme of this meditation: "of all automata of high complexity, computing machines are the ones which we have the best chance of understanding." Suppose, then, that the Socratic maxim "know thyself" can be serviced indirectly by coming to know electronic computer technology.

Goal

I seek to create a new kind of philosophy that combines writing and software, that is oriented towards computing machinery in addition to human beings. This project has already been started with this journal, and follows the lead of those who first combined writing and pictures with philosophy, and responds to Nietzsche's dreams of musical texts disallowed by the cruel logic of Plato's Symposium.