I never took computer science class, but it seems I tripped over a lot of the same things on my own through the years.
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I suspect I’ve picked up a fair share of computer science along the way. It’s impossible for a thinking human _not_ to delve into the “Why” / “How” / What’s possible if only / philosophical side of things.
One point that’s hard to get across to people through the years is that:
a) computers can’t do certain things but can appear to. Remember the programmers. [even algorithms that write unique code follows a set of human placed rules]
b)they can be made to do a *lot more* than is possible now.
a) remember the programmer.
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I’ve been a fan of connectionism since my first experience with it in 1990. Had a friend who was doing neural networks and I’d watch in awe while also thinking of the limitations of it. [as someone who personally always straddles the line between belief/skeptic in most things – and preferring that ‘space’ over TRUE/FALSE, it was a perfect fit for me]
The ancient rules still apply: GIGO however complicated the algorithms or how many belief nodes and lines are buzzing about the layers [or the Markov structure]
There was another but I was busy trying to use proper terminology which always trips me up [Markov has no memory and behaves somewhat differently than neural nets and my mind was trying to properly put it into the proper category but then gave up as they both fit just fine together in the connectionist / associationism bucket in a very broad sense … but it annoys me I couldn’t mentally access a few clear words to make that distinction other than saying, “Markov structure”]
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I don’t assume the computationaist hypothesis though. It’s only over the past three years that I decided to tackle my most dreaded foe : Philosophy – so I could at least get a handle on some of the deeper concepts.
I’m glad I did but I’m still a neophyte.
Seems to me that current thinking has [excluded middle, inherent in the very Axiom/Proof system even without being formulated] -> Logic -> Mathematics -> whatever else follows from there.
So something has to be above the level of axiom/proof is what I was thinking.
Well, what’s the purpose? Truth-seeking. More narrow focus, what would a system of truth-seeking seem to require? Self-consistency. Self-consistency builds a structure that supports itself : a Universe of its own, not needing any other reality.
But it does: it needs us. We came up with it, or came up with the systems to derive it from. So, where can it exist without humans?
Platonic realm. Does the Platonic realm exist? Well, it must be a crowded place ’cause that’s where ideals, pure geometric forms, most gods, pure mathematics, thought experiments, fiction of all kinds reside.
So I had to conclude that it doesn’t and that I have to use humans and our history as foundation because I look around and that’s what I see: Humans doing this stuff or the machines humans made doing this stuff.
This doesn’t take away from their pragmatic value by any means but it’s something I decided it was important to always keep in mind.
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Above Truth-seeking and within the system of humans-and-their-systems I’d have to place Rhetoric [convincing]. It’s humans convincing humans.
What’s above Rhetoric? Myth-making. What’s above myth-making? Religion [because awareness of whether something is a myth or not is at a lower level as it has more distinctions].
So, religion, even when we do not recognize it as such, is what makes us. Ones religion might not be in a “book of religions” or follow Webster’s definition 2a of “Religion” but in the broadest sense, it seems to be primary. *Finding* what someone’s religion is can be a tricky affair but once you can identify it (and again, I don’t mean “Christian / Buddhist / etc” here when I say Religion ].- you’ve learned more about the person you’re talking to and all of the assumptions about their ways of thinking that you need to place their belief structures into context.
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This order-of-things seems natural to me because it follows human development. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to notice this, just something I noticed through the years.
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