Programming is as important an innovation in thought as is empiricism. Because while empiricism is but correspondent and logic is a but question of sets, programming is operational (existential).
I think the act of creating databases is about as close to philosophizing as you can come, but it involves the same problem as logic: as practiced by the discipline its logical but non-operational, and often non-correspondent.
When you combine user interfaces(human-reality), programming (operations), and databases (sets/logic), where the data structures must correspond to real world entities (empiricism), then you have covered the entire conceptual spectrum.
If we combine the correspondent, logical, and operational, we have everything but the moral. If we were to add full accounting of all transactions (full capital accounting that is: under property in toto) we would essentially create the entire spectrum of dimensions necessary for cognition.
My view is that while the blockchain method is currently too weak for this purpose, that the general theory of duplicated recursive competing ledgers provides the full accounting of TITLES (changes in ownership), and that local databases can take care of local accounting (local measures of local capital), then we would have sufficient dimensional information to produce meaningful artificial intelligences bound by the same limits as we are.
But regardless of what we do with programming itself, my objective is to teach people that the sensation of teaching a computer but having the reaction “well it should know that’s what I meant!” vs what you told it to do are two different things. And that this ‘gap’ is solved by training the mind to think operationally – existentially?
Why? Because just as empiricism taught us that the information we wished to be contained in our words was not in fact there, programming or in broader terms ‘operationalism’ teaches us how little we actually know.
In other words, it teaches us humility and skepticism in our own thoughts. Or conversely, it teaches us how to test for error and deceit in others.
Is this an additional burden? Of course it is. So was scientific knowledge. So was literacy. So was numeracy. So was law and order. These are all costs. But they are not sunk costs. They are investments we make. And the investments in truth telling are always the BEST investments man has EVER made.
(Good luck trying to argue otherwise)
My strategy is to require law be written programmatically (operationally) even more so than today. Strictly constructed by the same means. This will produce an even more readable body of law, and one that can be accumulated technologically in future systems other than the human mind.
Law is very close to programming now. But we do not have all the requirements in law that are necessary for the defense of the informational commons.
If we do that, then law will be dimensionally complete (as far as I can tell). And we will be able to hold the liars at bay.