Category: Epistemology and Method

THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY

It turns out that I’m not alone in this thought: computer science, which is operational (algorithmic) and constructivist(computable), has been replacing and will replace mathematics as the primary method of argument, and classical mathematics as well as Cantorian sets, will remain ‘verbal toolkits’ for the purpose of approximation (lower precision) which allow human minds to think in approximations (deductions) which can later be operationalized. That approach is what intuitionist mathematics recommends for example: discover necessary axioms then prove them.

Does the operational constraint (algorithmic and computable) in computer science explain why philosophical thought leadership at least on the right and libertarian spectra is coming out of the computer science wing? Is that why austrian economics makes such sense to computer scientists? Or is it merely the skew in IQ distributions as talent follows money, leading to the saturation of technology with smart folk? Or is it a combination of both?

Programming is pretty much like logic: an art of clear communication that can be conducted many ways. But databases are a bit more like philosophy of science: they must be constructed to correspond with reality. And both programming and databases force you to account for whether information is present for the purpose of making a choice – which is the problem of decidability (sufficiency of information presence) in all fields. Decidability is a serious problem as we create general rules with lower information density. We desperately want to create general rules in which the information is present for deduction. Because this limits the effort of cognition to something we can manage with our feeble minds.

I learned physics first, computer science second, austrian economics third, and contemporary keynesian economics last. Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers are constructed of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).

I suppose that I have the luxury of a century of computing that Mises didn’t have, and the luxury of cognitive science and experimental psychology that Rothbard and Hoppe didn’t have. And I suppose as an operationalist (scientist) I have a higher demand for truth than did Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. And as a software developer, I have learned that the human mind is an undisciplined creature and it is very difficult to demonstrate that we know what we claim to when we are forced to. Writing advanced software is terribly humbling. Engineering is terribly humbling. If only economics and law were as humbling as software and engineering. But teachers, lawyers and economists (at least those who recommend policy) are insulated from the failure of their models. Whereas in computer science and engineering, large sums of money can be lost, business opportunities lost, and people can die, and there is no one else to blame.

So I don’t know if what I’ve done is all that smart – we stand on the shoulders of giants – but it was pretty hard to get to this point: where all of philosophy, all of the logics, and all fields, are reducible to a single problem of constructing theories (general rules) consisting of arbitrary precision of some sort or other (including or excluding properties of reality), while preserving the sufficiency of information for use in deduction (the confidence that our general rules allow us to conduct comparisons).

In any event, it appears that far from being merely engineering, that the practice of software development, particularly in those cases where we deal with human machine interactions, is not subordinate to mathematics precisely because (now that over the past decade we have produced algorithmic equivalents) it is operational and therefore provable.

And those of us working in ethics, myself in particular, can make use of this insight: that you cannot make a truth claim unless you can operationally construct the argument.

That austrian economics is ‘correct’ in that it’s operationally moral.

That praxeology failed because it is a fallacy as mises and rothbard defined it in pseudoscientific and false philosophical terms. Even if we give Kantian arguments some childish validity, we can say that they are useful only by analogy, not by construction and operation.

Whereas, we can provide a superior explanation of economics, of the logic of cooperation, of the logic of human choice, and the necessity of human acquisition, by the simple acknowledgment of the necessit of property for incentives and economic calculation, the necessary morality of voluntary transfer and exchange, and the empirical analysis of emergent economic phenomenon, from which, like intuitionist mathematics, we explain as rational human actions.

Curt Doolittle