Nick, Glen, Marcus, et al -
The stew is getting nicely rich here. While I wanted to ignore Owen's
original question regarding isomorphisms between computing
(language/concepts/models?) and philosophy as being naive, I know it
isn't totally and the somewhat parallel conversation that has been
continuing that started with circular reasoning has brought this out
nicely (IMO).
This particular subthread on referential opacity is a nice example. I
would now try to frame (not dismiss or belittle) Owen's question with
this particular exchange (Nick, Glen, Marcus) in mind. In the world of
natural language speaking, we expect that all things are ultimately
translatable and that anyone from any language/culture can learn the
language/culture of any other with enough time and diligence.
Aptitude, age and other circumstances make this harder or easier, but in
principle, we tend to believe that there is really only one natural
human language and learning the various examples (after the first) is
doable.
On the other hand, we also have experiences that suggest just the
opposite. For example, I used to think that (american) English *must*
bet the simplest/most-concise language because when you read
instructions in a consumer product in several languages, somehow the
English always seems to be the shortest or have the most white-space.
I'm pretty sure now, that in these cases, it is because the original
instructions were in English and the others were translations which
ended up being more wordy than the original because that is the nature
of (simple) translation. A single word, chosen for a specific reason
in one language often needs a phrase or at least a modifier to make it
more like the original one. While it is possible that one of the
languages being translated INTO has a more precise word that could
replace a phrase or a noun with an adjective, it is unlikely that a
simple translation is going to hit upon it.
Thus so between computer science/engineering and Philosophy. The
words, while sometimes the same, have subtly importantly different
meanings. In this case, Referential Opacity. I have coded on
projects involving evidence theory where we in fact modeled the
evidenciary processes and circumstances such as Nick's Jones, Unicorns,
Squirrels and Central Park and I can attest that this ideal of
referential opacity is NOT the same as in code. Ideas with elaborate
semantics (Unicorns, Horses, Horns, Magic, Locations) can be
*referenced* by simple names ("Unicorns" ...) in a similar manner to the
natural language discussion between Nick and Jones, and I believe the
invention of OO programming was intended to align the act of programming
more closely with natural language, it only does so, *at best* for the
lexicons and dictionaries we design a set of class libraries for and
build programs with. It doesn't improve the alignment between the
language *of* philosophy (or psychology or physics) with the language of
programming. If anything it distinguishes it.
If you look a library, in particular, a specialized library like a Law
Library, you notice it grows and grows and grows. One might say the
law started with the golden rule... but somehow that wasn't enough so
somebody had to go meet Jehova on a mountain behind a burning bush to
get receive 10 commandments... which were nearly as self-evident as the
Golden Rule, but somehow spelled things out "just a little better".
The US constitution starts rightin "We hold these truths to be
self-evident" and for the most part US Citizens for a couple hundred
years (and I presume scholars from other nations and cultures) have read
it over and over and nodded when they read those words. There may be a
few alternate world views where they shake their head and grimace at
what we call "self-evident"... but I think in general this large
document is roughly as self evident as 10 commandments or a golden rule
(or pick your own culture's equivalent).. but we are compelled to
split these hairs, to elaborate (said the man whose e-mails here are way
too long) on most anything.
Computer science *adopted* or *inherited* it's terms from mathematics
and logic which shares their own with Philosophy just as English
inherited many words from Latin and Greek and Gaelic handed down through
intermediate languages... and sometimes the words are dead on the same
between languages and other times they are anything but. Referential
Opacity in Computer Programming means something very precise (if context
dependent) as Glen so eloquently described just now. It has a vague
resemblance to what Nick means, due to it's heritage but to demand (or
even wish for) the two to become an isomorphism lames one or both domains.
One of our biggest limitations in this culture (american, european,
western) in my opinion is that we were mostly raised up and trained up
under the metaphors of factories, cities, and a zero-sum (scarcity vs
abundance) economy. If we were to (try to) constrain the Philosophy,
for example, to fit within the (much more constrained and specialized)
metaphors of Computer Science, it would at *best* be as bad as raising
and educating our children on a factory model where they may all be
churned out to have some degree of regularity and functionality, they
are also taught (by their circumstance) that they are interchangeable,
replaceable parts. Later in life they end up having to sign up with a
union (The brotherhood of gears and levers) to keep from being abused
(and then simply replaced if they go out of tolerance) which is *also*
built on the same metaphors.
So, no Nick... a programmer is not questioning whether she can know what
a function (or object) means or to what degree of confidence or accuracy
you can believe what is reports when you read out the value of a
variable it has returned to you (Object Jones, return the state of your
"Most Interesting Thing I Saw Today" variable). A programmer is
saying... "can I know anything more than what Jones tells me?" In a
very loose sense, you can draw a parallel... Jones may know he did not
see a unicorn, but it is in his programming to always make up something
fanciful (squirrels or horses or babies in prams are unicorns in his
strange or obtuse lexicon) when asked. As with Glen's concurrency
example, between the time you ask Jones what was the most interesting
thing he saw in Central Park, he may answer honestly ("I saw a
Unicorn!") he may in fact see something more interesting, or recognize
that there was no horn, and his *internal* state would shift from
"Unicorn" to "Horse". In programming, it is as likely as not that
Object Jones would not have been designed to recognize the import of the
question and quickly volunteer," wait... hold the phone... I just
realized it was not a Unicorn, it was a SQUIRREL!". There are
programming models that *do* attempt this kind of stuff, but that is
because the standard models tend not to do this obviously or easily.
User Interface and parallel, distributed models (e.g. federated models)
*do* have mechanisms for this... but welll... a whole 'nother story.
So, in summary, I feel like I'm among Russian and Polynesian speakers
(well, maybe just French and Spanish or Dutch and English) arguing over
the meaning of words that sound the same in each language. At best the
two might be able to suss out the etymology and roots of the same words
in a mother tongue that they share or were informed by... but it would
be silly to go back and forth arguing that one is *more right* than
another? I know Nick is being genuinely curious, and I think Owen is
being (stubbornly) idealistic... but the translations here are going to
be on the order of translating between (or learning) a foriegn language,
and one that might not have more than a passing relationship to the
other (via mathematical logic).
- Steve
In my (leetle) world, referential opacity refers to ambiguities that
arise in intentional utterances ... utterances of the form, "Jones
believes (wants, thinks, hopes, etc.) that X is the case. " They are
opaque in that they tell us nothing about the truth of X. So, for
instance, "Jones believes that there are unicorns in central park"
tells us neither that such a thing as a horse with a horn in its
forehead exists (because Jones may confuse unicorns with squirrels) or
that there are any "unicorns" in central park, whatever Jones may
conceive them to be (because Jones may be misinformed).
What does the computer community think "referential opacity" means.
Are there statements in computer code that take the form , "from the
point of view of circuit A, switch S has value V". And do have later
to worry that somewhere, later in the program, some other circuit,
circuit B will encounter switch S and take it to have the value V?
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 10:52 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Tautologies and other forms of circular reasoning.
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 04/16/2013 07:55 PM:
> A more important issue is whether a model has referential
> transparency. Are all the possible ways an object can change or reveal
> state made evident, or are they hidden away in obscure ways due to
> implementation issues?
>
> [...] The issue is whether a modeler is prepared to put all of the
> degrees of freedom on the table and find and remove those that are not
> essential, or imagine that 1 piece on each of 100 tables is somehow
> different from the same 100 pieces on 1 table.
Yes, exactly. The conversation Nick started regarding tautologies is
fundamentally about separating [non-]essential, or in the extreme
case, no-ops. I (think I intellectually, if not behaviorally) share
your preference for functional computation because it helps force me
to be more rigorous in my intent. I'm as lazy as they come, though,
and when given too many bells and whistles, my product tends to be
sloppy. But I tend to also argue that, sometimes, depending on the
requirements set out by the task, the sloppiness is not bad but merely
a trivial side-effect.
But this might be where we're talking about different things, below...
> Maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. I'm not sure what you
> mean by "size" above. I think you might mean that "All eventualities
> must be covered by top-down analysis." I think you might mean that not
> having to make types fit together means there are more ways entertain
> the parts and pieces.
Sorry, I was being obtuse. I meant it in the sense of set measures,
or perhaps counting the members of a state space. In general, when we
look around us at the world, we tend to focus, to slice off a subset.
Then we go about justifying that the focal subset is "smaller" than
the ambience from which we sliced it. There seems to be 2 ways to do
that, by measuring the size of sets vs. iteratively, i.e. showing how
various subsets can be composed (unioned, accumulated) to construct
various sets.
It's not entirely clear to me where "type" fits (at least not the
specific sense of "type" we use in programming). But it seems to be
synonymous with the predicate that defines the set. "Type" seems like
a state-oriented conception, whereas "predicate" seems like a
process-oriented conception. We talk about things being "of a type".
But we talk about "satisfying a predicate". I could easily be wrong
in my intuition, there.
> If so, I don't see it that way. If there are
> paths a computation can take which will result in failure, it's better
> to know sooner than later about them. If certain state configurations
> require logic, generics, or big union types, to do nothing but
> something benign -- until the appropriate treatment is identified --
> being confronted with those configurations as classes (at compile
> time) is better than hitting the edge cases one by one at runtime.
Well, to go back to my defense of my sloppiness. Sometimes the
sloppiness is not bad or merely ignorable. Sometimes, it's crucial to
re-use (or, more appropriately [mis|ab]use). This is the concept I
was trying to get at earlier when I mispoke and claimed that iteration
is more open-ended than recursion. It's not, since they're duals.
But iteration, being state-oriented rather than process-oriented seems
more amenable to sloppiness. When we finite-minded, hyper-focusing,
pattern recognizers wander around in the ambience, trying to "do
stuff", we face a kind of action threshold, a hurdle we have to get
over in order to get anything done.
When we try to be as rigorous as possible and put all our DoF on the
table, so to speak, that raises the threshold and makes action more
difficult. Granted, it also might make the eventual action more
effective or powerful, but it does make it more difficult.
Given the variety of types of people out there, we end up with a nice
spread of people, those who would prefer to "just do it" versus those
who feel they should think long and hard before they do anything. My
speculation is that it's easier for the sloppy people to "grab onto"
whatever they slice out of the ambience if they use a state-oriented
world view. It seems very difficult to be a purely Taoistic floating
process, continuously, sloppily transforming/filtering things from
birth till death.
--
=><= glen e. p. ropella
This body of mine, man I don't wanna turn android
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
