Nick
*From:*Friam [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
*Sent:* Wednesday, April 17, 2013 1:18 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Tautologies and other forms of circular reasoning.
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
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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