AdvancedResearch
An Introduction to Philosophy for Computer Scientists
by Sven Nilsen, 2022
Roman copy of a portrait of Plato.
In this blog post, I give an introduction to philosophy for people with a background in computer science. The primary motivation is to help people from this background to avoid the fallacy of naivity about philosophy, such that people can figure out whether philosophy is of interest to themselves, without making decisions based on false assumptions from wrong first impressions.
In the Chinese Room thought experiment, one can not determine from the outside of the room whether the room contains a person who knows chinese, or whether it contains a person who follows rules that seems to know chinese. However, if the person inside refuses to operate the room, then one can certainly detect that the room no longer knows chinese.
Applying the Chinese Room thought experiment to the whole universe, there is an ambiguity of whether the universe could have existed before it started in terms of pure thought, or not. This hypothetical “pure thought universe” where nobody are existing inside, is materialistically indistinguishable from the universe that we live inside.
When assuming that I do not know whether I live inside an actual universe, or a mere universe built out of pure thought, my only freedom to determine whether something exists physically or not, is answered in the negative. The person inside the universe can not decide whether to exist in a positive sense, but has the freedom to decide to exist in a negative sense, by termination. The only certainty possible here is that something does not exist, while there is always uncertainty whether something exists.
The philosopher that first established a school of thought based on this negative principle of certainty, was Socrates. Philosophy means “love of wisdom”, yet, how do we know whether wisdom can be achieved or not? Socrates thought that nobody knew what wisdom was and the only certainty we have about wisdom is, not when we have it in our possession, but only when we do not possess wisdom. Quote: “I only know that I know nothing”.
It can be difficult to think about the world in a negative sense. Perhaps it might seem even a mysterious way of thinking. However, reasoning in a negative sense can be explained using examples. All knowledge we have is kind of a measurement of our ignorance. For example, every number measures its distance from zero. At zero, there is nothing there to examine, so it is kind of pointless to assume that when one finally gets to wisdom, there will be a world there somehow. My only method of describing that something exists, is by putting some distance between myself and the thing I want to describe.
A student of Socrates, Plato, was not satisfied with never being able to achieve wisdom. So, he looked for a substitute for wisdom: Perfect knowledge. By using a mathematical equation, we can describe a perfect circle. Although a perfect circle is by no means anything close to wisdom, we can approach a perfect circle arbitrarily through its mathematical framework. It means: Perfect knowledge does not grant you wisdom, but lets you approach it over time.
A student of Plato, Aristotle, was the world’s first zoologist and among creatures he studied was fish. Being trained, by himself, to observe the natural world, he thought that the idea of perfect knowledge is not sufficient to describe the human condition. Although we would like to achieve perfect knowledge, in practice we often miss the target. For example, when studying the movement of a fish, the only data one has access to, is through observation and measurement. The actual fish has possible movement that might happen outside measurements. In principle, one could describe the fish’s behavior perfectly when given perfect knowledge about the entire universe, yet due to this absence of perfect knowledge, we are often missing the target, making errors of inference. Therefore, the rules of inference should be described to avoid making unnecessary errors.
Centuries later, Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”. Although, it is only possible to reason in a negative sense about the ambiguity of the actual universe and the pure thought universe, there is a certain perspective from which one knows that one exists in a positive sense. This perspective is by observing the process of thinking. In order to observe a thinking process, there must be a thinking process making inferences. One can think about this as putting two Chinese Rooms next to each other. One of the rooms can determine whether the other room knows chinese or not, and through this observation, the room can infer that there exists a person inside of itself.
Taken together, the peak of innovative philosophical thought might be Plato, as the idea of the very essence of perfect knowledge and reflection upon existence, while the other philosophers built the foundation, the walls and the roof. Plato sits firmly in the center of the house that a lot of people, noticeably dominated by the male gender, contributed to.
While all these ideas seems fine, there is a backstory. This backstory is the tapestry of history. When Socrates, Plato and Aristoteles lived in ancient Greece, the role of women in society collapsed. Women were rare, in a ratio of 1 woman to 10 men, so if they walked outside the house they risked kidnapping and being sold into prostitution. This meant that there were certain perspectives absent from the debate due to the bias of the coincidental historical context. These absent ideas can be found in history by going further back in time, to the Bronze Age, e.g. the rights of women in ancient Egypt which were considerably more liberal than in the later ancient Greece.
In ancient Egypt, there was a goddess named Seshat. Her symbol was a hemp leaf. From hemp, one could produce rope and rope could be used to measure. From measurement, one could obtain knowledge of the world. Therefore, Seshat was a goddess of knowledge. While Socrates was mortal and man, Seshat was divine and female. This divine female perspective of philosophy absent from the debate, is dual-Platonism, or simply: Seshatism.
In Seshatism, one credits knowledge by causality, not abstraction. This silly house of abstraction which Plato sits inside, could not even exist without countless women doing the actual work to make society turn around, day and night. Society and existence itself, is like a clockwork, ticking moment by moment. Platonism is the position of the arms on the clock, easily observed, while Seshatism is the blurry movement between the positions, harder to observe, but still necessary to make sense of the whole. Seshatism attributes originality of every being, every moment, in themselves, set apart from their abstract mathematical properties, which is due to the context in which being presents itself. In some sense, Seshatism is the way of thinking that allows the person inside the Chinese Room to be reunited with the room itself, metaphysically.
Kent Palmer introduced an overall framework to understand the work of modern philosophers, like Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou and Zizek, as perspectives of different Beings. The view of Platonism is Pure Being, or Present-at-Hand in Heidegger. The view of Seshatism is Process Being, or Ready-at-Hand in Heidegger. The general idea is that it is not only the world itself that determines being, but also the lens which we use to look through, the method or language one uses to make inference, or the tools required to make measurements.
Seshat, depicted in leopard skin.