I was recently revisiting my old post about model-based definition of software defects in relation to their forthcoming classification. When thinking I recalled a three worlds diagram in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality book depicting the Platonic mathematical, the physical and the mental and came up with Software Generalist three worlds: World, Models and Software:
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OpenTask plans to publish a philosophical treatise:
State and Event: Categorical Foundations of Being and Time (ISBN: 978-1906717643)
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Facts are actual states of affairs, worldly correlates to true propositions that make them true. (*) Suppose that a piece of code that you are reviewing contains a security flaw like a local buffer overrun. Is this security defect factual? According to the definition of a fact it is not. The proposition about buffer overrun can be true from a reviewer’s logic but could never happen in reality. This is further complicated by a potential simulability of that piece of code that might predict all possible facts about its execution on some machine.
(*) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edition, p. 287
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Recall that not so long ago slavery was morally acceptable and it took courage for some to step back and question that. (*) My point here is that we currently do not question what we do to software but in the future killing a computational process or even attaching a debugger to it would definitely cause certain moral questions to arise. So we should question what other contemporaries consider obvious and take for granted and reconcile new answers with future computational perspectives.
(*) Philosophy, by S. Law, p. 15-16
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John Earman was one of early proponents to re-cast philosophical questions about space and time as mathematical conjectures within space-time mathematical language. (*) Any computation is some kind of abstract space of moving instruction pointers against memory spaces guided by discrete time. Therefore, a software program can be considered as some space too. All possible software programs can be aligned on another abstract space dimension, for example, consider all possible variations of a memory space coding possible software programs.
(*) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edition, p. 225
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Not in the usual sense as worshiping the memory of someone deceased or something passed. Here is the full blown religion of Memory with its own philosophical foundation called memoidealism:
This is a case when powerful software metaphors provide novel insights into Nature.
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The subtitle of this blog has changed from “All you need to know to become a successful software engineer” to “Connecting Software with Engineering, Science, Philosophy and Religion” to reflect the shift in content towards the broader spectrum of topics since its foundation almost a year ago. The original idea to provide short independent survey articles about various aspects of software engineering now becomes one of categories of posts on this blog.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ SoftwareGeneralist.com -
This is a new book planned by OpenTask with the some preliminary details:
The Variety of Software: The Richness of Computation (ISBN: 978-1906717544)
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He was a co-editor of Encyclopédie together with Diderot. His views about reality were rational. Being a mathematician he strongly defended the view of mathematics as an ideal form of knowledge and considered physics as a base science. (*) The modern view of mathematics as an ideal form of software and physics as a knowledge base of hardware makes Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717 - 1783) stand as one of the early software scientists and philosophers.
(*) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edition, p. 188
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“We all hold philosophical beliefs” (*). Where did software come from? Is it real? Can it evolve into some sort of intelligence? If yes, do we have a moral right to abort some projects which may lead in the future to intelligent software forms? Would it be software like we define it today or it finally evolves into something new? Where and when there is a line dividing intelligent and non-intelligent software? What about killing a running instance of software or shutting down its hardware? Are we some sort of software too? If software is real does it more real than we are? Did software exist before us? Is there any software God or gods? Can we consider ourselves as software gods? Freedom of software and its output, perhaps in some distant future? These are fundamental questions that come to a mind of any philosophically inclined software engineer or a computer scientist. And most answers to them require to take a certain philosophical stance and hold beliefs not possible to verify or test at the moment.
(*) Philosophy, by S. Law, p. 14-15
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