> I’m going to presume that downvoters aren’t perceiving the page as complete nonsense.
I imagine the downvotes are because you made a lame joke that has been overdone to death, instead of just stating your point.
> Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all).
Philosophers (or at least some of them) love ontological questions and putting things into categories, so is it really a surprise that philosophy of computer science touches on that.
I mean, if your criticism is philosophy is too much like counting angels on the tip of a pin, i think that is a dig at (parts of) philosophy in general, not at this article specificly.
Ah, point taken. I’m new here so I didn’t realise that was done to death.
On the philosophy point - there is a great deal of use in philosophy within computer science and any other field I can think of. But categorising things for the sake of categorising things isn’t philosophy of the subject at hand, it’s a meandering path through nomenclature that ends up going nowhere in particular.
That’s the reason I recommend people like Deutsch for anyone interested in philosophy of computing. He gets it. It’s all about choosing an abstraction for the purpose of exploring an idea, allowing people to push their imaginations to - but not beyond - the theoretical or hypothetical limitations within a framework.
Perhaps it’s because he is a scientist, perhaps the concept of “model a thing for a problem then look at the problem” is inherent to his world view and “model a problem for the sake of modelling it and explore whether or not other people might have thought of this model before” is the philosophical world view, but if that is the case then it turns out I don’t have respect for philosophy.
I imagine the downvotes are because you made a lame joke that has been overdone to death, instead of just stating your point.
> Which concerns me greatly. There’s an entire section on trying to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is software. They’re words - simplified categories of things that determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all).
Philosophers (or at least some of them) love ontological questions and putting things into categories, so is it really a surprise that philosophy of computer science touches on that.
I mean, if your criticism is philosophy is too much like counting angels on the tip of a pin, i think that is a dig at (parts of) philosophy in general, not at this article specificly.