Wow, never thought there would be a day where my favorite college philosophy time-sink graced the pages of my favorite work time-sink. Mind, blown.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed, academia level resource. Basically a classroom accepted Philosophy Wikipedia. I wonder if there are similar academic resources for other subjects?
Detailed articles on Turing and the Turing Machine.
The hours whiled away on plato.stanford.edu shouldn't count toward a man's life. :)
Something I'm not grokking:
In the exposition the list of examples presented as typical of Computer Science – "certainly not just programming" – is this one at the end of the list:
"... the design of embedded systems ..."
Huh?
Why doesn't that fit? There is no further direct discussion on the page that could apply (that I found). Is it a modern perspective that the embedded world and the high-end world are becoming so blurred as to be identical (such as Linux on both)? Is it simply Moore's law in action reducing the cost of embedded solutions to the point that embedded design is no longer something special?
The other examples, "the construction and optimisation of compilers, interpreters, theorem provers and type inference systems," clearly hit meta-activity more than "just programming."
In a word/acronym, RTOS. Its forest of O(1) algos and insane low latency reliable guaranteed response.
The joy of (hardware related) spinlocks and related contention control algos that non-embedded systems would resolve with the reset button and/or blaming the operator.
Mergers of a lot of classical engineering control theory and computer science (although not limited solely to embedded).
I don't think anyone in industry writes mathematically provably correct software except embedded aerospace.
As much as it pains me to say it, on a multidecade basis, exception handling and testing seems to be retreating to life-critical embedded work, even if in the rest of the biz those topics get a lot of PR.
I think they're writing about "real" embedded like the space shuttle autopilot as opposed to "its just a PC w/ PC app, but not typical PC hardware and outside a cubicle" like an asterisk appliance or a linux based small NAS appliance.
Agreed! The Stanford Encyclopedia is really awesome - helped so much with my undergrad philosophy degree. Somehow it manages to be topical and in-depth at the same time.
Excuse my ignorance on this; I am actually interested in understanding.
I started reading this page and it seemed like some of it was just arguing about definitions and the rest, well, I can't say I really understood it. I get the feeling it's just sort of a "useless" discussion about words.
Beyond computer science, I guess I just don't understand the current contributions of philosophy or philosophy of science to actual science. The fact it links to metaphysics sorta reinforces the useless notion I have of it. I can't determine if it's actually nonsense (like Derrida/deconstructionism) or if I'm just not thinking hard enough.
Can someone clue me in as to what you find so valuable here?
I think in the general sense, any "contributions of philosophy or philosophy of science to actual science" would end up being science, not philosophy. Consider the different interpretations of quantum mechanics -- in an earlier age these sorts of discussions would fall under the rubric of natural philosophy. However, nowadays these theoretical and experimental discussions are properly conducted within the sphere of physics.
So to look for direct contributions of philosophy to science is to commit a kind of category mistake, since science is a self-correcting model based on experimental verification of theory. Anything that can be verified (well, more pointedly, falsified) through experimentation is within the domain of science -- it is science. Anything that can't really be falsified through experimentation doesn't really have a place within the scientific framework.
Now, it takes a philosophy of science to make this separation of non-science from science, so that's at least one indirect contribution anyway.
I am afraid you are simplifying the scientific progress quite a bit with "we have a model, then we look for empiric data and if there is conclusive evidence we can conclude that the model matches reality".
It has been shown by many historians (e.g. Thomas Kuhn) that in reality scientists do not just follow these guidelines and in many cases scientific models use assumptions that cannot be verified or falsified, nor would it make sense to adhere to such strict rules.
If you are interested in this topic I also recommend the discussion of Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend, which has been a very important contribution to how we now think about scientific progress.
Hence I tend to disagree with you and in fact you could probably say that many of the theoretical discussions you find in Physics (such as Quantum Mechanics) can be seen as being actually closer to Philosophical debate.
I admit to simplifying a bit, but I don't think the sociological turn in the philosophy of science is relevant to the original question.
The point is that scientific propositions are evaluated based on their predictive success in observations. The propositions of philosophy are not intended to be predictive statements about experimental outcomes, which is why the original poster did not see how philosophy contributes to science.
First of all in academia you will often find subjects that may very well prove to be irrelevant to practical activities, not just in Philosophy, but also in Mathematics, Physics or Political Science.
However, I do think that a great deal of these theoretical questions can be of great help also for practical activities.
Philosophy of Science deals with, among other things, questions such as "is there a particular method with which we can find the truth or is it just anything goes? Is there even truth, and if so, what constitutes truth?" If you are an academic and you are doing research I would say this is a fairly relevant question since the theoretical paradigm you follow directly influences the way you are going to conduct research.
Another example could be AI, where frequently philosophers work together with scientists. IBM or Google are working on remodelling the human brain, but this task is highly difficult since intelligence is not just based on computational power (which explains why advances in technology do not directly correlate with advances in AI), but there are fundamental differences. So philosophers, together with neuroscientists, try to find an understanding of what constitutes the human consciousness, which is a very wide but fascinating field.
Last but not least Ethics also constitutes an important subject in philosophy that has direct influences on the way we deal with future advances in technology and there are too many examples to think of.
Philosophy can be a frustrating subject since there is almost never a satisfying moment where you reach a final conclusion and hence many people dismiss the discipline as a group of people who never tend to shower sit on the couch and talk about the universe. There are many schools of thought, not just postmodern feminism. In fact, there are also an abundance of philosophers that have a true passion for science as well as renowned scientists who also shared a great enthusiasm for this academic discipline. Philosophy helps you to precisize your thoughts and sharpens the theoretical framework of your investigations. How can this not be supporting practical research?
It looks to me like it questions what computers are, how they work, what they do, and their moral use. These things are difficult to understand but they are certainly not nonsense (nor is deconstruction for that matter).
SEP is helpful in many matters philosophy-related: I find that the articles are usually a very sound combination of historical as well as problem-oriented perspectives with references to contemporary / recent research. The SEP is generally well-regarded in academic circles, AFAIK.
It really depends on what you want to learn. As you know, with the diversity of philosophy (language, science, law, art, mind, etc.), there are many different types of educational roadmaps.
I find it difficult to get a general understanding of Philosophy as this discipline tends to be so big that it is difficult to get a good overview.
What I would suggest is asking yourself what kind of questions you find interesting.
Do you like Politics and have arguments with libertarians, nationalists etc? Maybe you want to read more about that, reading both contemporary authors as well as classic ones such as Rousseau or Mill.
Are you more interested in questions that are linked to science? Go read about authors such as Daniel Dennett, Searle or David Chalmers to find out more about questions e.g. "what is consciousness? How does this relate to AI?" and many other topics.
After a while you will know more names of authors and you will increase your network immensely.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a peer-reviewed, academia level resource. Basically a classroom accepted Philosophy Wikipedia. I wonder if there are similar academic resources for other subjects?
Detailed articles on Turing and the Turing Machine.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/