This is obviously too big to be digested in a single chunk, but from a very brief first read, it looks impressive. The table of contents alone (19 pages) is an extraordinarily good outline of what CS is, and what the major components and questions of it are.

The author is William J. Rapaport, emeritus professor of computer science at SUNY Buffalo: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/

Wikipedia bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Rapaport

Trivium: WJR is the author of "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

There've been some earlier submissions, few with much discussion, though from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603

Also relevant, the "Philosophy of Computer Science" article at the Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451072 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/

    ... earlier submissions ...

The front page of the PDF is dated 6 September, so this most likely is some newer revision.

Trivium: WJR is the author of "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

You're off by a couple of buffalo :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

Philosophy is advertised as something more fundamental than logic itself. Here it's advertised as something more fundamental than computer science.

But when I read stuff like this I question the veracity of it all. The very first section seems to be talking about "science" and "computer science" then it goes on to talk about ethics... Is this really legit? I mean what "science" means and what "computer science" means is more of a english language problem then some fundamental aspect of reality... and ethics are just rules that govern human behavior and the human condition... does this really need to be merged with the formal fundamentals of computer science? It's like saying english literature is part of quantum theory or that morality is intrinsic to classical mechanics.

I'm curious but as an outsider looking in... it looks like a load of BS. Any top tier theoretical mathematicians or hardcore scientists have anything to say about philosophy? Or even the philosophy behind computer science? Is it worth reading this stuff?

Philosophy is the study of knowledge, including the idea of "knowing", and furthermore even being in a position to know (existence). It is indeed more fundamental, as it was probably the discipline in which first useful breakthroughs were made in human thought. Though we would do well not to confuse being more fundamental, with being more important (as far as people & society today are concerned).

In a way, it is the fuzzy wiring that underlies most other disciplines, that you need to poke around in when you run into longstanding, or seemingly intractable problems in what you're trying to do above. See for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905801

Computer science itself doesn't have ethics. It's like saying arithmetic has ethics. My question is why is philosophy including it as if it's part of the framework of computer science. It makes philosophy seem illegitimate.

Computer Science is pretty different from arithmetic (heck, that's a philosophical question in itself). Looking at the table of contents, he doesn't seem to be saying algorithms or data structures have ethics - but that a lot of recent developments in Computer Science can help us reckon with issues of what constitutes intelligence or autonomy, and the ethical ramifications that follow.

That's what makes it all seem illegitimate. The ethical ramifications of AI are a human quality outside of the computer science itself.

Computer science as a discipline like arithmetic has nothing to do with the human condition, it is just an aspect of logic. If philosophy purports to be more fundamental than logic or computer science why does it go on to talk about liberal arts topics of things like ethics or religion? It seems jumbled and disorganized and lacking of formal rigor.

Think about it. To use the analogy of arithmetic, the more fundamental theory is number theory. It dives into a lower level description of arithmetic. But then suddenly it starts talking about ethics and the moral implications of using arithmetic on human society. Is this social studies or formal logic?

Just read the intro, he explains what he means by ethics. There are two ethical questions to answer with respect to computer science. The first is are there decisions we should allow computers to make?

What nuclear missile trajectories should we allow mathematics to calculate? Yes, it's an ethical question that you can ask, but do you realize that this does not mean ethics is part of mathematics?

IF you can see how the question above doesn't force mathematics to be part of ethics. Then that same line of reasoning will help you realize how computer science is the exact same thing. The science of computing is entirely different from the application of computing (aka programming) side of it.

If philosophy purports to be a lower level description of mathematics/computing... why is it talking about ethics? The heart of computing relies on axioms, anything lower level then that would be an examination of what is an axiom? and what is logic? Not human rights.

The practice of computer science is a human activity and therefore involves ethics. Further, the argument that computer science is ethically neutral is itself a question of philosophical ethics.

The practice of mathematics also is a human activity and therefore has ethics when viewed from the context of human activity. However, math itself is not ethical. It just is.

The same is said of computer science. What you do on the job as a software engineer, is more engineering and applying math and programming in a human activity. The disciplines themselves, algebra, category theory, topology, calculus, number theory, computer science are all devoid of ethics or morals.

Combining ethics and science is like combining church and state.

is there any non-human math you are aware of? The categorization of mathematics into certain disciplines (algebra/topology/etc) is also a human choice. As is the choice to separate the philosophy class from the calculus class. They are all human choices, which reflect our outlook to life. I choose not to demarcate mathematics and philosophy because as far as I know only humans do mathematics, and every choice they make in that doing, teaching or researching has implications, even if tiny, for the good or bad that happens to this world.

How does it make philosophy seem illegitimate?

I think that the three main areas of philosophy are being, ethics, and knowing. Of those, ethics doesn't apply to CS (until you try to make a program that does something), but that doesn't make all of philosophy illegitimate. It makes one branch of philosophy less applicable, that's all.

Ethics seems arbitrarily

It's a liberal arts thing.. opinionated ideas on how to behave well suited for a thick book with lots of prose. Very hand wavy and requires cultural context.

Science and mathematics on the other hand is more of a description of reality as we know it. It is a logical and cold description that is devoid of bias and the focuses on reality as it is not reality from the human perspective.

The two fields don't really fit together, but both are important. When you drop an atom bomb, science says "E=mc^2" while the liberal arts on ethics says "genocide."

Philosophy feels like a relic of the past. A lot of mathematics and modern science comes from it but it unfortunately includes a lot of more artsy human centric branches of study like religion and morality. Philosophy comes from a time when people thought humans were the heart of the universe and that deep thought on the nature of reality needed to include things humans felt were personally important.

We now know that we humans are a byproduct of natural selection and we're nothing special living on a tiny speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy. Our existence has little effect on the ultimate fate of the universe, the galaxy or let alone the solar system and as such the deep musings on the nature of reality must not include our own experiences in ethics or religion as part of the discussion.

When you start learning more about philosophy you realize it forms the bedrock of the accepted ideas in our society. Down to some very common sayings you often hear repeated. It makes its way into daily life all the time.

Sure. "Ideas about society."

Why do we need to combine "Ideas about society" with "Newtons laws of motion" is all I'm saying. One is a liberal art, the other is a formal theory.

You can't unlink them.

Now, is there a contradiction with "both are important" and "[philosophy is a] relic of the past" (and what that implies, which is, that we can dispense with it)?

FYI: science and mathematics are, by definition, part of the seven liberal arts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Seven_l...

Computer Science absolutely has ethics. In the process of constructing systems which humans interact with, we simultaneously cause cultural and societal repercussions. Even if the choices we made could be perfectly justified by "maximum efficiency", or "just the optimal way to structure things" (which is rarely the case - as this book likely argues, there's always a human design factor), then Computer Science must still work to understand the societal ramifications of those structures. To give a tiny sampling: Online shopping, social networks, VR, drones, office drones, automation, AI, the internet - all were arguably inevitable results of the new abilities computer science unlocked. All with deep ethical concerns.

If anything, the people who design the structures of life have the most ethical responsibility of anyone. We're the ones who make it possible, and who have the strongest understanding of what it is we're creating. Personally understanding the full ramifications might not be easy, with so much else to know, but certainly our field as a whole should be working to understand them. To say we have no ethical responsibility because we're scientists and mathematicians dealing with the technical problems is to say Frankenstein had no ethical responsibility when creating his Monster.

Naw. It doesn't. Programming, UI, UX has ethics. But computer science doesn't have ethics just like mathematics doesn't have ethics.

Pure computer science and pure mathematics have axiomatic foundations that are formally scoped and defined. The application of mathematics and computer science via engineering has ethics, but computer science itself is devoid of ethics just like algebra is devoid of ethics.

The work that gets done in a strictly theoretical area ripples out onto practical areas and thus society.

Cryptography is a rather "pure" form of math, yet it has major implications on society.

Yeah so does mathematics itself. Right? Mathematics is applied everywhere and is even used to calculate the trajectory of nuclear bombs yet it's utterly clear to most people that ethics and mathematics have nothing to do with each other.

The thing with computer science is that people are just confused because they use it as a more lego like artistic endeavor rather than a mathematical field. The reality is... Computer science is really just mathematics with axioms rooted in two isomorphic primitives:

Lambda calculus and turing machines.

It is absolutely not clear to me that ethics and mathematics have nothing to do with each other. Let me give just one example. In statistics, there is a great debate about Bayesian methods vs frequentist methods. People in other fields using Frequentist vs Bayesian has real world consequences. For instance, medical scientists using frequentist statisics abuse the methods to publish cures that will not cure or help any sick people. This is not to say that the same scientists using Bayesian statistics would not attempt to abuse the system, but my belief (which could be wrong), is that the abuse will be less with Bayesian statistics.

So for me the math professor, who teaches pre-medical students frequentist statistics or the mathematician who creates yet another adhoc frequentist test for some specific situation, is doing something bad according to my ethics. They are making the world a worse place because of the particular kind of mathematics they choose to do.

Yes, mathematics has ethics - in the sense that as soon as you start talking about something being "right", while other understandings are "wrong" you're making an ethical choice. That doesn't just imply right/wrong in a logical sense. It also implies that you may be choosing use an analogous process - possibly automated - to find right/wrong values in decisions of all kinds.

Philosophy is about understanding patterns, habits, and traditions of thought. You can look at the patterns from different angles, one of which is ethical.

If you don't think at this level, math just "seems right because it is" - obviously and self-evidently.

But that's exactly why you need philosophy - to understand why that's a superficial misunderstanding of how math works, how the foundations of math aren't as stable as they seem to be (see also Hilbert's Project), why empiricism cannot possibly be genuinely objective and only works up to a certain point, and why even something "obvious" like the concept of True/False is contingent and questionable.

Philosophically, any sentence that starts with "Obviously..." or "It's completely clear that..." turns out to be the product of a cultural habit of thought, not the absolute and immutable objective truth that it pretends to be.

If you have no experience of this you're going to find this hard to understand, and you may even deny it outright.

But that may be taken to suggest that you haven't learned to think outside the usual socially-defined norms, and therefore can't imagine anything outside of them - which is not in any way the same as having infallible knowledge that there is nothing outside of them.

There are different views, but I like to think of philosophy as mapping the terrain of thought. Most scientists don't think much about the scientific method even though they implicitly apply it, but it's nice every once in a while to step back and reflect on the whole endeavor, and that's where philosophy steps in.

Obviously, the boundaries are blurred. The study of formal logic straddles both Math and Philosophy. Lots of fields were once under the domain of philosophy before they branched out - Leibniz, Descartes, Russell all made important philosophy contributions as well.

Logic itself is a field of philosophy. As the most fundamental field of human inquiry, philosophy at times even tries to challenge logic itself. (Although this is rather niche) Anyway, if you're looking for the relevance of philosophy to Computer Science, look no further than to these 5 figures who were self-ascribed mathematicians and philosophers:

- Augustus DeMorgan

- Rudolph Carnap

- Gottlob Frege

- Kurt Gödel

- George Boole

Historically, philosophy has been the home of the study of logics, until there was a shift towards faculties of mathematics in the 19th century. - This is a very typical trend. Newton was a philosopher, his groundbreaking work basically created a new discipline.

Generally I would argue that the strict separation of disciplines is hindering understanding. Fundamentally, all studies are related in some ways, and I would argue that with the correct mindset, you can even learn valuable lessons in computer science through the study of literature or history.

Sure but the categorization is off.

Shakespeare is doesn't belong in a computer science textbook anymore than ethics.

I mean, you could use Isabelle/HOL to analyse a passage of Shakespeare, and if done correctly you could probably publish it in CS. If I'm not mistaken, it has been done for legal texts.

I haven't read the relevant part of the book yet, but it seems like he's using the Ethics of AI as an example for exactly how Ethics can be relevant to the field of Computer Science, and also as an example on how philosophers actually work.

In a course called "Philosophy of Computer Science", this seems quite reasonable.

Math and cs can be applied to thing outside of the respective fields even in research papers. Math can be used in architecture, this doesn’t mean it’s part of math. Programs can be used to analyze Shakespeare, this doesn’t mean Shakespeare is computer science.

Ethics in philosophy is reasonable which leads to my main point. Is philosophy legit? Why is philosophy purporting to be foundational then suddenly talking about ethics?

Whoah. He goes for 360+ pages before even touching the titular subject of his book. I would have preferred a simple glossary of terms, or maybe just release 3 books instead of one? It sounds like he wants to teach this book in schools, but as a student, I could easily imagine the professor telling me to buy this whole book just so we can study the last 400 pages. I think it's a waste of money when the professor asks me to buy an entire book because he or she just wants to look at a few chapters.

Is there a print copy of this book purchasable anywhere? Reading PDFs of this length is difficult for me.

I was expecting this without looking at the website : https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/

Seems to be more relevant.

What section of it should I read to get an idea of what, according to the author, "philosophy of computer science" is?