Recent Developments in Computing and Philosophy

Abstract

Defining the FieldBecause the label "computing and philosophy" can seem like an ad hoc attempt to tie computing to philosophy, it is important to explain why it is not, what it studies (or does) and how it differs from research in, say, "computing and history," or "computing and biology". The American Association for History and Computing is "dedicated to the reasonable and productive marriage of history and computer technology for teaching, researching and representing history through scholarship and public history" (http://theaahc.org). More pervasive, work in computing and biology enjoys the convenient name of "bioinformatics...the science of using information to understand biology..., a subset of the larger field of computational biology, the application of quantitative analytical techniques in modeling biological systems" (http://oreilly.com/catalog/bioskills/chapter/ ch01.html). The recent venture of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to publish the Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB) bears witness to the reach of computing and biology and underscores its objective. TCBB intends to report "archival research results related to the algorithmic, mathematical, statistical, and computational methods that are central in bioinformatics and computational biology; the development and testing of effective computer programs in bioinformatics; the development and optimization of biological databases; and important biological results that are obtained from the use of these methods, programs, and databases" (http://tcbb.acm.org).In the case of "computing and history" and "bioinformatics," each discipline stands in a particular relationship to computers that raises questions unique to itself. But both are devoted to the development of computational tools to aid discovery. We might, therefore, expect the study of "computing and philosophy" to be an integration of the two in the same way, that it should ask computing technologies to help with philosophical discovery, and sometimes it does. However, the unlimited scope of philosophy and its self-reflective nature make

Information-Theoretic Teleodynamics in Natural and Artificial Systems

“…We are more interested in the question of computation in nature with regard to goal states, employing the emerging method of "computational philosophy" defined as the use of computational techniques to aid in the discovery of philosophical insights that might not be easily discovered otherwise. (See [7]). Nonetheless, it will be difficult not to intersect with Deacon in some places while disagreeing with him in others.…”

“…Computational philosophy, again, is the use of computational tools to establish points of philosophical interest that might not be seen otherwise [7]. Even though this work is very much in progress, we do believe that we can tentatively claim on the basis of what we have said here that teleological causes can be computed in principle, given the right kind of structure, one in which information-theoretic quantities can be used to determine information flow through a network to produce activation patterns that march in step with our semantic sensibilities.…”