The Philosophy of Computer Science (2017)

"Computer science could be called the post-Turing decline in the study of formal systems." (One of my favorite jokes. Dijkstra's I think.) FWIW, the foundation of it all is the act of making a distinction. "In the beginning was the void, and the void was without form." Operationally, if the thing in your brain that makes distinctions is suppressed (by e.g. a stroke) you literally lose the ability to distinguish between your body and the world and enter into an…

That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class, which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it. That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly 1985-2005) followed. That class was known informally as "Dr. John's Mystery Hour". The Stanford CS department, when it…

Props to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, it’s perhaps the best general resource on philosophy on the web

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. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/