The Primordial “As”: Gian-Carlo Rota

I must confess, I’m about to blow the bolts on GW’s project given the rapidly evolving situation in the field, but before doing so I must fulfill my promised contribution concerning Heidegger’s “as” structure.  I’ve had a few false starts on writing the related post so I’ve broken it up to get it rolling.  This first installment provides a sense of how fundamental that contribution was to Heidegger’s work as well as to a new paradigm for the philosophy of science.

From “Indiscrete Thoughts” by the late Gian-Carlo Rota, Chapter XVII “Three Senses of ‘A is B’ in Heidegger”:

The tradition of philosophy constrains us to use words like “problems,”  “solutions,” “arguments,” and “relationship.”  There is at present no alternative to this language.  Heidegger attempted to develop a language which he considered more appropriate, and time will tell whether his lead can be followed.

I begin by quoting Rota for a particular reason:  He was to have reviewed related work then coming out of Interval Research in which I was peripherally involved—work related to Heidegger.  As Interval began its budget cuts, I was able to provide thread-bare bridging support for that work via Hewlett Packard’s massively funded eSpeak project (“Internet Chapter 2”) circa 1999, shortly after Rota’s death.

I provided this support because ever since my work in the early 80’s (as Manager of Interactive Architectures for the Knight-Ridder Corporation’s joint venture with AT&T to provide a nation-wide network for delivery of information services on home computers—VIEWTRON Corporation), it had become apparent to me that programming a network required a different language paradigm than programming a computer.  My chief insight derived from the late

John Backus 1977 Turing Award lecture,

“Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?  A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs”.  The releveance to network programming is 2-fold: 1) Functional programming has inherent parallelism—and networks are massively parallel and 2) Backus’ “FFP” was to be a formalization that provided proofs of correctness—and while programs are nonlinearly harder to debug the larger they become, programming a multiuser network is qualitatively more bug prone.  My chief insight was that, functions being degenerate relations, in going from a single massively parallel computer to a massive network of computers in which “time” itself became a problematic formal entity, it was important to reinterpret Backus from a relational viewpoint.

As of now the most concise summary of my early and chief insight as a programming language designer may be the relevance, to network programming, of the formal template:  “X is equal to Y as a Z to I”, with Z replacing sets in mathematical philosophy and “I” being the identity to which this relative equality belongs— “objectivity” or “object-orientation” being that which is invariant under change of identity/change of viewpoint.  A future post will develop some of the implications of this formal template.

Rota concludes his chapter on Heidegger with:

The discovery of the universal “as” is Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy.
...
The disclosure of the primordial “as” is the end of a search that began with Plato, followed a long route through Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Vico, Hegel, Dilthey and Husserl.  This search comes to its conclusion with Heidegger.

Rota’s family left Italy during its fascist rule so it is not because he was biased in anyway toward Heidegger that he made such sweeping claims—although he devotes only a couple of pages to Heidegger.  As penance, Rota devoted far more pages to Ulam and his view of the primordial “as”.

For now let me conclude my comments on “Indiscrete Thoughts” with this quote from chapter VIII “Philosophy and Computer Science”:

The computer scientist is led by thought experiments on computer programming to a fundamental realization:  a computer program’s identity is an item that is related to the hardware by a peculiar relation philosophers call Fundierung... The concepts proper to this new science will bear no relationship to terms like “process” and “time” which we have carelessly used… The new sciences of the computer and the brain will validate the philosopher’s theories.  But what is more important, they will achieve a goal that philosophy has been unable to attain.  They will deal the death stroke to the age-old prejudices that have beset the concept of mind.

Posted by James Bowery on Monday, November 1, 2010 at 02:33 PM in The Ontology Project
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