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”:
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:
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”:
Comments:2
Posted by Notus Wind on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:20 | #
It’s a good question, I’m not sure what advancements James has in mind either. 3
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:17 | # You beat me to it, Das. I was thinking of the same passage, which is eventually resolved as “the same as itself with itself”. 4
Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 03:55 | # Yes, I’ve seen the repeated references to “Identity and Difference” here extended to the 2009 post “False Identity”. I do intend on getting around to read it when I have the time. Who has the time? What I’ve done here is throw down the gauntlet to The Ontology Project on behalf of Gian-Carlo Rota regarding “Heidegger’s contribution”. He is saying that if you don’t get Heidigger’s “as” structure, you don’t get Heidegger. Are there no takers? Post a comment:
Next entry: An unexpected email from the BBC Moderation Team
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Posted by Wandrin on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:09 | #
Apologies for dragging the tone down but if you get a chance sometime to do a post on how you see what is currently happening i’d be obliged.