Personal History Of Computing — Part 1

 Cyberspaced Existencialist Experience

Some Introductory words

“After the tool, responding only to his hand; after the machines, covering complex tasks and operations but subject to his will; here he is to delegate automata to take care of managing and thinking in place of him, on the basis of apparently rational criteria, whereas these automata should be developed only to assist organization of human societies. “ — H.J. Martin, 1988

Return True. Modern Science is based on Mathematics, but what has been the, often forgotten, contributions of Philosophy to sciences and in particular to the last forty years’ crossfunctional (and crossmedial) Science that is Computer Science? (I use this general term, or also Computation, for the set of different activities like Programming, Theoretical Computer Science, Informatics, Computational Sciences. I won’t mix all these, for evident reasons, with Computability which is a higher grade of abstraction). What are the spots where the “science of human language and logic” has been relegated and/or, depending from the points of view, has been secretly incubating the future of human-machine interaction? This multi-parts essay is here only to remember the, usually covered, side of contemporary Digital Era, especially in the names of some of its contributors, usually not really present in the minds of experts in tech or philosophy.

I asked myself: is there a thing called Philosophy of Information — really I had never cared — I only know I felt the need for it in 2007 and that’s the way I called this matter for my own sake before getting in touch with formal Information Theory. This writing is the answer I have crafted for myself. Before starting, You Reader should know this text is not easy to read, so take your time and ask as many questions as you want, if there are some errors or misleading logic, let’s talk about.

This essay takes strength from the peripherals of the tech world, the old part of the Olde Freakie Europe. Its original version is even much more opinionated, with the translated title of “Why Not Understanding Present — Introduction to Information Management”, and it is basically a scream in the ears for people that still pretends to not understand the importance of mathematics logics and computation for basic education (aka code literacy and usage of computers in schools). It has been written between 2007 and 2010, with some later additions; only this part has been ported to English thus far.

The only pivot is the concept of algorithm in Information processes, the only tools used are in the frame of Cybernetics. So when you find any intricate statement, just apply Occam’s razor and try to find the most coherent meaning according to these basic concepts. I think that a lot of people accustomed to “practical” Computer Science and technology can get closer and understand the impact of 20th century’s Western Philosophy on technology by taking a ride along these seeding steps. As this essay pretends to be about Philosophy, some new words (or compound-words) are taken from the mint, don’t be scared. One of the most used word is actually ‘medium’, in the etymology written in the text. That’s one of the reasons I think this is the right community to appreciate these lines.

In General

“If you want peace, prepare to set yourself free”

“Si vis pacem para remissionem”

“Se vuoi la pace, prepara la liberazione” — A. Capitini

I — On contemporary society

As young reckless troglodytes, in this new Neolithic of competences, we struggle searching for a feeble fire, donated by some other superiors, big minds from the Past. They are together with a kind of a new machine­-mind demiurgos (crafter): Information. Total immersion into media tracks our decisions; three centuries after political individualism single action reaches critic quantity leveraging electronics. The flames of valuable minorities (like myself) can reach people, and be carried on. We are again fording on, carrying weak flames on thin branches from camp to camp, struggling to remember, to have a clear representation of human physiology, rather than human thinking.

This constant intellectual (Latin — inter legere, tie together) process, of camping and leaving from/to representations or from/to frameworks, proposes new tones of colors for a ‘nomadic’ approach to history of thinking, mostly because immobility can spot up dogmatism. This scenario needs evidently a constant adjustment, dynamically drawn, based on media and the implied logic they carry on. It is needed, because of it, a pivotal node of relations (bonds) that describes logical adjustments through time, scientifically founded, oriented to human and social development. We will try to build tools to put up this logical ‘architrave’ (a cornerstone for the Archive?), that is for sure a mathematical, physical, algorithmical and, finally, complex tool. Let’s iterate.

We are going to build in later chapters the caliper to measure complexity: a sort of existencialism for computability, that works in parallel with our daily reality made of action-reaction loops: Cybernetics. Raw materials are Computation and Philosophy, global sight to problems, and what we can describe as peculiarity (in the meaning we are going to define). What is the main role of knowledge networks (networks of digital media) in the field of logical thinking in contemporary world? Answer: the knowledge of digital networks themselves, with their new languages, artificial or natural, depending on from which point we look at them. We will draw a presentation of these structures finalized to a proper development, that is genuine, authentic, of individual possibilities inside networks that provide shape translate Information.

We are going to deal (in Part 2) with the logical-­mathematical concept of quantity of Information. It has both a logical, as a consequence of a sequence of (binary) decisions, and a physical foundation, as an ordered sequence of signals; in our particular case electrical signals through electronic circuits.

Let’s take this starting datum: for every frame into the monitor of a nowadays computer we capture the same quantity of Information transmitted by the whole telegraphic network between 1915 and 1920. By now we state that this unit of measure has both logical foundation, as measure of a decisional process, and physical, as expression of a set of signals on a wire (bits). Some people, accustomed to natural language-based (economical and political) habits, strictly defined by paper-written laws, finds big problems understanding codes founded on-top of different frameworks (Early Modern Age’s legacy is specialization of concerns when not segregation of science from science, computational sciences are loosening these bonds). Just an example, 20th century’s educated economists have been overwhelmed by any kind of unprecedented input in the last 40 years from timestamp 0 (Unix Time). Why? In my honest opinion, they, and a lot of other mono-specialized scientists around, treated Computer Science as a specialized science or even, in the worst cases, they thought at a computer as an evolved typewriting machine; I am going to state in this modest lines that Computer Science (and more practically Programming) is a crossmedial and crossfunctional Science as much as Linguistics, Philosophy and Mathematics. I am going to try to explain here the approach I observed in the IT industry to make my ideas clearer on the argument. The approach that I have tried here to put into words is actually what is experienced every day by Knowledge workers around the globe, with exoteric techniques and esoteric acronyms.

The abuse of digital networks’ resources and outcome arises because of the incapability of developing thinking systems adapted over the physical media; these media are, fatally for everybody in this 21st century, networks of computers. Some misconceptions are bringing somebody (and I am definitely not excluding myself in certain situations) into a kind of crazy drifting because of the lack of interpretation tools, fortunately new theories and frameworks come to the rescue. A lot of people simply cannot make their mind thinking parallel to the medium, that is now The Medium, the Internet. On the other side, the kind of citizens of the global village that do instead, they can perform magics because of their consciousness of the medium. As a racing pilot is conscious of the movement of his/her engine’s piston. Simply we all need an epistemological structure to interact and stack Information with digital machines: a ‘philosophic harmonization’ of human logic, based on Mathematics and Humanism, with all its plenty of cultures, to a common set of feedbacks. That is what is happening with global software products. What is the way to this state of comprehension? Humans thinking as machines or machine thinking as human beings? Not so simple fortunately. We need to do it in a way that saves diversity while dancing on a common layer, we need peculiarity.

The sensation of third-­party-­user­-experience referred to inputs (estrangement), multiplied to the incredible set of digital media we use, is the central knot of the quippus describing this new shape of the perpetual fire we bring with us. First differentiation we are going to use for the sake of solving this tie is between the machine­-to-­men mind, typical of the industrial taylorist period, and the machine-­speed mind, that I am testifying, experienced by the digital user. The (“informed”) user represents information in the medium through an efficient and authentic representation, creating his/her own processes while deploying a common language with thousands of others. This approach needs a proper way to describe and communicate the tools we define for our sake. The core of this (really complex) self-similar wrapped onion is knowledge about what we are using.

Every experience needs an internal (logical) behavior customized on the medium of the experience. We need to teach ourselves. When we don’t reach this state because of lack of knowledge about the medium, a misleading representation starts, possibly diverting to extreme, creating flat thinking or not legitimate behaviors. Building a proper internal logical representation that interacts with the medium (somebody called it Cyberspace or, in some quite weird times in the past Will-Representation) is a matter of knowing codes, languages, and metalanguages on which anything, society economics communication, runs. We call this way of solving the problem (aka managing the fire) ‘medium driven approach
’, in opposition of theory- (or system-) driven approach typical of Modern Age. Its day-by-day practical implementation is code literacy or more in general pattern recognition.

I will try to understand how the progress driven by networking media has been modifying the role and dimensions of social units, through the creation of new approaches to interpretations, values and processes. I will do this not by observing the manifest behaviour of units themselves (that sounds theory driven isn’t it?), but instead by studying the tools they are massively using (a more pseudo-theoristic approach maybe). The preferred vehicles of this flow among computing models, media, societies are scientific discourses that take place both in natural but also in artificial languages; for which we need to develop the proper communication tools.

II — A nomadic approach: continuous adjustment

“And the reason that such complexity is not usually seen in human artifacts (tools or machines) is just that in building these we tend in effect to use programs that are specially chosen to give only behaviour simple enough for us to be able to see that it will achieve the purpose we want.” — S. Wolfram, 2002

Chain production (Fordism­-Taylorism) had been the way to development until the ‘50ies. Since then some industries have developed fully automated facilities, or even entire segments of industry. They define an output exclusively through machines controlled by few technicians. This movement from the tool to the robot had surely wide opened attractive scenarios for businesses in the services industry, through reallocation of workforce and the improvements in automated tasks and calculations. The goods produced by these facilities have been conquering the markets and found place into our lives; with shapes and materials but, above all, because of the huge immaterial knowledge they represent. How they influence the psychology and the sociology of people? What is the impact into the personal sphere of individuals? Which level of adaptation is necessary to use them consistently? These objects bring a peculiar epistemological style compared to Tayloristic goods, that makes them the top vehicles for a new metabolism of knowledge. This is getting even more true for new 3D-printed products and future SPIMEs.

The step to be is adapting the shapes we use in logical thinking (and language consequently), aiming to a “continuous analysis of different types of transformation” (M. Foucalt, 1978); a way of sharing knowledge between different sides of Science. Go beyond the “shape that programs the empirical world by the imposition of his teleology”. It’s a process of leaving the way of continuous discontinuity

“… with the aim of removing the terms of totalitarian history from epistemé, using instead differential analysis.” — M. Foucault

This, in the end, is typical of properly used digital interconnected media. As wonderfully found out in late 70ties, the Modern (I would say also Theoretical) approach to the experiment was an imposition of teleology (a system of actions and reactions) that in certain cases was a one-way approach. The shapes we are experiencing in our representation are objects in the human logical thinking, their designers impose a representation of reality using, according to Foucault and Wolfram, a kind of unilateral schema on the empirical world. This is changed with the increasing popularity of coding. How programming concepts made a change of paradigm possible? How this ledger of meta-tools (programming languages, protocols, data pipes) that is the Internet is radically changing the way people does Science?

Digital (computational) sciences (see computational linguistics or computational biology for example) have nature of ‘search for code’ more than search for hypothesis or applications? The outcome of research are proofs? Or again patterns themselves to be observed? Is the process the quid of the activity more than in previous approaches? Information Retrieval is a big part of what I have called a crossmedial science. This kind of search has been involving mainly mathematical and philosophical works, to reach a terrible conceptual breakthrough (Hoffstadter, 1976), widely transmitted to societies via digital media, and greatly misunderstood until new generations of (semantic) search engines arrived. It is born then, the necessity to create forms of speech that fit the narration of Complexity.

Key word of this unveiling track is (as you probably already know) the word medium. Medium as a vehicle, a tool, a machine aiming to a goal, but also a way of dealing between different heights in the morphology of knowledge. Developing skills that make networking the vehicle of a deal between concepts expressed in the same language, or between concepts evolved differently in histories of different cultures; we can define a map (a structure of concept, a cyberspace, a collection of pointers) to reach a good communication using Knowledge networks; over differences, enriching original cultures.

III — Re-duction

“Every people is Geography as much as History, any culture disappearing is a hole in the map of the World.” — G.L. Ferretti

History of societies is based on denial of contingency, that is the forced cycling of ages. From basic survival to crop rotation, we have designed patterns to deny contingency. Nature taught us how to, it’s a human bias. This intellective process, sometimes of fixed habits, of settling and going, unveiled the values of a 21st century’s path to a nomadic approach to logics and philosophy. To leave strong positioning to dogmas, that led to aberrations in the Past, when Information makes transformation possible, and a brand new positioning becomes reachable. It’s just strategy. In this perspective we need dynamical adjustments, related to media and to representations. Which are the cardinal directions? The new kind of calendar that makes the deal between artificial networks/languages and Humanism (Renaissance Humanism) possible? A pivotal point oriented to cultural diversity of human beings and evolution in Science. We are going to build this logical load­bearing roof (a floor for the Archive), it will be necessarily: physical, mathematical, algorithmical and complex.

We are measuring this phenomenon, the efficiency-length-effectiveness of an algorithm or program. The measurement is strictly connected to Information, that is a communication process; Information from genetic code, or mathematical code, or whatever process, depending on what we are thinking, or crafting, or dreaming. The picture of a programmer working on his/her own computer is disappearing, also the icon of the nerd is repositioning. The characteristics of the algorithm is the meter of Complexity, its main value, I believe, is peculiarity. Peculiarity is the role-aim of humans interacting with/in Knowledge networks. What is the aim of the users-networks interaction? Answer: the knowledge about the digital medium and how cultural biases shapes its representation and efficiency (the recursion of self-similarity of representation of the medium according to cultural biases and shared representation of the world through the medium). We present here a try for a logical structure of knowledge processes aimed to a proper development, or authentic, of our possibilities as individuals connected to networks.

I introduce here the concept of a form-medium as application to computer networking of the concept of shape by Foucault seen above (yeah coders, what we are doing here is extending, the new concept form-medium extends shape). Every experience mirrors an interior machine-speed in-­formed to the tool. The form-medium (a human-build tool for working with the machine, one of the possible realization of the machine-speed) acts and counter-reacts to the empiric-medium (the world, or the medium in which this contact happens, the computer) by the laws of Cybernetics, the space that is created in this interaction is a cyberspace (see Part 3 for a complete diagram).

As far as I know nowadays, the vehicles of experience are necessarly going to be digital media. When the machine-speed (which Sein would be this one for Heidegger? No one will know. Ontology of the machine-speed in Part 3) is mirrored in the wrong form-mediums, they happen to be unfit for the task; thus the effect of the medium becomes misleading, and, further on, homologating or diverting, understanding of peculiarity is missing, hyper-subjectivity arises and in the worst cases criminal behaviour. The improper form-medium, not well in-­formed to the facing empiric-medium, generically fits all the media linearly, treating a computer as a common standard tool. This lack in finding the right ratio (the lack in understanding medium-peculiarity by leveraging our form-peculiarity, these terms also will be debated in Part 3) is the cause that makes us missing the epistemic possession of the medium. The continuous adjustment of medium-medium in search for a better understanding of the peculiarity-peculiarity is a cyberspace (again see Part 3). Again, I call this way of approaching the cybernetic system, made up by a user and a medium with the aim of defining a shape that fits the task of accomplishing the epistemic possession of the medium itself, medium driven approach:
meaning medium as tool, artifact, vehicle, or as instrument for the extension of human skills (M.McLuhan), or as an intermediation between logical systems acting differently (from Latin medius, middle, as proportion between two points, the right proportion), as in this case, human physiology and electrical components in a machine or a network.

“…, instead Virtue always finds the right proportion.” — Aristotle

Into this scenario of similar multiplicities — objects represented on growing planes of thinking proportional to simple shapes of knowledge — wrapping peculiarities; indetermination, existentialism, artificial languages, computers, theory of probabilities are all modules in the mosaic of logical processes frescoing the era we are living. The Network encages who is found lacking about the medium; as a catapult, it throws you into the castle of no­ne-possibility.

To handle and share (tools) this incredible amount of knowledge (open source) we need education and epistemological thinking (open science) the same our grandpas and grandmas needed, but increased by many orders of magnitude. Those I am going to treat in Part 3 after treating the basics of Information Theory in Part 2. We feel the need of a new foundation oriented to media, new processes to develop the duties­-rights paradigm (licensing) to live relations into new nomadic (continuously changing) scenarios. As individuals we live the movement from a machine-­to-men mind (for the non-digital native, somebody maybe can name it “motorhead feeling”), as seen for the industrial era, to a machine-­speed mind, as we can experience in the Information age (somebody maybe can name it “radiohead feeling”, in the process of “becoming Talking Heads” and I’m off by now with musical jokes).

Next to come: Part 2 — From thermal processes to Information processes: Fordism into Continuous Integration? “computer is an adjective” 

>>>Next to come: Part 3— Example and tools of continuous adaptation in a Knowledge network: What is the meaning of a medium? 

>>>Notes: This work has been based on the study of (with a short reference about the arguments treated):

• Descartes: from empiricism to science
• Leibnitz: differential equations
• Pascal Babbage Lovelace: early computation
• Russell Wittgenstein: logics’ spannung
• Godel Heisenberg: crisis in methods
• Wiener: Cybernetics
• Heidegger Arendt Foucault: actual foundation of ‘search’
• Jasper McLuhan: communication and medium
• Turing­ Church Hopper: codify, artificial languages and automata
• Wolfram: A New Kind of Science
• Barabasi: Graphs and Networks
• Berners­-Lee Gibson Sterling: ISO-OSI, education, code literacy, future