On philosophy in computer science – Part 1

I used to wonder a lot in my first semester as to why computer geeks are also interested in things like science fiction, philosophy, metaphysics and all the stuff that most of the people can’t really understand nor they have much inclination to do so . Aren’t they just supposed to think of the algorithm and keeping coding.  But now I think I can understand why it might be so interesting. It is because these topics describe and suggests us some ideas .. ideas which we may never have thought.. ideas that makes the world around us more interesting .. ideas which help us understand, enjoy and appreciate this craziness that we are surrounded by inside and out.

I am not going to describe these ideas as I myself don’t have much strong opinions about them now . But such are the ideas that I am discovering attending the classes of Prof. Kannan Srinathan.  I will try to keep this post updated with the interesting insights described in class. The class is about Distributed Algorithms and is more of a research experiment than a normal one hour class where a prof comes, writes some formulas on the board and leaves the class leaving the students completely confused most of the times.

So what I have gained from these classes -

Ideal research should help person to improve his or her Imagination. Of course a lot of hard work needs to be put in to plunge into a subject, read about the work done so far, discussions with the peer group .. but it requires imagination to think of a new and different problem , to apply existing techniques to a different problem, improving the solution, proving the solution. It is equally important to sometimes show that a problem is really tough .. because that means sending out a signal to other fellow researchers saying “hey man .. stop working on this .. as it is really difficult to solve”

Research always doesn’t mean that you are changing the world. You may be attacking problems that would probably make zero difference in the way people live their daily lives. Most of the times the best theoretical claimed complexities are very tough to be realized in practice. So why then do you need to think and solve such problems .. ? This gave rise to famous class discussion of Action vs Inaction.

Before going to the concept of action vs inaction, lets see how getting a  solution of a problem changes things -

• It creates a numerous more problems to be solved.
• It may make or usually doesn’t make much difference to the society.

Very active reasearchers will say that they want to solve all the problems that exist. But they don’t realize that there are already an infinite number of problems to be solved, and on top of that by solving one problem they are creating infinite more.

Totally Inactive researchers say that already solving a problem is going to introduce infinite other problems. Stop now to be safe . World has progressed enough and whatever I solve, people are anyways going to be the same. What they don’t realize is solving something or atleast trying to do so .. changes something within us. That change has been committed to Nature’s mind. And that change will someday ( even if it is after centuries ) affect the world. We may not be there to see the effects of our works but we will be present somewhere in the causes of those effects.

So the problem of Inaction vs Action is to choose the Middle Path. Not to be so active that you don’t give the future generations a chance to work on any problems or not be so inactive that transfers all the burden to the future generations. Finally, our goal should be evolution.

Advertisement