Life in Silico

A few weeks ago I began scouting WordPress for interesting blogs. One such blog is The Ivory Tower, where I had a few interesting exchanges with the author regarding some of the Standard Issues - objectivity and meaning. The author decided to honor me with a separate post, where he first paints a caricature of a code hacker as an incompetent, irresponsible script-kiddie, and then pins it on me. Don’t let my boss find out!

Personal jabs aside, let’s examine the author’s logic:

A hacker can make guesses about the program’s behavior without accepting the responsibility of guessing correctly. … The hacker’s belief that he knows what it does and what it’s supposed to do has no supporting evidence, because he doesn’t have the program’s specifications. … But isn’t this exactly like the scientist’s stand in relation to the universe he studies? We don’t have the specifications for the physical and natural laws of the universe. We have to guess at them. … In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of its nature as a hack.

I had a similar discussion (actually, it was more of a monologue) with Yoni recently. I explained that many sociologists like to pose as scientists, adopting rigorous methods and using math, but often they miss the point. We know they do when they present their Ultimate Truth - that science is a social construct, that it is not really true or progressive - and it fails to account for basic history. And when Tom Lehrer pours his scorn on these clearly dubious approaches, some are annoyed, but still fail to address the problem.

The author’s logic is similar, and so are the failings. Science is defined by evidence - no evidence, no science. Greats like Pasteur and Lister knew what they were doing, and took the responsibility for it (contrast with woo-meisters, who notoriously evade responsibility every way they can). Einstein was so good a hacker, he could point out bugs in God’s system. This is simple history - science does not fit the caricature the author paints. He needs a different metaphor - science as reverse-engineering.

The author says:

The car is what it is, and does what it does, and without some additional specification beyond the car itself, it’s impossible to say whether the car’s condition is correct or faulty.

What specifications are there for the human body? Yet it is absurd to say that human bodies don’t have “correct” or “faulty” modes of operation. Even amoebas do. Their operations, intentions and meanings are defined according to the reality they live in. We do not need an outside guide to define us and to inform our lives, neither do we need outside specs to fix the body when it’s broken.

Even within the metaphor of computer programming, it easy to see that the program’s specifications are not the program, they hold no special status. This is why reverse-engineers are often in a better position to evaluate a system than the original designers. I know a person who did just this with CPython. He knows how it works better than some who have contributed to its code-base, but he read neither the source code nor the docs. Despite this, he can point out where implementation deviates from its own documented specification.

The author’s reasoning leads to a grand reductio ad absurdum. If you think that there is no reality and no truth (defined here), or if you believe in any other form of non-realism, I dare you to take responsibility for your words, stick your neck out and demonstrate it. So far no one has succeeded at this (even though many tried), and despite this glaring failure, such ideas are vigorously promoted. Yet people continue to both enjoy reality in practice while simultaneously rejecting it in theory. If science is a hack, why does it work? Why are its guesses much, much better than chance, and the guesses of other disciplines? If reality is a fiction, why is it so persuasive? Can you do better than science? It appears to me that the author simply ignores these questions, and fails to see how his premises lead him to absurd conclusions. In his defense, the vast majority of people seem hold this contradictory duality of thinking (even scientists). That’s hardly a good thing, though.

In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of the fact that it actually works, and that it reveals a world that is ordered and lawful. How and why does it work, and what does it tell us? Good questions, which only the hackers can answer.