[crimsonalucard]

Computer science itself doesn't have ethics. It's like saying arithmetic has ethics. My question is why is philosophy including it as if it's part of the framework of computer science. It makes philosophy seem illegitimate.

[finolex1]

Computer Science is pretty different from arithmetic (heck, that's a philosophical question in itself). Looking at the table of contents, he doesn't seem to be saying algorithms or data structures have ethics - but that a lot of recent developments in Computer Science can help us reckon with issues of what constitutes intelligence or autonomy, and the ethical ramifications that follow.

[crimsonalucard]

That's what makes it all seem illegitimate. The ethical ramifications of AI are a human quality outside of the computer science itself.

Computer science as a discipline like arithmetic has nothing to do with the human condition, it is just an aspect of logic. If philosophy purports to be more fundamental than logic or computer science why does it go on to talk about liberal arts topics of things like ethics or religion? It seems jumbled and disorganized and lacking of formal rigor.

Think about it. To use the analogy of arithmetic, the more fundamental theory is number theory. It dives into a lower level description of arithmetic. But then suddenly it starts talking about ethics and the moral implications of using arithmetic on human society. Is this social studies or formal logic?

[mcguire]

The practice of computer science is a human activity and therefore involves ethics. Further, the argument that computer science is ethically neutral is itself a question of philosophical ethics.

[crimsonalucard]

The practice of mathematics also is a human activity and therefore has ethics when viewed from the context of human activity. However, math itself is not ethical. It just is.

The same is said of computer science. What you do on the job as a software engineer, is more engineering and applying math and programming in a human activity. The disciplines themselves, algebra, category theory, topology, calculus, number theory, computer science are all devoid of ethics or morals.

Combining ethics and science is like combining church and state.

[abdullahkhalids]

is there any non-human math you are aware of? The categorization of mathematics into certain disciplines (algebra/topology/etc) is also a human choice. As is the choice to separate the philosophy class from the calculus class. They are all human choices, which reflect our outlook to life. I choose not to demarcate mathematics and philosophy because as far as I know only humans do mathematics, and every choice they make in that doing, teaching or researching has implications, even if tiny, for the good or bad that happens to this world.

[crimsonalucard]

All math is non-human.

What does the quantity one have to do with a human? Nothing. The only thing you are doing is giving it a name. "One" The categorization of mathematics is just nomenclature. We choose the name and categorizations of something that already exists independent of the human experience.

[sjg007]

Just read the intro, he explains what he means by ethics. There are two ethical questions to answer with respect to computer science. The first is are there decisions we should allow computers to make?

[crimsonalucard]

What nuclear missile trajectories should we allow mathematics to calculate? Yes, it's an ethical question that you can ask, but do you realize that this does not mean ethics is part of mathematics?

IF you can see how the question above doesn't force mathematics to be part of ethics. Then that same line of reasoning will help you realize how computer science is the exact same thing. The science of computing is entirely different from the application of computing (aka programming) side of it.

If philosophy purports to be a lower level description of mathematics/computing... why is it talking about ethics? The heart of computing relies on axioms, anything lower level then that would be an examination of what is an axiom? and what is logic? Not human rights.

[crististm]

I can understand your argument. Science necessarily must be void of any ethics in order to be science.

Then, people confuse ethics of what you do with science with the "ethics of science". It doesn't make any sense. But even if it's a thought contraction, it's imprecise enough to warrant a debate.

[sjg007]

You are over thinking this.

[dogcomplex]

Computer Science absolutely has ethics. In the process of constructing systems which humans interact with, we simultaneously cause cultural and societal repercussions. Even if the choices we made could be perfectly justified by "maximum efficiency", or "just the optimal way to structure things" (which is rarely the case - as this book likely argues, there's always a human design factor), then Computer Science must still work to understand the societal ramifications of those structures. To give a tiny sampling: Online shopping, social networks, VR, drones, office drones, automation, AI, the internet - all were arguably inevitable results of the new abilities computer science unlocked. All with deep ethical concerns.

If anything, the people who design the structures of life have the most ethical responsibility of anyone. We're the ones who make it possible, and who have the strongest understanding of what it is we're creating. Personally understanding the full ramifications might not be easy, with so much else to know, but certainly our field as a whole should be working to understand them. To say we have no ethical responsibility because we're scientists and mathematicians dealing with the technical problems is to say Frankenstein had no ethical responsibility when creating his Monster.

[crimsonalucard]

Naw. It doesn't. Programming, UI, UX has ethics. But computer science doesn't have ethics just like mathematics doesn't have ethics.

Pure computer science and pure mathematics have axiomatic foundations that are formally scoped and defined. The application of mathematics and computer science via engineering has ethics, but computer science itself is devoid of ethics just like algebra is devoid of ethics.

[sabas123]

The work that gets done in a strictly theoretical area ripples out onto practical areas and thus society.

Cryptography is a rather "pure" form of math, yet it has major implications on society.

[crimsonalucard]

Yeah so does mathematics itself. Right? Mathematics is applied everywhere and is even used to calculate the trajectory of nuclear bombs yet it's utterly clear to most people that ethics and mathematics have nothing to do with each other.

The thing with computer science is that people are just confused because they use it as a more lego like artistic endeavor rather than a mathematical field. The reality is... Computer science is really just mathematics with axioms rooted in two isomorphic primitives:

Lambda calculus and turing machines.

[abdullahkhalids]

It is absolutely not clear to me that ethics and mathematics have nothing to do with each other. Let me give just one example. In statistics, there is a great debate about Bayesian methods vs frequentist methods. People in other fields using Frequentist vs Bayesian has real world consequences. For instance, medical scientists using frequentist statisics abuse the methods to publish cures that will not cure or help any sick people. This is not to say that the same scientists using Bayesian statistics would not attempt to abuse the system, but my belief (which could be wrong), is that the abuse will be less with Bayesian statistics.

So for me the math professor, who teaches pre-medical students frequentist statistics or the mathematician who creates yet another adhoc frequentist test for some specific situation, is doing something bad according to my ethics. They are making the world a worse place because of the particular kind of mathematics they choose to do.

[crimsonalucard]

I'm talking about the categorization of ethics with mathematics. You can tell some story putting them both together it doesn't make the category make any sense.

I think the bayesian way is more beautiful. Does that mean now I have to insert beauty into the description? No.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Yes, mathematics has ethics - in the sense that as soon as you start talking about something being "right", while other understandings are "wrong" you're making an ethical choice. That doesn't just imply right/wrong in a logical sense. It also implies that you may be choosing use an analogous process - possibly automated - to find right/wrong values in decisions of all kinds.

Philosophy is about understanding patterns, habits, and traditions of thought. You can look at the patterns from different angles, one of which is ethical.

If you don't think at this level, math just "seems right because it is" - obviously and self-evidently.

But that's exactly why you need philosophy - to understand why that's a superficial misunderstanding of how math works, how the foundations of math aren't as stable as they seem to be (see also Hilbert's Project), why empiricism cannot possibly be genuinely objective and only works up to a certain point, and why even something "obvious" like the concept of True/False is contingent and questionable.

Philosophically, any sentence that starts with "Obviously..." or "It's completely clear that..." turns out to be the product of a cultural habit of thought, not the absolute and immutable objective truth that it pretends to be.

If you have no experience of this you're going to find this hard to understand, and you may even deny it outright.

But that may be taken to suggest that you haven't learned to think outside the usual socially-defined norms, and therefore can't imagine anything outside of them - which is not in any way the same as having infallible knowledge that there is nothing outside of them.

[crimsonalucard]

I get it. Your saying philosophy is foundational. A framework that’s even lower level then logic. My argument is that at this low level, why is philosophy talking about high level stuff like religion and ethics?

My guess is historical reasons. People in the past could not delineate the dichotomy between the human experience and hard logic, but they saw a deeper meaning in many topics. Hence philosophy is a basically a relic from the past.

[smhost]

nobody knows whether mathematics really exists "out there", independent of human minds, which is what you're talking about. people are generally more interested in how mathematics appears to humans.

the basic tools and methods we have of investigating mathematics is designed for human minds. what are mathematical axioms if not the attempt to discover the point beyond which human cognition can't go? if you truly believe that there is a mind-independent mathematics "out there", and you believe that humans are really that insignificant, then you must believe that the totality of mathematics is vastly beyond the reach of human minds. so then the mathematics that is available to humans as of today must be a very small part of mathematics in itself, and it's not a coincidence that we find it so useful.

[AnimalMuppet]

How does it make philosophy seem illegitimate?

I think that the three main areas of philosophy are being, ethics, and knowing. Of those, ethics doesn't apply to CS (until you try to make a program that does something), but that doesn't make all of philosophy illegitimate. It makes one branch of philosophy less applicable, that's all.

[crimsonalucard]

Ethics seems arbitrarily

It's a liberal arts thing.. opinionated ideas on how to behave well suited for a thick book with lots of prose. Very hand wavy and requires cultural context.

Science and mathematics on the other hand is more of a description of reality as we know it. It is a logical and cold description that is devoid of bias and the focuses on reality as it is not reality from the human perspective.

The two fields don't really fit together, but both are important. When you drop an atom bomb, science says "E=mc^2" while the liberal arts on ethics says "genocide."

Philosophy feels like a relic of the past. A lot of mathematics and modern science comes from it but it unfortunately includes a lot of more artsy human centric branches of study like religion and morality. Philosophy comes from a time when people thought humans were the heart of the universe and that deep thought on the nature of reality needed to include things humans felt were personally important.

We now know that we humans are a byproduct of natural selection and we're nothing special living on a tiny speck of dust at the edge of the galaxy. Our existence has little effect on the ultimate fate of the universe, the galaxy or let alone the solar system and as such the deep musings on the nature of reality must not include our own experiences in ethics or religion as part of the discussion.

[jaynetics]

You are confusing philosophical ethics with morality a bit.

Ethics includes systematization, description and criticism of moral thought, although I'll admit that, in the real world, it often doesn't draw on science as much as it should.

You might find this interesting for instance:

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Joshua-D.-Gre...

[dredmorbius]

FYI: science and mathematics are, by definition, part of the seven liberal arts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Seven_l...

[crimsonalucard]

You're right, maybe I mean the humanities.

[james_s_tayler]

When you start learning more about philosophy you realize it forms the bedrock of the accepted ideas in our society. Down to some very common sayings you often hear repeated. It makes its way into daily life all the time.

[crimsonalucard]

Sure. "Ideas about society."

Why do we need to combine "Ideas about society" with "Newtons laws of motion" is all I'm saying. One is a liberal art, the other is a formal theory.

[james_s_tayler]

You can't unlink them.

[crimsonalucard]

Most universities unlink them. That’s why philosophy isn’t a stem major. There is a clear dichotomy in both reality and society.

[crististm]

Now, is there a contradiction with "both are important" and "[philosophy is a] relic of the past" (and what that implies, which is, that we can dispense with it)?

[crimsonalucard]

Liberal arts is important and philosophy is a relic from the past. Should not combine math and liberal arts which is what philosophy is.

[crististm]

Indeed, science, of any kind, is void of ethics. People should stop for a second and ponder what that really means.

_People_ have or don't have ethics. And this is different story altogether.