3 ms·
> as if computers were found in nature and we were trying to 'reverse engineer' how they are made; which is ridiculous! Computer Science is a branch of pure ma
by bheadmaster 3y ago
> as if computers were found in nature and we were trying to 'reverse engineer' how they are made; which is ridiculous!
Computer Science is a branch of pure math, and arguably pure math is found in nature and we're just reverse engineering its laws.
- brap 3y agoPerhaps the fundamental logic behind pure math is "real" in the sense that it's "found in nature" (whatever that means, I don't see how we would prove that), and we're only applying this real thing to models that we've completely made up. e.g., modus ponens is real, but a Turing Machine is not. We can reason about it logically but we didn't discover it, we made it up. Maybe the same can be said about numbers.
- bheadmaster 3y agoMathematics reliably predicts observable phenomena from nature. If that's not a proof of its "realness", then I don't know what possibly could be.