☞ Computation as Philology
Logismics and the wide-ranging impacts of computing
In James Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, he makes the claim that before the fields of history and linguistics and anthropology and all the rest, there was philology. Philology was a sort of ur-field, in the same way that natural philosophy preceded all of the scientific disciplines that we know and love. Philology was the “queen of the human sciences,” examining the origins and etymologies of words and languages, but in the process ranged over linguistics, history, archaeology, literature, theology, art, and more.
Philology was a sort of intellectual attractor, using the study of language to draw in a huge number of topics into its orbit. J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist and, while no doubt an outlier, The Lord of the Rings is the kind of wide-ranging and all-encompassing work one can make if you take your philology seriously. But as the study of these different humanistic fields expanded and deepened, there was a fracturing and specialization, with historians arising, literature professors coming to the scene, and so forth. And philology slowly faded away from the humanities.
As I read about philology, I was struck by similarities to how I think about code and computation. Perhaps this is entirely idiosyncratic, or simply my love of radical interdisciplinarity, but I view computation as a similar kind of universal solvent. In studying computation, you are not simply thinking about the nature of for-loops, or data structures, or databases. By taking the nature of computation seriously, you are able to interrogate the nature of language and how humans think, as well as the limits of mathematics. Insights into computation address profound aspects of biology or even philosophy. When we model the world in silico, simulation can help us think about the complex nature of how we build scientific models, or even reality itself. And dwelling on computation even draws in the humanities, whether it’s literary analysis and biblical studies, or code as magic, the history of ideas, or even Greek mythology.
The best books on ideas from computation do exactly this, from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach to James Gleick’s The Information (I am hoping to do the same in my own humble way for my work-in-progress The Magic of Code).
But of course, I must be aware of the counter-argument, which is simply that computation is not a special case, this is simply the end result of E. O. Wilson’s claim of consilience, or James Burke’s approach towards all of knowledge, or the interdisciplinary writing of
. Everything is somehow interconnected. Which I am sympathetic to, as I love nothing more than to find unexpected links between different domains of knowledge. As per John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”Nevertheless, not only does computation feel special here, but I think that we must work to see the full force of its implications. Computation has the ability to provide a uniquely unifying framework, exerting a massive centripetal force on ideas and fields of knowledge. We must nurture its connective power.
For example, in my Lux colleague Danny Crichton’s thesis, he explores the development of Stanford’s computer science department in the mid-Twentieth Century and how it emerged from the mathematics department and was highly interdisciplinary.
Perhaps there are hints of this also in Stanford’s Symbolic Systems program:
The name stands for exactly what you will study and seek to understand:
Systems that are built with symbols, like natural language, programming, languages, and formal logic; and
Systems that work with symbols, such as minds and brains, computers, networks, and complex social systems.
We see something similar with Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science (computation “is central to many of the investigations and innovations that range across the humanities, arts, and sciences”), the journal Computational Culture, Carnegie Mellon’s department of Software and Societal Systems, and even indications of this in the field of science and technology studies more broadly. This is clear even in philosophy. As per Philosophy of Computation at Berkeley:
Some ideas from theoretical computer science, such as uncomputability, P vs. NP, and quantum computing, have slowly seeped into such diverse areas of thought as child development, strange loops, language, evolution, culture, epistemology, metaphysics, morality, and on and on. But the idea that computer science has philosophical roots and implications has been slow to be snuggled into the cultural zeitgeist.
So what is the name of this unifying field? Because it feels more than computer science. And in truth, the term philology might be what we are looking for all along. The Greek derivation means “love of words,” but “logos” can also mean “reason” or “plan,” and the word “logismos” in Greek refers to calculation. I can almost envision a group of scholars reclaiming philology as a mashup of computer science, the humanities, and a sprinkling of the sciences both natural and social.
But that’s unlikely. Perhaps then we could settle for logismics as this new discipline. It is derived from the Greek for computation and calculation, and also has the unfortunate property of looking very similar to “logistics.”
Whatever we call this though, this logismics—this computation as philology—is something that we should take seriously. Computation has the power to act as the key to constructing a porous boundary between numerous realms of knowledge. ■
The Enchanted Systems Roundup
Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):
🜸 Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s: “As we appear to be entering a new era of rapid scientific innovation in the 2020s, it is worth remembering that it often takes decades before the lasting social value of a technical innovation is understood — and decades more before we understand its downsides.”
🝳 Reimagining the Bioreactor: “The bioreactor was designed for the chemistry industry. What if we redesigned it with biology in mind?”
🝖 how to write on the internet (& keep doing it): Lots of wisdom here.
🜹 Help the Library of Congress create video games that improve public knowledge of civics.
🝊 The Codon Guide to Synthetic Biology: “Books, papers, courses, and blogs to help you get started.”
🜸 The Think-Tank Man: a fun profile of Herman Kahn from 1968 in Life magazine.
🜚 Outreach and generativity: “I suspect that there may be other benefits to my kind of public-facing work, benefits that are more strictly academic — even if the work itself isn’t academic, or not in the familiar ways.”
🝳 iMac at 25: a visual history of Apple’s iconic all-in-one computer: I had the Blueberry iMac in college.
🝤 Robustified ANNs Reveal Wormholes Between Human Category Percepts: ‘These observations suggest that for arbitrary starting points in image space, there exists a set of nearby "wormholes", each leading the subject from their current category perceptual state into a semantically very different state.’
🝖 In Defense of Tech Trees: “I can hardly think of cooler projects than trying to build the real-life, full historical tech tree, with a high level of detail.”
🝳 Rest: Rohit Krishnan explores the idea of sabbaticals.
🜚 Notes on Seeing Biology: “the ability to see living systems with ever more clarity and resolution has transformed our understanding of biology, and continues to push our research guided by a sense of awe driven by the power of the image.”
🝊 Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly: On Monotype.
Until next time.