The Language of Information Science

 In 2021 we are blessed with a rich vocabulary to describe the world. This has grown over the last few five decades, from describing the format of punch cards to recognizing faces.

It would take a book to describe this language or a year to teach a course in it, but here I'd like to introduce a few ideas that are directly applicable to how we talk about our experience of the world.

About in the middle of this transition, we started talking about stuff in the real world rather than data formats in some kind of computer storage. The idea was for our designs to mirror the real world as much as possible, rather than just pushing bits and bytes around. The first wave was called "Object-oriented programming". Our electronic "OBJECTS" were supposed to represent objects in the world. For example, a program dealing with e-mail would have an "object" in memory representing that object. Sounds simple unless you experienced the world before.

Objects have attributes. Pretty soon we realized they should send MESSAGES to each other and respond to messages they receive. They have "STATES". For example, our piece of e-mail would respond to "send" and have a state of "received".

Already things were getting complicated. More and more ideas crept in as we expanded our language (and our programming language) to cover more situations.

One useful concept is the INTERFACE. Think about the screen on your smartphone. It is an interface between you and the mysteries in the device. You don't need to know anything about how it works, you just need to know how to work with the interface. Indeed they can and do change the "innards" of your phone with every update but (hopefully) the interface is unaffected. Or they can change the interface to provide a more convenient way to access the "innards".

Already we have words that can allow us to escape some philosophical traps that resulted merely from poverty of language.

For example, is the "soul" an object? If so, where is it? What about consciousness? What kind of a "thing" is it?

We can think of the "soul" as sending and receiving messages through the interfaces afforded by our senses to the world out there. The object-oriented design doesn't usually represent people apart from the messages they send and receive. We tend to package these into TRANSACTIONS, which have STATES. For example, this is the message you need to send to the email object to send it (putting it in the SENT state). We don't usually need to wonder "why" somebody would send the message, but we get a picture of the person himself as having states, such as the desire to send the email. We can visualize the mind itself as a kind of interface with the world, having certain states.

What kind of "states" will the mind have? We can assume that such states correspond to states in the brain. In principle, we can imagine that state as the sum of the states of all the neurons in the body - indeed everything about the body, including position, heart beat, alertness, and so forth. To me, this seems pretty obvious but it seems to be an improvement over how philosophers talk about the mind. It is (in principle and in part) observable for one thing. It has been de-mystified. We are still left with the big question of why it feels a certain way to be in a certain state but the state itself doesn't seem so mystical.

The "soul" would seem to be some (very complex) thing that can be in a tremendous number of "states", still leaving aside why it feels like something to be in a certain state.

All these ideas are in the back of my mind when I take up the subject of mind and "self".

Our minds are capable of representing mental objects in the real world using mental "states". These depend very closely on the interface we have with the world. To clarify, I assume my dog has a mind (more on this later) but cannot represent a "door" in her mind. To be sure, she has a very rich interface with the world but it is very different from mine. Her senses are different, her needs are different. Same world, different interfaces, different minds.

The brain can be thought of as a big collection of neurons and synapses. Neurons and synapses have "states" and send messages to each other. The internal details of all this are dauntingly complex but, in the end, we have interfaces between neurons and we can (in principle) imagine the "state" of the whole brain without knowing (for example) the chemical processes within the cell or at the synapse.