• Philosophy and Spirituality
    Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Threads of Note Socialize
  • P&S Moderators: JackARoe

Why do we pay Philosopher's (and the like) for basic Stoner Thoughts? Have they ever solved anything?

Philosophy leads to morals, principles, and life outlooks that are valued and benefit society

Why do people still accept the US dollar when the US is trillions under? Is that philosophical or logical, we'll see if there is an answer.
 
Last edited:
Morality is simple (Unless you want to study pain) Principles and life outlooks leads to skinwalkers. They make Hegel their entire personality.
 
Mace Windu*edit
*I do mean pain shouldn't be studied. I didn't make that clear.
 
Last edited:
The etymology of the word philosopher is simply 'lover of wisdom'.

Does philosophy have any practical uses? Yes - manifold. Philosophy is how we descide the most appropriate heuristics to apply to solve real-world problems in the most efficient way.

-Pragmatism
-Bounded Rationality (accepting we cannot know everything)
-Satisficing (The strategy of searching through available options until an acceptable threshold is met rather than hunting for the single best answer)

Criteria: Frugality, Reliability and robustness

So EVERY man-made object in existance came into being because a design philosophy was used. Those phlosopies may be totally different between objects but before you even design you have a design philosophy. Maybe it's 'keep it simple', maybe it's 'keep it cheap' but once a philosophy exists it then informs CHOICES. Every choice made through an entire design cycle.

Even homogogenous objects. It didn't take long for every bolt IN THE WORLD to have a right-handed thread. The philosophy simply being that the vast majority of people are right-handed.

Amazing, someone using a computer which contains processors whose existance dates back to design decisions made 40+ years ago. But the fact it still works is a testement to someone having employed a design philosophy and today designers are simply adding more detail to that original design philosophy so that in 40+ year time, even the 512 core 64THz processors will still be compatible with that design set down in 1982.
 
4DQSAR said:
Amazing, someone using a computer which contains processors whose existance dates back to design decisions made 40+ years ago. But the fact it still works is a testement to someone having employed a design philosophy and today designers are simply adding more detail to that original design philosophy so that in 40+ year time, even the 512 core 64THz processors will still be compatible with that design set down in 1982.
Click to expand...

I believe engineers made the CPU and philosophy had nil to do with it
 
Shrooms00087 said:
I believe engineers made the CPU and philosophy had nil to do with it
Click to expand...

Well, I could agree with you but then we would BOTH be wrong.

Engineers BUILD things that have been designed. Or did you think they just broke open the tool-box and randomly started hammering?

The humble 8086 was designed in 1982 to allow 248-bit long instructions. No 8086s instruction uses more than 32 bits and yet someone had the foresight to note how CPU power doubled around every 2 years and pretty soon 16, 32 and 64-bit processors would become common. With that in mind at every step they ensured that even though reading a 248-bit instruction would take a long time with an 8-bit data bus, they chose to support it.

Which turned out to be fortunate because today all modern x64 processors execute three 64-bit instructions in parallel. We use the term 'triads' as the microcode seemlessly converts several instructions into a single VLIW instruction and guess how big triads are?

It WOULD have been cheaper, faster and simpler NOT to support instructions larger than 32-bits but the design philosophy was to make a design that was future-proof.
 
Last edited:
I'm sorry I don't see where philosophy came in. The designers are the engineers. Using engineering data. The 'philosophy' the purpose behind the design made from facts, made from engineers, is to be made future proof. That's just good engineering I don't know
 
philosophy is foundational to modern computing and modern business. it provides a framework for decision making, evaluating systems and communication.

i think you could make the argument that, without philosophy, digital computers and the modern cpu would not exist.

logic was a branch of philosophy. from there, boolean algebra and boolean logic, then shannon (logic gates) and the rest is history.

so, yes, engineers built the physical cpu but philosophy invented the idea of logical computation that made it possible.

alasdair
 
Shrooms00087 said:
I'm sorry I don't see where philosophy came in. The designers are the engineers. Using engineering data. The 'philosophy' the purpose behind the design made from facts, made from engineers, is to be made future proof. That's just good engineering I don't know
Click to expand...

Nope, engineers are a couple levels DOWN from the designers.

Typically CPU designers have little idea how the latest gate-technology works. They know it exists, understands it's benefits and weaknesses and based on a philosophy, they make CHOICES.

Those designers could not possibly have foreseen triads or VLIW or Vector Registers but they ensured that their basic design was flexible enough for implementations of all kinds to be build, used, discarded yet at the heart of the design nothing had to change. code written in 1983 works fine even on the very latest CPUs. Lots of x86 design ideas have come and gone but it doesn't matter because all of them were still 100% backwardly compatible.

Backward compatibility only works because someone thought about it AT THE START.

It took longer, cost more, made design more difficult and forced trade-offs. BECAUSE the core philosophy was BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY! EVERY descision made had to first ask 'will this be backwardly compatible'. THAT is a design philosophy in action.

That is why someone using a computer to deride philosophy is an oxymoron.
 
4DQSAR said:
Nope, engineers are a couple levels DOWN from the designers.

Typically CPU designers have little idea how the latest gate-technology works. They know it exists, understands it's benefits and weaknesses and based on a philosophy, they make CHOICES.

Those designers could not possibly have foreseen triads or VLIW or Vector Registers but they ensured that their basic design was flexible enough for implementations of all kinds to be build, used, discarded yet at the heart of the design nothing had to change. code written in 1983 works fine even on the very latest CPUs. Lots of x86 design ideas have come and gone but it doesn't matter because all of them were still 100% backwardly compatible.

Backward compatibility only works because someone thought about it AT THE START.

It took longer, cost more, made design more difficult and forced trade-offs. BECAUSE the core philosophy was BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY! EVERY descision made had to first ask 'will this be backwardly compatible'. THAT is a design philosophy in action.

That is why someone using a computer to deride philosophy is an oxymoron.
Click to expand...

I don't know sounds like piggy-backing. Like the decisions that you are describing doesn't sound like I need Philosophy. I don't need philosophy to make choices.
 
Shrooms00087 said:
You can build your own cpu without any knowledge of philosophy, right now.
Click to expand...

of course you can.

maybe you're completely missing the point. or maybe i didn't make it clearly enough.

you can drive a car today with no knowledge of thermodynamics and internal combustion, but that doesn't mean that thermodynamics wasn't required to invent the engine.

you can build a cpu today without knowing philosophy for the exact same reason you can drive a car. the people who came before you already solved the theory so you wouldn't have to.

alasdair
 
For me, the value of philosophy is that it allows you to discuss things accurately.

Different philosophers give you different sets of language that can describe aspects of reality. This lets us better understand and discuss aspects of our realities from morals and ethics, to language and social organization.

Social and political movements favor different philosophers who tend to grow symbiotically with the movements. Getting exposure to the writings behind different movements allows you to better understand them at fundamental levels.

I also think it’s just fun stuff to play with in my head.
 
Who doesn't value philosophy and please think why if you don't....

now you philosophized.... Thought isn't something to be afraid of. Saw a funny youtube video where a fellow was explaining different thought excercises, like the ship of thesius or w/e --- if all the parts are eventually replaced is it still the same boat... egg theory, etc etc....

everytime the dude explained something ppl would freak out and be like "No that is bullshit" --- I am not saying it is or is not bullshit these are just thought exercises, believe what ya want

Idk to me it was funny and showed the disconnect between recent and previous generations.

"Why would I think when google and A.I?" -- is that philosophy? If so I know some practicers
 
alasdairm said:
of course you can.

maybe you're completely missing the point. or maybe i didn't make it clearly enough.

you can drive a car today with no knowledge of thermodynamics and internal combustion, but that doesn't mean that thermodynamics wasn't required to invent the engine.

you can build a cpu today without knowing philosophy for the exact same reason you can drive a car. the people who came before you already solved the theory so you wouldn't have to.

alasdair
Click to expand...
  • Design choices: Engineers use guiding concepts like the RISC philosophy to decide how chips process instructions.
  • Human ideas: People built chips using formal logic rooted in philosophy, but the silicon itself remains purely mechanical.

    I'm saying it's concepts are purely language which happens to conform to RISC philosophy (this or that philosophy).
  • When directly asked Google says: "No, Central Processing Units (CPUs) do not require philosophy to function" Google AI
What even makes you think we can't program CPU's without algebra. Mind boggling.
 
Last edited:
@Shrooms00087 - but do let my know how your quantum computer works out. Because no two designs are compatible and it's actually a philosophical shift becuse instead of an list of formal logic instructions executing in sequence to provide the correct solution, quantum computing produces all possible solutions simulataniously. So, given it all takes place at the same time, is it even correct to describe it as 'computing'? It doesn't calculate the correct answer but rather uses a property of quantum mechanics (interference) to eliminate the incorrect answers.

A common trick when speed was paramount was to precalculate results and it appears that quantum computers essentially generate and access that (traditionally) precalculated result but it can in theory provide a precalculation table of any arbritary size and number of dimentions.

Because while Gödel formal logic is analagous to a classical computer, what is a quantum computer analagous to?

For a start nowhere is it stated that a quantum computer need be Turing-complete (no requirement for a conditional branch) so are these in fact computers?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top