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Why should I care that data and reality are different?
Maybe I'm simply exploring an area that is obvious: the way computers handle data has nothing to do with the way people interact with information. Yeah, it's different. So what? One of my overarching questions is this: What exactly is being accomplished by computers? I write software; what is this activity, from a philisophical point of view? What does it mean to have a program run? Another question is: If computers operate on data, what is data? What is the relationship between data and reality? We call the industry "IT"-- Information Technology. What is information? What does the technology do to make information work? I have a nagging, gut-level suspicion that the pro forma process that IT represents has little or nothing to do with the way that "information" in a human sense is gathered. What is nature's information processing like? The goal of software, generally, is to create better and better models. What "better" means depends on what the goals of the software are, but I picture a process of definition, modeling, creation, and refinement that generally improves the fit between task and software through time. Why is there no analogous process in nature? Why doesn't nature create models and attempt to improve on them? Why doesn't nature deal in abstractions? Maybe I'm tilting at windmills. Maybe my explorations make as much sense as someone accusing paper and pencil as not representing the human mind. I think the value of this line of questioning is there because it seems that other people are taking computing for granted. Maybe what's needed is a clear demarcation: "This is computing" "This is reality". I'm hoping there is even more. Maybe the foundations of logic that computing are built on are only one way of approaching information handling, and there is a different in kind approach that would also be useful to people. If computers are tools, just like bandsaws and hammers, then what are they capable of doing? What are they not capable of doing? The fact that computers "do stuff" and databases and programs store and process stuff makes it seem as if these things are more than just analogs to tools. They run models that we create. They codify processes we define. They force us to formalize our thoughts about how reality might be. So, given all this, are computers really the right tools to do all these things? Are these activities reasonable for people to do?
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