2024-09-03T00:00:00.000Z
Dear MW,
In my last letter, I used the word Science to refer to the process of creating a Self that we Love. Calling something a “Science” is a bold claim so I want to clarify exactly what I mean by our personal term “Self Science”.
Science, in general, is the rational way that we come to understand our observations, or experiences, of the world. You are familiar with the scientific method. Let’s talk about where it fits into the bigger picture and what we might stand to gain from thinking scientifically.
This is generally how Science has progressed over the past four hundred years or so. Everything we know from Newton to Darwin to the Large Hadron Collider fit in this four hundred year span; a handful of generations. To get a sense of scale, here is a bar representing the duration of all of history (since written language was first used in 3200 BC). The section in green represents the Age of Science (1600 AD - present).
If applying the Scientific method was humanity’s way of jumping from our humble beginnings and landing in a mastery of ourselves and our environment, we are still very much in free fall. This means there is a lot to be curious about and still plenty of problems to put your mind to. You have so many choices, you will need a great sense of choosing what to work on! I think you will find, in time, that you have a natural gravity toward exploring some ideas. You will also find that it is impossible to ignore these tendencies without feeling like there is something tugging at you all the time. For instance, do you remember the way that your first computer programs made you feel? That feeling of delight and discovery is exactly what keeps the scientific method alive. In a very literal sense, at the heart of Science is the religion of curiosity. In this letter we will hone in on the pursuit of the safe fulfillment of curiosity and how scientific thinking can help us get there.
If Science is a relatively new chapter of history, Computer Science, and doing Science with computers is a relatively new chapter of Science. Here is the visual for the history of Science (1600 - present) with the period highlighted since the first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, was turned on in 1945.
Computer Science is a funny term because there is a well known and shared intuition amongst so called Computer Scientists that Computer Science is hardly about Computers and it is not a Science in a traditional sense. It is not about computers in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes and painting is not about brushes. Computer Science isn’t exactly a science because it isn’t studying naturally occuring phenomenon in the way that the natural sciences do by observing and experimenting on what is already there in nature. We who wrestle with computers are the designers, creators, and discoverers of our domain. In one sense, this is the purest science because the phenomenon being studied is what we called step four of the scientific method, the experimental procedure itself. Computer Science collapses the scientific method in on itself and inquires about the essence of problem solving in the abstract. This incidently is what gives Computer Science its distinct home apart from the activity of mathematicians. We take a step away from the static world of logical, eternal truths, into the rich and dynamic world of processes and systems of processes that evolve and change in the real world over time. This is the world of Science.
It wouldn’t be an exageration to say that Computer Science is as much of a revolution to Science as Science was to language and mathematics. It is an extension of our our objectivity about Nature, our Selves, and the amount of Self that we share between us. This isn’t a magical claim. Computer Science gave us a language for studying process in an abstract way. In a natural application of the scientific method, we removed the variables of studying processes in nature and in ourselves by creating a stable environment to define processes and apply the scientific method to them.
If this all sounds very meta, that is a great observation. Computer Science is riddled with Self reference. If you don’t believe me, wait until you read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader. It is almost a natural move to focus into Computer Science, moving from the Science of computation, problem solving, and abstraction to the Science of Self. If Self is defined as the process or collection of processes we identify with, within Computer Science is the origin of the science for understanding our selves. This is where Computers are directing us.
Donald Knuth, one of the historic figures to adopt the name ‘Computer Scientist’, wrote in 1982:
Being a useful tool is not enough in itself to account for the fact that computer science is now thriving in thousands of places. For example, an electron microscope is a marvelous tool, but ‘electron microscope science’ has not taken the world by storm; something other than the usefulness of computers must account for the rapid spread of computer science. What actually happened was that the people who got interested in computers started to realize that their peculiar way of thinking was shared by others, so they began to congregate in places where they could have people like themselves to work with. This is how computer science came to exist.
It is in this way that I write the term “Self Science”, not as an attempt to parse through psychology or philosophy with you, but as a passionate endeavor to explore the territory of methodologies for using language and software to understand one’s Self. Specifically ourself. I think that personal touch is an important component of trying to study one’s own internal world. It is something that must be done in the spirit of an artist, a monk, or a shaman. We will try also to take the spirit of a scientist and a mathematician when it suits our process. I think this dual spirit is one that would be familiar to many in the world of Computer Science.
Yours Truly,
Wally Flowers