Relevancy22: Contemporary Process Christianity: Post-Evangelic Topics and Theology: Process Christianity, the History of Computer Languages, and Quantum Computing

Process Christianity, the History of Computer

Languages, and Quantum Computing

by R.E. Slater

Introduction

Would you expect to find a post on Digital and Quantum Computing on a Christian website?! Well, why not? Christians should be interested in everything to help mold our religious worlds. We should be expanding our religious reality at every opportunity. For myself, I wish to allow doubt and uncertainty help lead and inform my religious beliefs. Plus I had a lifetime of service in the technology industry including a major portion of my schooling in mathematics and the sciences. So, I am always interested in learning something new!

I will here digress but you should know that further below will be a load of information that may be explored and learned on your own from early classical computing to quantum coding online in the cloud. But first, let me provide a tie-in from what I describe as "Process Christianity" to Process-based Sciences as they are being affected by Whiteheadian Process Philosophy in the foreseeable future.

Here, at Relevancy22, I try to envisage God and God's World around us. How we might fit in and work with God and with God's creation. And how our every thought might help reconstruct a new point of process-based human progress towards accomplishing healing and restitution between ourselves and the world at large.

Think of the world of computing as a helpful vaccine given to a pandemic world trying to rediscover it's humanity and presence in the world of nature. Computing across all industries, including greentech, will be able to do just that - nanocomputing, biologic and molecular computing, organic computing, AI computing, and so on.

Whatever we touch let us touch it for good, give it to the masses, and use any funds received to alleviate the world's troubles. I suppose this is a naive view but we all know our history how the machinations of man always screws things up. So stay noble, be wise, and invest when and where you can since money talks. And always remember you're first principles. Thus Process Christianity to help remind us that we but a wee part in a very large, and complex, universe.

One last, this is also an apt goal for any future worlds forming themselves into (cosmo)ecological societies and ecoworld civilizations. Don't you LOVE it?!! Computing and cosmological goals! :0

The Progress of Computing Logic

Today I was curious about the progress of computing logic and languages. From its early silicon days to the quantum computing research and applications presently being undertaken. The logic basis of constructing synthetic machine language is dependent upon the medium used.

Whereas in the past a form of linear thinking or sequentially-based (Boolean+, Many-Valued) mathematics might have been applicably related to the silicon world of electromagnetism, in this next world of quantum materials I am guessing a form of "fuzzy logic" (imprecise free association) or, perhaps more properly, a form of "free logic" (unassociated free variables from objects), must be the minimum starting point. In psychological terms we might even consider "free association" (unassociated forms divested of relationships).

In fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1 both inclusive. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false. By contrast, in Boolean logic, the truth values of variables may only be the integer values 0 or 1.

The term fuzzy logic was introduced with the 1965 proposal of fuzzy set theory by Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic had, however, been studied since the 1920s, as infinite-valued logic—notably by Łukasiewicz and Tarski.

Fuzzy logic is based on the observation that people make decisions based on imprecise and non-numerical information. Fuzzy models or sets are mathematical means of representing vagueness and imprecise information (hence the term fuzzy). These models have the capability of recognising, representing, manipulating, interpreting, and utilising data and information that are vague and lack certainty.

vs.

A free logic is a logic with fewer existential presuppositions than classical logic. Free logics may allow for terms that do not denote any object. Free logics may also allow models that have an empty domain. A free logic with the latter property is an inclusive logic.

The point of free logic, though, is to have a formalism that implies no particular ontology, but that merely makes an interpretation of Quine both formally possible and simple. An advantage of this is that formalizing theories of singular existence in free logic brings out their implications for easy analysis. Lambert takes the example of the theory proposed by Wesley C. Salmon and George Nahknikian, which is that to exist is to be self-identical.

vs.

Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.

Freud described it as such: "The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions".

We Live in Relational Worlds

What cannot be escaped is the idea of the relationship of things to things. Yet in this regard to either process mechanics or, process-based quantum physics, those relationships are severed and may freely associate with any other non-dissimilar relationship whether sensical or not.

As example, the picture of a well-ordered businessman or businesswoman in personal psychic crisis deconstructing himself or herself into elemental forms of human reconnection to self and society. Or the chemical bonds found is radical compounds freed from their ionic bonds to recompose into entirely new, non-historical configurations.

Tenet Trailer - Spoiler Alert

In the quantum world we will discover a new way of imagining cause and effect. Perhaps, similar to the TENET movie, by placing effect before cause in non-temporal terms of relational matter to matter freed of temporal bounds... yes, I disabused the movie's premise. Forgive me. I was freely associating :)

But in truth a photon of light has been shown to have virtually travelled its path before actually traveling its historical path, so welcome to the world of the strange found in the quantum world of the paradoxical.

Process Metaphysics

Last thought, as Metaphysicists examine the nature of the reality, or as Philosophers do the same, we must similarly ask ourselves the deep questions of life's material processes, of its organic processes, of even its unseen - some say, spiritual - connections between itself and one another. It is within this complexity we live-and-breathe-and-have-our-being which provides yet another fundamental direction to a purpose-filled world granted (process) theological regard of the Divine in relationship to the inherited immortal.

Inherited in that this world is but an organic process spun off from God's own Self. And immortal in that in process events, as processes live and die, come and go, its overall "manufacture" between ever evolving and freely associating event processes will live on-and-on-and-on even as its Creator-Author does. The very nature of the cosmos is immortal when defined in process terms.

Thus, we should learn to see life from the theological perspective. Let it override the perspective of the metaphysician, the philosopher, and the quantum world of wonder whose threshold we step upon as for the first time. We live in a process world of healing and wellbeing should we allow it. Let's do. And let's together see where it takes us.

Conclusion

Below I have laid out a graphic history of computing languages. A Family Tree of sorts. These iterations have all occurred in my lifetime with more to come. As example, Apache UNIX (2013) is being used by Databricks as an enterprise-wide computing platform in the Cloud. It is replacing all previous enterprise versions of corporate/proprietary UNIX solutions. Thus, IBM and HP had also sought this avenue to stay up with open-source code branded committers.

But what will computing firms do in the future as quantum computing comes on line? Stay to faster iterations of silicon-based computer languages or replace the older logic and language systems altogether with something more pertinent to the medium used? And what kind of quantum logic should be used?

Hence my post today. While thinking specifically, learn to also think universally. See Tim Eastman's discussion in an earlier post a month ago for more discussion here. Especially in his paper and the notes given at the end of the post. It speaks to the developing world of quantum logic and language.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

May 7, 2021

TERMS TO KNOW

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among [the study of] the natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle’s works into the treatise we now know by the name Metaphysics (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, meta ta physika, lit. 'after the Physics ', another of Aristotle's works).

Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fully general manner, the questions:
What is there?

What is it like?
Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. [Let's also add organic process metaphysics where there are no eternal objects, which are considered existentially phenomenological. - re slater].

Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics.

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Philosophy (from Greek: φιλοσοφία, philosophia, 'love of wisdom') is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about reason, existence, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. The term was probably coined by Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BCE). Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation.

Historically, philosophy encompassed all bodies of knowledge and a practitioner was known as a philosopher. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "Natural Philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics.

In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. Since then, various areas of investigation that were traditionally part of philosophy have become separate academic disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics.

Today, major subfields of academic philosophy include:

metaphysics, which is concerned with the fundamental nature of existence and reality;

epistemology, which studies the nature of knowledge and belief;

ethics, which is concerned with moral value;

and logic, which studies the rules of inference that allow one to derive conclusions from true premises.

Other notable subfields include philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.

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Process Philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, defines processes in the ordinary everyday real world as its only basic or elementary existents. It treats other real existents (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes [sic, existential phenomenology as secondary abstractions of recontextualized space. - re slater].

In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change, or becoming, as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world. [sic, as exampled by the quantum world of process and event where reality isn't either static or fixed but constructed transitory-and-temporal contextual events. - re slater]

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.
Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics, Ilya Prigogine distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming".

Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.

[Addendum: GWF Hegel was the main precursor to all of the above; Whitehead completed Hegel's thought where it stopped short thus creating a separate branch of philosophy some think of as an Integral Philosophy encasing all previous philosophies; Hartshorne showed process thought's relationship to the natural world. - re slater]
Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than Analytic philosophy because it is usually only taught in Continental departments. However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus Continental methods in contemporary philosophy.

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Types of Programming Languages

A History of Computer Languages

(1900s - 2021)

Click to Enlarge - https://i.stack.imgur.com/G2Xri.png

Berkley Software Distribution and the History of UNIX

Languages used at a particular firm (including front end scripts, markup and DSL's)

This one illustates some Languages evolving around BASIC and Fortran

Click to Enlarge - http://rigaux.org/language-study/diagram.png
Also from Wikipedia - Genealogical Tree of Programming Languages
And one other link - UNIX Family Tree

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Language Categories

Procedural Language

A language which states how to compute the result of a given problem. This term encompasses both imperative and functional languages.

Imperative Language

A language which operates by a sequence of commands that change the value of data elements. Imperative languages are typified by assignments and iteration.

Declarative Language

A language which operates by making descriptive statements about data, and relations between data. The algorithm is hidden in the semantics of the language. This category encompasses both applicative and logic languages. Examples of declarative features are set comprehensions and pattern-matching statements.

Applicative Language

A language that operates by application of functions to values, with no side effects. A functional language in the broad sense.

Functional Language

In the narrow sense, a functional language is one that operates by use of higher-order functions, building operators that manipulate functions directly without ever appearing to manipulate data. Example: FP.

Definitional Language

An applicative language containing assignments interpreted as definitions. Example: Lucid.

Single Assignment Language

An applicative language using assignments, with the convention that a variable may appear on the left side of an assignment only once within the portion of the program in which it is active.

Dataflow Language

A language suitable for use on a dataflow architecture. Necessary properties include freedom from side effects, and the equivalence of scheduling constraints with data dependencies. Examples: Val, Id, SISAL, Lucid.

Logic Language

A logic language deals with predicates or relationships p(X,Y). A program consists of a set of Horn clauses which may be:

facts - p(X,Y) is true
rules - p is true if q1 and q2 and ... qn are true
queries - is g1 and g2 and ... gn true? (gi's are the goals.)

Further clauses are inferred using resolution. One clause is selected containing p as an assumption, another containing p as a consequence, and p is eliminated between them. If the two p's have different arguments they must be unified, using the substitution with the fewest constraints that makes them the same. Logic languages try alternative resolutions for each goal in succession, backtracking in a search for a common solution.

OR-parallel logic languages try alternative resolutions in parallel
AND-parallel logic languages try to satisfy several goals in parallel.

Constraint Language

A language in which a problem is specified and solved by a series of constraining relationships.

Object-Oriented Language

A language in which data and the functions which access it are treated as a unit.

Concurrent Language

A concurrent language describes programs that may be executed in parallel. This may be either

Multiprogramming: sharing one processor
Multiprocessing: separate processors sharing one memory
Distributed

Concurrent languages differ in the way that processes are created:

Coroutines - control is explicitly transferred - examples are Simula I, SL5, BLISS and Modula-2.
Fork/join - examples are PL/I and Mesa.
Cobegin/coend - examples are ALGOL 68, CSP, Edison, Argus.
Process declarations - examples are DP, SR, Concurrent Pascal, Modula, PLITS and Ada.

and the ways in which processes interact:

Semaphores - ALGOL 68
Conditional critical regions - Edison, DP, Argus
Monitors - Concurrent Pascal, Modula
Message passing - CSP, PLITS, Gypsy, Actors
Remote procedure calls - DP, *Mod
- Rendezvous - Ada, SR
- Atomic transactions - Argus

Fourth Generation Language (4GL)

A very high-level language. It may use natural English or visual constructs. Algorithms or data structures may be selected by the compiler.

Query Language

An interface to a database.

Specification Language

A formalism for expressing a hardware or software design.

Assembly Language

A symbolic representation of the machine language of a specific computer.

Intermediate Language

A language used as an intermediate stage in compilation. May be either text or binary.

Metalanguage

A language used for the formal description of another language.

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Click to Enlarge - https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/250a-fall-2005/docs/ComputerLanguagesChart.png

Alan Turing: Crash Course Computer Science #15

Tomorrow's World: New Banking 09 December 1969 - BBC

BBC4 - Codes That Changed The World - Fortran

A Brief History of Programming Languages:

A Review of “Codes That Changed the World”

Fortran

MON 6 APR 2015

1/5 Aleks Krotoski explores the language that helped put men on the moon and harness the atom.

Cobol

TUE 7 APR 2015

2/5 Deeply unpopular, but 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in it. Why?

Basic

WED 8 APR 2015

3/5 As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, Basic became iconic.

Java

THU 9 APR 2015

4/5 The language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.

The Tower of Babel

FRI 10 APR 2015

5/5 Aleks Krotoski explores how today's digital world is a reverse Tower of Babel.

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Click to enlarge -
https://www.vediccomputing.com/images/unifiedfield.png
Source - https://www.vediccomputing.com/about.html

I found it curious that someone acquainted with Indian and Hindu philosophy should give the qauntum computing world a spin much along the lines I had done in my opening introduction here at this post. As Tim Eastman would say, these are our life contexts which either inspire us to greater insights or shut us down in the same. So, to hedge against my Westernized bias of the Cosmos from a Process Theological perspective I thought this little chart may also supply some wisdom. - re slater

The Vedas (/ˈveɪdəz, ˈviː-/; Sanskrit: वेदः vedaḥ, "knowledge") are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism.

There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. Each Veda has four subdivisions:

the Samhitas (mantras and benedictions),
the Aranyakas (text on rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and symbolic-sacrifices),
the Brahmanas (commentaries on rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices), and
the Upanishads (texts discussing meditation, philosophy and spiritual knowledge).
Some scholars add a fifth category – the Upasanas (worship). The texts of the Upanishads discuss ideas akin to the heterodox sramana-traditions.

Vedas are śruti ("what is heard"), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are called smṛti ("what is remembered"). Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which means "not of a man, superhuman" and "impersonal, authorless," revelations of sacred sounds and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.

The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the modern age for their phonology rather than the semantics, and are considered to be "primordial rhythms of creation", preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, "by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base."

The various Indian philosophies and Hindu denominations have taken differing positions on the Vedas; schools of Indian philosophy which acknowledge the primal authority of the Vedas are classified as "orthodox" (āstika).[note2] Other śramaṇa traditions, such as Lokayata, Carvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism and Jainism, which did not regard the Vedas as authorities, are referred to as "heterodox" or "non-orthodox" (nāstika) schools.

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