I’m absolutely on board with this, though I doubt it would help much with the kinds of work I do in either field (philosophy or psychology), though maybe not; in the last few years I had no choice but to pick up R and I think I’d be quite a bit further along if I’d taken computer science courses earlier. Even so, there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit for people who work in philosophy or philosophy-adjacent fields to do that probably wouldn’t benefit all that much from understanding computer science. That’s not to say it might not help in some way, but I’m not sure exactly how or if it would be of comparatively high value compared to studying other topics.
I’m mostly referring to the way of thinking where you can think of things in terms of computations. Without this, you might have weird ideas about what the mind can do with information, what can constitute a successful map/territory relationship, etc. Sorry, I’m not being very specific here; I just think there are a ton of philosophical errors which boil down to not understanding computation.
Granted, most of the important points are probably already “in the air” from computers playing such a central role in life and society today. People probably don’t need formal information theory to have good intuitions about what information is, today, compared to in the past. But it probably still helps!
I’m absolutely on board with this, though I doubt it would help much with the kinds of work I do in either field (philosophy or psychology), though maybe not; in the last few years I had no choice but to pick up R and I think I’d be quite a bit further along if I’d taken computer science courses earlier. Even so, there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit for people who work in philosophy or philosophy-adjacent fields to do that probably wouldn’t benefit all that much from understanding computer science. That’s not to say it might not help in some way, but I’m not sure exactly how or if it would be of comparatively high value compared to studying other topics.
I’m mostly referring to the way of thinking where you can think of things in terms of computations. Without this, you might have weird ideas about what the mind can do with information, what can constitute a successful map/territory relationship, etc. Sorry, I’m not being very specific here; I just think there are a ton of philosophical errors which boil down to not understanding computation.
Granted, most of the important points are probably already “in the air” from computers playing such a central role in life and society today. People probably don’t need formal information theory to have good intuitions about what information is, today, compared to in the past. But it probably still helps!