Back To Query Logic

Life is life being adrift on a sea, the winds of fortune carry you away from something, then back to it. At least with ADHD.

But I wanted to return to this subject. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yes, a talk on UWTV reminded me of it today, one of those gentle and philosophical type CS guys from Princeton, the kind the tech nerds mock but have the real insights if you take the time to listen to them. He was talking about the role of significator and signified in computer science, Turings intuition to to stop looking at cognition as binary, (brain/observer vs. observed) and look it as trinary (observer vs. brain vs. observed). I've mentioned something similar here; Quantum mechanics stops looking weird when you take your brain out of the equation and set it on the table, then you are talking about non-local entanglements between natural systems, one of which just happens to be your brain. But that's beside the point.

What I was talking about was good old computer science. There are two things you do in a program, you observe (compute) the values of things, and you define the values of things. its historically been awkward enough to our old math intuitions that we still have two equals in programming languages, '=' and '==', the former being that which assigns equality and the later representing observed equality. (sometimes written as ':=', '=') in math, the former tended to be manifest in the words "let" and "where" historically: A+B = C where B = X/Y (assignment of B) but didn't seem to deal that formally with it .... The philosophical underpinnings of math assume a sort of timeless eternal truth to the principles, rather than then programmers world where something is true because he says it is, so assignment and definition are something less formally defined, the mathematicians job.

But the computer revolution is here because of the programmers reality, the world where we can make things true by defining them as such formally, in the language allowed by our programming paradigm. Every programmer knows that that the assignment of functions, classes and variables is as important as the evaluation of those things at runtime. But still, programming is the former, computation is the latter. Though users of python and other modern languages are confronted with a blurring of the line between the definition of the program and the execution of it more and more, the fact is that the potential for the complete blurring between these lines goes back to the very definition of of the Turing machine: Its a system where the program can write itself, where the result of a function can be the definition of a new function, the essense of the lambda calculus. The model allows observation and definition to be one in the same.

But, just as we have spent the last 4 decades visiting web 'pages' which simulate symbols written on dead tree, so have we been unable to face the complete liquid continuum between definition and evaluation that is possible with Turing's model, that in fact most accurately models the universe of Heisenberg. So where do we start?

THAT'S what query logic is about. Its a pathetic stab in the dark at the simplest system where observation and definition are inseparable attributes of the same process. The evaluation of a logical statement should be able to result in a new logical statement, which can then be requeried to give yet new results, even with the same inputs. The Kleene-Rosser paradox wasn't the refutation of the lambda calculus, it was the glorious completion of it, the crowing jewel which showed us that computation is dependent on recursion, on iteration, on a system changing states across numerous layers of evaluation, nay, numerous instances of observation. The process which then unfolds is facilitated by G. Boole, but governed by Maxwell, by Boyle, and more than anybody, by Shannon. Its an entropic process, where the final result of evaluation is equivalent to maximum entropy.

But I'm a nuts and bolts guy. Maybe going back to Codd's model is a good place to start. Baby steps, right? Codd deserves credit for good work, a businessman who contributed to science. The key thing is that his model takes shortcuts. In SQL, these manifest as INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. The mathematical relational model states that these operations result in a new table, and behind the scenes the "relvar" (table name) associated automatically links to the new table. The SELECT statement on the other hand acts as a sort of passive observer, making no changes. So what you see is this schizophrenic duality, between the passive observer and the active creator. IF I were to give this philosophy a name, it would be called the father of failed websites, where there is this god called the publisher, and these peons called the readers, and the roles are ever separated. Now the alternative, where the roles of the readers and the creators are blurred, is called the father of great websites, essense of Facebook: Those who come to observe also create. Great power in this model. Yet computationally this simple fact is not explicitly expressed.

Nuts and bolts: I've worked out that there is very little reason to index anything in a database. If you are searching through an unindexed column, an index can easily, and in very little computational time be built each time this is done (using an algorithm like quicksort), so that after it is done several times the index is completely built. This is observation (search) resulting in state change. The acts of the deleting, inserting, or updating eye are essentially the same...observations who presumptions - facts assumed at observation time - result in state changes.

Why?

the woman who walked into the water at the mall whilst texting was a milestone for humanity, the realization that the weak link in this whole process is at this point, (and has been for decades) ourselves. Its not computers who have to catch up to us, its we who have to catch up to them. OOP is equivalent in its expressiveness to binary, yet the former is empowering to humans, the latter is not. When we understand that observations create changes in the observed, than we partake in an economy of knowing, where every observation is an investment, not to be made lightly.

And this is alignment with reality.