Symbiont – Ethics of computing

Abstract

In this work, a connection is found between mathematical education and the architecture of computer knowledge, in the notion of formal system. What we tell here is the story of the failure to block the symbiosis of heterogeneous systems of thought. This is the history of computing, as perhaps the culmination of a project to unify thought systems. We start from the observable transition between the production of self-evidence, the convention of classical school mathematics, and the realization of the calculating machine. In a second step, we move towards the construction of theorematical knowledge, which extends into the notion of configurable machine. This is the common experience of computer systems. The work then looks at the third stage, which corresponds to the possible connection between the ideal of mathematical formalization and the concept of computational language, which is at the origin of the knowledge of computer science, and which ends at the last stage of the journey: the problematic field of self-referential systems, in which the attempt to substantiate the refusal to the symbiosis of heterogeneous systems of thought drifts towards failure. The conceptual development thus engendered ends up working as a connection with the exterior of thought. An exterior that imposes the consideration that, like psychoanalysis, what remains of the failure of computing as a discipline is ethical in nature.