Philosophical Cud: The Platonist and the Unlovely Algorithm

As a student of computer science, I feel as though I have a certain responsibility to be critical of the field when circumstance requires it. As fate would have it, I’ve been unable to position myself near other computer scientists lately without hearing algorithms, data structures and the like referred to as good and even beautiful. Now, one can justifiably talk about runtime efficiency or program complexity and describe a particular algorithm as “good,” but can the word beautiful ever be used in this context in a meaningful way? Realizing that I run the risk of stepping on toes in writing this, I’m casting my vote as a brazen, frustrated “No!” Can I get an amen?

To get started, let me come at this from Plato’s angle. God, he writes, created all of the true objects of nature; these objects are the Platonic ‘forms’ we’ve all heard about. In the forms, we find the perfect, transcendent, essential qualities of the objects we’re used to seeing in daily life, like chairs and beds. Of course, there are many shapes and sizes of chairs and beds in the world, but these tangible items are created by craftsmen, not God. In this sense, the beds we sleep on are only elusive, shadowy man-made reflections of the one true bed. When an artist paints a bed, or anything else we find in the sensible world, they are not painting a bed as such, they are painting the man-made illusion of the true, formal bed. Plato posits that what an artist creates, then, is three times removed from reality, in its fullest sense. This is to say, in essence, that art is the furthest thing from reality that humans had come up with at the time of Plato’s writing.

I would like to posit that even further distanced from reality than art, in both the Platonic, formal sense and in our everyday understanding of the world we live in, is the computer model of an object. In software engineering, real, tangible objects such as radix machines, physical systems and even biological populations are modeled using digital logic. This means that the functionality of something like a car’s engine or ping pong ball can be emulated using electrical signals, though there is nothing of substance happening – what may function in protocol or logic like a physical machine is really nothing more than a running algorithm consisting of computational flow controls and data structures. Layers upon layers of abstract logic and electrical pieces of hardware give the illusion of something real. If art was the vehicle that the ancients used to model the world, the computer algorithm is modern man’s contribution to this modeling. I fear that we have engineered a much more insipid, dreary form of imitation indeed.

Things constructed with algorithms are aesthetically worse than any other human creation, not strictly because they’re so far removed from reality but also because in application, the algorithms themselves fail to retain the creative influence of the designer. Computer code is written according to a syntactically strict, predetermined format. While an engineer can dictate some trivial aspects of code when implementing an algorithm, the variables are just that – trivial. There are no brush strokes, no smudges, no sense of style or marks of individuality to be found between the myriad of lines of code that comprise computer programs. The closest a program can come to relaying its origin is the programmer’s commented signature: digitally encoded, impersonal, standardized.

Computer science renders ghosts out of electricity and sterilizes the beauty of the reality it models. Computer implemented objects are not only illusory in form but vacuous, fleeting and wanting of meaning. Are computers a crux of modern medicine, science and culture? Sure. Does their place in society mark them as anything more than an ugly convenience, much like Walmart, deep-fried, salted carbohydrates and CFC propellants? Probably not. Are they beautiful? Never. Humans flew airplanes, vaccinated polio and discovered relativity without the aid of computers, and as such, I believe their un-necessity in the efforts of human progression to be incontrovertible. Like all unnecessary and aesthetically unpleasing things, we, as a people, may do well to dispatch with computers altogether. In a perfect world, I would end this column by imploring the reader to boycott Facebook or mindless Internet surfing for a few days, but doing so would only render me a hypocrite. I play too much Farmville. Until next week, just go ahead and download some music or something – at least there’s a redeeming quality, a human aspect to be found, in that.