Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Hiding in Plain Sight - See it?

Digital Dollars appear to me to be the writing on the wall in big letters  --- intuitively.

Robert Harper also sees a writing on the wall.  in his specific problem domain.  While he may get it in a flash of intuition or by putting pieces together he can certainly express it in the precise language of math.

His words:
Ideas have their time, and it’s not for us to choose when they arrive.  But when they do, they almost always occur to many people at more or less the same time, often in a slightly disguised form whose underlying unity becomes apparent only later.  This is perhaps not too surprising, the same seeds taking root in many a fertile mind.  A bit harder to explain, though, is the moment in time when an idea comes to fruition.  Often all of the ingredients are available, and yet no one thinks to put two-and-two together and draw what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious inference.  Until, suddenly, everyone does.  Why didn’t we think of that ages ago?  Nothing was stopping us, we just didn’t notice the opportunity!
The recent development of higher-dimensional structure in type theory seems to be a good example.  All of the ingredients have been present since the 1970′s, yet as far as I know no one, until quite recently, no one quite put together all the pieces to expose the beautiful structure that has been sitting there all along.  Like many good ideas, one can see clearly that the ideas were foreshadowed by many earlier developments whose implications are only now becoming understood.

The writing he sees on the wall can be viewed here. 

All I can do is view it, I can't see it.  Someone might say the same about what I see written on the wall and attempt to explain.

What appeals to me is a link given as background to his thoughts that jumps entirely out of the technical problem domain to the same thing in a theological domain.  Seems that I jump like that the deeper I get into the technicalities of money.  Conceptual pattern matching has value.

The beginning paragraph at the link:

The Christian doctrine of trinitarianism states that there is one God that is manifest in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who together form the Holy Trinity.   The doctrine of computational trinitarianism holds that computation manifests itself in three forms: proofs of propositions, programs of a type, and mappings between structures.  These three aspects give rise to three sects of worship: Logic, which gives primacy to proofs and propositions; Languages, which gives primacy to programs and types; Categories, which gives primacy to mappings and structures.  The central dogma of computational trinitarianism holds that Logic, Languages, and Categories are but three manifestations of one divine notion of computation.  There is no preferred route to enlightenment: each aspect provides insights that comprise the experience of computation in our lives.

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