Bits don’t have error bars: upward conceptualization and downward approximation

How engineering enabled abstraction in computer science. 1. Turning dreams into reality What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? – Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 Although Ecclesiastes says “No,” engineers and computer scientists say “Yes, there are things that are new under the sun—and we create them.” Where do these new things come from? They start as ideas in our minds. A poetic, if overused, way to put this is that we—and I’m writing as a computer scientist—turn our dreams into reality. Trite though this phrase may be, I mean to take seriously the relationship between ideas and material reality. Engineers and computer scientists transform subjective experience into phenomena of the material world. The previous statement notwithstanding, this paper is not a theory of mind. I am not claiming to explain how subjective experience comes into being or how we map subjective experience to anything outside the mind. I do plan to talk about the relationship between ideas and material reality. Section 2 provides more detail on the approach to consciousness I’m adopting. It also provides an introduction to the notion of a level of abstraction and its significance. Section 3 returns to thought externalization, the ways in which engineers and computer scientists turn ideas into material reality. As Ferguson (1992) says, “The conversion of an idea to an artifact ... is a complex and subtle process that will always be far closer to art than to science.” Section 4 discusses both the bit, the fundamental level of abstraction, and the price computer science pays for working at the bit level and above. Section 5 describes the different approaches engineering and computer science take to design.