Thursday, September 07, 2006
Buddhism and Category Theory
In my previous post today I mused about using standard ontologies in programs as a way of grounding the web of connections between your objects in a framework of common terminology.
There is a concept in Buddhist metaphysics called Dependent Origination, which states that nothing exists on its own, but only manifests itself through its connections with everything else in its environment. One illustration of the concept is Indra's Net, an infinite spider web with little silver balls at all the junctions, each reflecting all the others in a way that would gum up any ray tracer.
A program that doesn't refer to much of anything external to itself is like that -- you can define data structures and pointers and files that all point to each other, but it's all meaningless without the interpretation that a programmer or user gives to it in the data they feed to it and their interpretation of its output.
I'd say that Category Theory is a mathematical restatement of Dependent Origination.
Tags: CategoryTheory, DependentOrigination
There is a concept in Buddhist metaphysics called Dependent Origination, which states that nothing exists on its own, but only manifests itself through its connections with everything else in its environment. One illustration of the concept is Indra's Net, an infinite spider web with little silver balls at all the junctions, each reflecting all the others in a way that would gum up any ray tracer.
A program that doesn't refer to much of anything external to itself is like that -- you can define data structures and pointers and files that all point to each other, but it's all meaningless without the interpretation that a programmer or user gives to it in the data they feed to it and their interpretation of its output.
I'd say that Category Theory is a mathematical restatement of Dependent Origination.
Tags: CategoryTheory, DependentOrigination
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