The deeper root of anti-LLM developer posturing is that it's an existential threat to the more hucksterish model of SaaS—pretending simple computational tasks are complex and offering to do it for clients—upon which the industry has thrived the past couple of decades. There was no real historical need for companies of any significant size to outsource database management and other simple internal functions to cloud companies with no, or nominal, domain expertise in their respective industries.

My current head canon for readings in the philosophy of software, will write this up on the blog eventually:

- Plato: insights on mathematics, theory of forms, theory of chora.
- Aristotle's Categories.
- The history of emanationism from the Neoplatonists onward. Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being can be taken as a starting point.
- The historical evolution of the scholastic organon (particularly proto systems thinkers like Francisco Suárez).
- Robert Fludd and Athansius Kirchner passim, for whom the representation and logical retrieval of knowledge was elevated to an art form.
- Raymond Lully and Giordano Bruno, passim.
- The mathematical theology of Nicholas Cusanus.
- Leibniz's Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, writings on organon and Monadology.
- Diderot and D'Alembert.
- Kant's discussion of the very concept of System in the Architectonic from the Critique of Pure Reason.
- Kant's "philosophy as a system" passage from a preface to the Critique of Judgement.
- Fichte and Reinhold's post-Kantian systematic philosophies (in particular Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre).
- Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik.
- Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms.
- Various other Neo-Kantians, but certainly Emil Lask's domain category concept, which resonates strongly with modern type theory.
- Martial Gueroult's Dianoématique project, which takes up the history of philosophy as a historical problem using comparative systems analysis.
- Jules Vuillemin's development of the notion of philosophical system in What are Philosophical Systems?
- Deleuze's Différence et répétition.
- Friedrich Kittler's work on the history of "code" in general, and programming languages in particular. The majority of these are of course not about software as such but rather the construction of epistemic systems. In so doing, these thinkers ran into the same issues you encounter in large-scale software projects.

The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers is a fascinating anonymous medieval text full of neoplatonic and Pythagorean numerology. It contains 24 "definitions" of God offered up by fictional philosophers. The second definition is the earliest version of the famous "God is an… https://t.co/8cRVsH9I3htwitter.com/i/web/status/1…


Liber XXIV philosophorum I:
GOD IS A MONAD THAT GENERATES A MONAD, REFLECTING BACK ON ITSELF IN A SINGLE FLAME.

This is also Cassirer's thesis: the Katnian antimony is rooted in the late renaissance amplification of the paradox as epistemic unit. Finnegans Wake, the highest poetic expression of the coincidence of contraries, renders the cosmological antimonies into literature.

https://twitter.com/thomasmurphy__/status/1563505736407064577

This means we can read the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, San Juan de la Cruz, Ruysbroeck, Jakob Böhme in quite a different light. Likewise poets of the kaballah such as Isaak the Blind. The reciprocal determination of origin and end is perhaps *the* fundamental literary device...

Rationalism can never constitute a sufficient philosophy of mathematics because mathematical practice necessitates a coalition of the faculties, the interplay of intuition, schematism in the understanding & reason. Reason is purely connective, it "ignores magnitude" (Kant). Reason unrestrained by the other faculties arrives at illusory images of the whole because of this over-zealous reticulation trait. It has the structure of paranoia or apophenia: 'the rationalist is the one who [presumptuously] fills in the gaps' (Deleuze).

Neoclassical economics is being subjected to an immanent critique: all the effective altruists and ethical rationalists it has produced as epistemic byproducts are absolutely wrecking the system whenever they achieve any degree of network control. A Kantian "delirium of reason". This is equally what Deleuze calls the "tribunal of reason": the masochistic spiral of hubris-reduction that occurs when reason is called upon to select the criteria to judge itself.

Starting to figure out what is going on here. Florensky was inspired by Andrei Bely's father, Andrei Bugaev, who developed a theory of "evolutionary monadology" and "arithmology". Florensky sees the diagonal argument in Cantor as expressing the problematic composition of monads.

https://twitter.com/thomasmurphy__/status/1578369497471197185

Monads are windowless, they cannot broadcast their state, but they can paradoxically be composed. For Florensky, Cantor's aleph system expresses this. As Zellini argues, this is a resolution of the continuous and the discrete (an assemblage of monads with "internal" continua).

Group theoretical presentation of this notion in Vuillemin's lecture on Poincaré. This theory of the extremely high dimensionality of sense input and its nervous transmission recommends the Nietzsche/Helmholtz model of consciousness as "reducing valve" which'trims the manifold'.

https://twitter.com/thomasmurphy__/status/1432000849639837701

Perhaps an extension of Schopenhauer's critique of the given in the appendix to World & Will, this theme of unconscious reduction of sensory plentiude is a vector through epistemology and axiology for Nietzsche.