The Minimal Levels of Abstraction in the History of Modern Computing
Abstract
From the advent of general purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers and users with computers can be observed as interconnected informational organisms (inforgs), henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the philosophy of information (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category theory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed through constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding.
Keywords
Epistemological levellism Constructive levellism Philosophy of information Computational interconnected informational organismsCR Subject Classification
K.2: History of ComputingNotes
Acknowledgments
Dr Benini was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship, grant no. PIEF-GA-2010-271926, Predicative Theories and Grothendieck Toposes, within the 7th European Community Framework Programme.
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