Podcasts about c brown

Send us feedback at MetagnosisPodcast@gmail.com. Join our community at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Metagnosis/. Transcript:Yuta:00:04 And we begin. Okay. So this podcast episode will be a little different. I thought I would interview Henry about his classes and see how his classes tie into his, his other interests and his overall plans. So, yeah. What classes did he take this past semester, which would be for listeners a fall of 20, 19? Henry:00:35 Yes. And this would be my second to last semester in college. So senior year first semester. So I took four classes, one of them being my thesis project. So our college, we do a thesis in our senior year, which lasts for the entire year. And it's a kind of research projects on a topic of our choice relating to our major. And the other three classes I took were in three different subjects though. They're all related to my interests. I'm pretty much done with my requirement classes. The first one was modern philosophy. So actually Yuta and I were in this class together and it was on the topic of philosophy, major figures in philosophy, namely four major figures in the last couple hundred years, starting the so-called modern period in philosophy. Yeah, that's really early, modern, modern. Yeah. So starting basically with Descartes even though it's called modern philosophy. Yeah. I guess that the terminology is not super descriptive outside of the field, but it's just that time period is called modern and it will forever be called modern even though it's not contemporary. But yeah, so that was one and I had that starting eight 30 in the morning, so pretty early class, but still very good. We have some interesting stories about the professor of that class. Henry:02:32 Yuta has had more experience with him than I though. My next class was programming languages and this was a class on different paradigms of programming languages that have been developed over the past 50, 60 years. And we kinda go through most of the very theoretical foundations for programming languages, not so much the modern software engineering stuff. And that's really related to my specific research interests. So I really enjoyed that class. And then my final class excluding thesis is called topics in algebra. But the specific topic that we focus on was called quadratic forms. And these are just very simply, they're algebraic expressions that have degree to, so something like X squared plus Y squared plus Z squared was an example of a quadratic form in three variables. And apparently quadratic f orms are used almost everywhere in mathematics and also in sort of applied mathematics. Henry:03:59 So there's a ton of material to look at in that class. And it was a sort of upper level mathematics course. So it was pretty difficult and very sort of rushed presentation. The teacher was basically writing the textbook as we were going through it actively teaching that. Huh? Who was teaching that? Kyle Ormsby, which I've had a, I've had a class two or classes with him before and I worked with him one summer, so I have a bit of experience with him. He was a really great teacher and it was really nice to get a sort of high level introduction to mathematics as it's done in some active research fields. But I definitely am not like an expert mathematics students. So it was mostly just a challenge for me to be involved in that class. So I I enjoyed being challenged a little bit outside of my normal research stuff. Henry:05:12 Yeah. Well that's cool. I think your classes during the semester like represented your interests well in a broad way is you have a philosophy of math and computer science and then independent research. Yeah. Basically those are the three fields that I've taken all my classes in for Hume and then two economics classes, all my classes in philosophy, math and computer science. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. I've been very focused I guess most, at least my impression is that most people take like something else for their X group X requirement or something like that, but I just completely focused on philosophy for all my extra classes. Yeah. I think a lot of people they, they just take a lot of classes, just not even for requirements. They just take like random classes and in different departments, but actually my classes, they're also very narrow. It's, it's funny how read, you know, they want you to have a liberal arts education, but also their requirements are so flexible that you can really get away with being very narrow. It's true. It's definitely not the most flexible of like C Brown college. I mean that's just no shusher at all. Right. So that's pretty exceptional. But yeah, it definitely gives you freedom when it comes to a sort of extra requirements. They give you a lot of room within the groups, at least with the requirements that we have. I know that they've changed a little bit, but I don't know much about the new requirements. Yuta:06:56 Yeah. Henry:06:57 And they also only require you to take like two classes in to fulfill an entire group so you can really get away with focusing a lot in specific groups without taking too many. And other groups. For example, I only took two economics classes for anything outside of the three groups that I mentioned. So that was my entire social science. I guess I did take physics, but that was required for math in general. Yuta:07:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's similar to, Henry:07:38 And of course everyone takes the humanities class their first year. Yuta:07:42 Yeah. Henry:07:45 Wow. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, you didn't have to take a ton, but actually I mean philosophy is kind of like a liberal arts field just on its own. Like that's true. No, I think I'm like with like math or something, there's like a wide diversity and in the classes that you can take. Yes, very much so. I've taken so from sort of metaphysics to philosophy of science, so there's a lot of variety within that range. Yeah. And then modern philosophies. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. So we, it seemed to be focused more on the metaphysics, at least with what we did. Yuta:08:35 Huh. Henry:08:37 Well there is some, yeah, that's true. There were some of the smallest she at the end. Yeah, that's, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Unsatisfaction so what, what was so was your most intense class? The algebra class? Yuta:08:57 Yeah, definitely. It wasn't so much that the, Henry:09:01 I actually did really well on all the homework and stuff cause I just put a lot of time into it. Basically all of my time. My other classes didn't really require much in the way of out of class work. But I had a lot of homework for algebra but just the material is very difficult, so it took a lot of effort. That's why it was difficult. Yuta:09:28 Did you work a lot with, I mean okay. I'm still figuring out how to do podcasting because I know you were working with someone we know mutually. Did you work a lot with classmates for that class? Oh, I see what you mean. For that Henry:09:54 Class in particular, I actually did much more work with classmates than I usually do. I usually do homework by myself for classes for basically every other class. But that one but in that class I actually appreciated it because there were only about maybe 10 people in the class by the end. So basically everyone in the class could work together and it was an entire group and that was cool, especially since there happened to be a lot of typos in a few things. So it was nice to catch those quickly when other people found them. But in general, I don't usually work with other people, but for that class I found it useful because there were a lot of new definitions and concepts that I didn't really have a lot of intuition with. And most of the other students were math majors, so they had a bit more context and it was nice to ask questions Yuta:10:56 And stuff like that. Yeah. Where were they? All math majors? I think so. Yeah. There might've been one other person that was like a physics major or something, but I don't know who, but I was definitely the only computer science major. Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting. So how, like how does math fit into your other interests? Like how did you get into it and do you plan on like keeping on pursuing it and yeah. How does, how do you think of that as fitting into everything else? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that I, I'm definitely really interested by mathematics in general. So Henry:11:42 Not really any particular part of mathematics has drawn me in terms of like wanting to, you know, major in it or something like that. So that's why I'm not a mathematics specifically. Computer science is definitely always been my primary interest, but I think that mathematics in the pure form has been just a really great way to gain skill working with abstract systems. I think of it sort of like math is a less strict version of theoretical computer science. It's like doing computer science, both less constraints. You don't have to worry about the real computer or how you would accomplish the things that you're trying to represent. It's all just a matter of can you write it down. So that's how I view my sort of interests relationship to mathematics. But in general, I've just liked to take a bunch of mathematics courses because I guess I'm, I'm, I'm decently good at it and also it just is really interesting and keeps my attention. Henry:12:59 Most other classes, sorry, I keep cutting you off, but sometimes like I've audited a few classes just by sitting in for like the first week or two just to see what it's like. And most of the time it's been less than interesting enough to want to actually take the class or take a cost, not fueled in the future. It's just a very different level of, I would say rigor, but it's not necessarily rigor, it's more just clarity, I guess. Yeah. Okay. So when you talked about not being less concerned, is that also related to rigor for you? So what do you say that it's less rigorous than your work in computer science? I would say yes, but not for that reason. I think that computer science is more rigorous in general, just because you can actually test the things that you are trying to show. Henry:14:05 You can actually, you know, put it on a computer and then if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. Whereas in mathematics, you can kind of change the rules whenever you want and however you want to get what you want to work. But it'll just change your result. So if you're looking for something really, really specific than sure, it's just a, it's another version of, okay, rather than working with a computer, you're just working with something that's like a computer, but it's just completely abstract. But in terms of my work, I think that the, so there's a specific, there's a specific field in theoretical computer science called type theory and it's a sort of a new foundation, relatively new for thinking in theoretical terms about mathematical concepts. So it's an alternative to set theory where it's not in opposition to set theory. Henry:15:13 For example, you can write sets in terms of types, but it is just a completely different domain. That's more relevant to how computers work specifically. And I think that working in type theory, you just have a lot more constraints in how you can do things and the very small steps that you have to explicitly take rather than in mathematics. You can sorta just say, you know, well let there exists X such that, you know, whatever you want is true. Whereas you have to actually construct things in a computer science realm. So there are of course, ways you can represent this in mathematics, but it's just not at all as common or I think that the term that might be more familiar is constructive, constructive mathematics versus non Intuitionist stick. Okay. So, okay. I can't pretend to engage on the mathematical level, but where does type theory come from historically? Henry:16:22 Well, this is a great story actually. Last year of maybe I won't go off topic too much. Okay. So type theory as it sort of prototypical idea was formed by Stuart Russell in order to solve something, namely called the Russell's paradox, which was that there were certain statements that you could write in a theoretical world that weren't decidable is what it ended up being called. So you couldn't prove it to be true or false. And this was a problem because it meant that mathematics wasn't so-called complete. You couldn't decide every problem. And girdle later showed that if it tried to be complete, then it wouldn't be consistent. And consistency is more important than completeness. So they never made that trade off and type theory was introduced in order to not necessarily circumvent this problem, but to make it more foundational to the system. Henry:17:45 And the way that it worked is that rather than letting things be arbitrarily self-referential, you had to make things hierarchical. So for example, if you said that acts as a set that contains all sets, then in a set theoretical context, X contains itself because X as a set, but in a type theoretical context, you're not allowed to write that statement because you're not allowed to reference something on the same sort of level. You can only reference things that are a lower level than you are. So if acts as a set that contains all sets, well actually acts as considered to be a sort of large set, meaning that it's bigger than every small set. So there has to be this hierarchy and eventually this gets formal is more in category theory. So there isn't actually a set that contains all sets because sets don't have hierarchies like that. Henry:18:57 But in category theory, there is a category that contains all categories and it is called a categorically large category, whereas the categories that contains are small categories. And I wouldn't be able to go into the details of all of that is just an interesting field. But that's how the formulation of type theory was originally proposed. And later on it turned out that you could use type theory to represent computations from a completely different perspective. So in a computer it's just been sort of developed completely in a different context that you have memory in your computer, say a bunch of bits, but you don't want to just have bits. You want to include things like words and emails and images, but you can't, you know, put an image into your computer. It, they're just different kinds of things. So instead of what you do is you tell the computer to read some number of bits as a different type of information, namely an image type or an integer type or a Boolean type. Henry:20:20 And by designating how to interpret the raw information in your computer, you got these types that you could work with in a sort of abstract sense. But people have since developed these programming languages and type systems that go beyond anything that people even imagined being useful inside of actual computers. They were just completely systems that ended up being formally equivalent to this notion of types in the, the sense I was mentioning before Stuart Russell's type theory. Yeah. And there's been sort of a merger in the recent past of research that those have just become the same thing. So they're not really recognized as different even though they have different origins. Yuta:21:16 Okay. So stepping back with all that, that's interesting how a philosopher just came in. Yeah. Discussion. Yeah. And I mean, it's really interesting how it all came about. It just, it started from a simple sort of duct tape fix, like, Oh, we have this paradox. Okay, we'll just make it so you can't say the paradox. But it turned out to be a really interesting system. The HUD really practical consequences. Yeah. And, yeah, even though I think we started on that topic through I forget exactly through computer science, but yeah, you're asking me about how mathematics relates to my main interest. Oh, right, right. Yeah. Henry:22:15 And type theory is it's not popular within mathematical research. It's actually really just in computer science. Henry:22:28 So I guess that they just look very similar. Like you work with type theory and normal mathematics in a very similar way. That's, it's like a, it's almost as if it was just another kind of mathematics. Yuta:22:45 Okay. Yeah, that's, that's an another interesting intersection. Okay. So moving on to your philosophy class, what do you think of your modern philosophy class or our class I should say? Oh yes. What do I Henry:23:06 Well, I've heard of all the philosophers that we read, so just to be specific, the four philosophers that we read sections of, I think that the only one we read really comprehensively was Descartes. We read his entire meditations and then a few other essays by him. But so there was the cart, then there was live nuts, then spinosa and finally lock not in that order. I think it was, we did spinosa and then live bets and then lock. So yeah. Yeah. But so yeah, I'd heard all of all of them, but I definitely was not very familiar with the latter three. It was really interesting, I thought to read more of [inaudible] because I've read parts of his methodology, which is I think considered one of his sort of canonical works. But I never had gotten a full context or his ideas within, especially him writing to other philosophers at the time. Henry:24:25 So it was really interesting. We read a lot of essays that he wrote in response and in sort of back and forth with a few other philosophers that's had very different opinions than him on seemingly the most abstract issues. And while he was a Christian lameness was, he didn't really bring that a lot into, I thought his most important arguments. So I thought it was really interesting how he was able to make seemingly like on the same level of not traditional theology stuff that spinosa was a spouting. And for the unknowing listener spinosa was a atheist, or at least he claimed not to be an atheist, but really everyone thought he was. But loneliness sorta like the God of live nuts is not what you would think of as, you know, the God who is, I don't know what the theology is, but you know, Jesus's father I guess is just like nothing at all like that really. Henry:25:44 But I found, he says I didn't spit right, so I don't have to go in there and make dislocations. And he definitely was a theologian as well. He wrote a lot about religion, but somehow it just really did not seem to leak very much into his main philosophy arguments. So I'm sure there's a lot to go into there. But of the three or sorry, of the, yeah, so of spinosa live Leipnetz and Descartes. I went into it knowing a lot about Descartes and having read a lot by him in previous classes with Mark, which is a professor, but I came out of it really having a new respect for live nuts. I thought his ideas were really impressive in detail and it was tricky because a lot of his arguments were not so clear. They were less clear than spinosa and Descartes. I think the of the three spinners a and w the Kurt wrote the most explicitly, I would say, but for some reason I just really understood live ideas way more intuitively. Yuta:27:04 That's funny. And his ideas are by far like they're the most out there. They're just crazy. Yeah. Even that's funny. Spinosa Henry:27:15 Well, his ideas are very radical in a way. They're very simple to state, so it's not hard to miss. It's not hard to understand what he's saying. Whereas with Descartes or sorry, with lime nuts, it's not only really hard to understand what he's saying, but it's also really hard to really conceive of what it would mean. It's super weird. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just as a taste of an example of this, he has this idea that well there's a sort of fundamental concept it seems in modern philosophy called substance and substance is this well substrate for things that exist. So if something exists, then it is somehow either a part of or is a substance. It's kind of like this medium for existence and laminates looks into the world and sees there are different substances and thinks that in my reading at least, but they're all just different perspectives on the same world. They are like mirrors that reflect everything yet are different and they're all different perspectives of God. So God is the one who looks at the world in different ways and each way corresponding to a substance. And it would be tricky to pinpoint down a lot of examples of what counts as a substance, whereas other things are just sort of parts of substances. But maybe an example would, the most canonical example would just be that a person is a substance. So that includes their body and their soul. Yuta:29:12 Yeah. I thought you were going to go into monads but we don't need to. Yeah, I think that would just take Henry:29:21 Too long to explain. But monads are another concept that he's famous for. Yuta:29:27 Yeah. If you thought substances were out there, there's nothing like, okay. Yeah. Henry:29:34 Like just to say one thing about non ads though, it's so interesting how he's, it seems like there's not really a lot to explain there. Like it's just, okay, well there are physical substances and you can break them apart, so there must be some atomic components to physical substances, but it's just he, he just explains how, how you could have that in such a complex way that involves all of these interlocking pieces. You true Unity's and primal and keys, all these things that sort of fit together perfectly into these little round balls that he calls moons. Henry:30:20 I think the weirdest part is that they're all, they like reflect the entire universe as well, but I never got the intuition well, it kind of just, okay. I just kind of understand like the individual ideas and what he believed and then I don't, I don't see how they fit together for one person. Yeah. It's maybe for someone listening it sort of just doesn't make any sense at all. Like probably this is probably not the best conversation at this point. There is a fairly simple synopsis of it, which is just that if the substance has a nature where it's like fully specified by its nature, so everything that is true of the substance is in its nature, then every interaction that that substance has with any other substance is also in its nature. So following from that, if there's some something in another substances nature, then it also is a part of every other substances nature as a interaction with those substances. Henry:31:39 I'm probably using interaction a little bit incorrectly in how alignments would think of it, but, but that's like the most simple way I explain it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I agree. All right. So let's go on to your third class programming languages, which yes, we've already talked about computer science a lot just because of your math class. But yeah. So this is this topic are you, you're thinking of doing it in the future as well, did he say? Yeah. Yeah. So this is probably the thing that I would want to do research on as part of my PhD or some, some other research thing in the future. Yeah. Is this field, it seems less connected to math than like other ideas that you were talking Yuta:32:40 About with type theory? Is that the case? Speaker 3: 32:48 Well Henry:32:50 I would say yes, but there are some applications that are related to math. For example, there's this big effort now well I say big, but more like big relative to just any specific math thing. But of formalizing mathematical proofs inside of computers. So what does that mean? It means you have this paper, like a math paper that proves a theorem S but you want to write it in such a way that a computer could go through and check every logical step of the proof. And then when it gets to the end or to some error in the middle of the proof, then it'll tell you what went wrong or that the proof is completely verified. So that's a very math related thing. Although I think that most of the applications will not end up being used for, you know, completely random un-useful math terms. It'll bore and be used for like, you know, proving that a bank account is not gonna have negative money in it. So that's, that's something that's very sort of logic slash math related. Yuta:34:11 Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. I asked because with type theory and we were talking about before, it's hard to even tell if it's like computer science or math or logic. Yeah, yeah. Logic and logic itself. I mean that's an independent field as well. That's true. Yeah. I think it is. Speaker 3: 34:34 I'm in PR, well Henry:34:39 In the actual formulation of type theory, it's most similar to math, but they're very different communities. Yuta:34:46 Yeah. And then its origins are in like larger. Henry:34:52 Yeah. Yeah. Philosophical, logical very like non math. Yuta:35:01 Yeah. No number is there. Yeah. Okay. So the last topic is your thesis. What, what's your thesis topic? Yes. Henry:35:17 Well I can, let me just say one thing about the programming languages class though, which is that I think that it sums up a lot of why I went to Reed for computer science because I would have to have a pretty good reason because read doesn't, or at least when I first enrolled in Reed didn't even have a computer science department and wasn't really particularly strong in computer science in any visible way. But what I really wanted to go to Reed to do was to get a more sort of intellectual, mathematical perspective on computer science. I didn't want to just go to Berkeley and take like iOS development class, which I think is a popular pathway for people going into computer science, especially now that, you know, it's getting way more popular and demand is increasing really fast. So there's a lot of opportunities to do that sort of thing and not so many opportunities to do, I think what Reed offers. Henry:36:27 And I think that the programming languages classes, like a really good apitomy of that side of computer science. So there's that. And transitioning into my thesis topic, which is also related to programming languages. I think that there's a lot of, so what do I, what am I doing in my thesis, I'm mostly doing a lot of research and then I'm writing a, an exposition on a sort of survey of what has been done in a particular line of research. And then I'm going to, this semester I'm going to write a program that manifests a few things that I found in the research. The hasn't been implemented before with a few, you know, unique things that I'm developing. Obviously it's never going to be used anywhere else than just in my thesis because I'm not in a position to make good software or to make it work with anything else that people would want it to be useful for. Henry:37:43 But the main purpose is just to learn about this particular field of research and to get a little bit of experience working with experimental code. So what exactly is the topic? Well, I was talking about type theory before and what the type there is really good for his reasoning about logic that's being performed on your computer. So in other words, heating up your CPU. But it's not really useful for reasoning about, you know, sending emails or getting messages from servers or having computers communicate or do things in the real world in general because all of that has really messy interactions with, you know, like connections and things that are outside of the scope of formal specification. You wouldn't be able to write a program that like simulates the entire physical interaction of you pressing a computer key or anything like that. Henry:39:00 But that's really what program or does it really, well, a lot of modern software is useful for is automating interactions with the real world. So there needs to be this bridge between those two sides of one being completely formal and the other side being much more messy but useful. And this is commonly referred to in the computer science literature as effects or side effects. So it's things that your program does that are not fully specified in the program itself. And my research project is to look through the history of people formerly reasoning about facts and trying to introduce in some ways a ways to prove or to specify how fax should work for the most classic example is non-determinism. So if you want to have your program have like a random number generator in it, then by definition you can't formally prove, you know what it's going to do based on the number generator because it's going to be different every time you run the program. Henry:40:21 But you can in a way simulate that non-determinism by having the code branch every time it gets to a, say random number output so that you can compute what would happen on every single pathway. And then at the end you can in some way combine all the results and get some formal result that's completely deterministic, but models determinism. So that's just one example. But there are lots of other things that are examples of the facts. And the approach of this research is to take it completely abstractly. So any sort of effect and then how to reason about abstract effects in that way. Henry:41:12 So how does submitting code for thesis work? Yeah, so I actually, I don't know what the formal procedure is. I doubt there is one. I think that it's mostly just you have some code and then you, it somehow probably not typed up but you include a link to it or something like that. And it might be reviewed by a few professors, but what you're really going to be well not graded on but where you're really going to be analyzed by the professors that are going to review your thesis I think is just on what you have written in the actual thesis. So I won't have the actual program typed up in the thesis, but it'll have an explanation of what it does and what the results are. Yuta:42:08 Okay. That's cool. Henry:42:10 But I don't think there's really a precedent because this will be like the second year of there even being, Yuta:42:18 What's your programming in them? Yeah. Okay. I have, I think we can wrap this up soon. I have a final question. Overall question is about who am I voting for in holding 20. Oh yeah. Who are you voting for? I knew that was going to be the question. Yeah. okay. The question is, so looking at these classes modern philosophy program languages and topics in algebra and then your thesis research, how much of it so you were planning to go to graduate school next year. How much of it do you plan to keep doing? You know, in a continuous way and I guess fossil, it would be kind of the one that that's most uncertain, but yeah. How do you see it continuing into the future for you? Speaker 3: 43:23 Mmm, Henry:43:25 I don't have a very concrete plan, but I imagine that in the books that I read and the content that I consume online, it'll stay pretty relevant to math and philosophy alongside computer science, obviously. So in that way, I think I'll definitely still be connected in the sort of intellectual space. But in terms of maybe formal classes and things like that, I really don't know what the opportunities for that will be like in graduate school. I imagine that say.

Apostle Sharon E. Peace is a Registered Nurse and the Executive Director of the Word of Peace Ministries International. Apostle Peace with her husband, Pastor John Peace, pastored the Worship center. Compelled by the Fire of the Holy Spirit she proclaims, declares, decreed, and shares a vision to teach, train, and impart the Word of GOD, lifting spirits, impacting and changing lives, in the name of Christ JESUS. In addition to feeding the homeless and unifying ministries to do outreach ministry in their communities, Matthew 28: 19-20. Apostle Peace directs a weekly prayer conference line, where praise reports are the result, and Abba gets the Glory! She is the spiritual overseer of two local ministries: Walking by Faith Ministry with Pastor Bernard Bibbs and Victory Christian Center, Pastor Paulette Hazelwood in Victoria, Va. Her desire is to see souls saved, adding to the Kingdom. Apostle Peace has been married for 47 years to the anointed teacher of the Gospel, Pastor John W. Peace.  She has been blessed to have a business called, “Health Training @ Its Best”, because GOD our Father gave HIS Best, she gives her best, when she teaches CPR/FA, Child abuse and emergency preparedness in day care centers, preschools and churches, just to name a few of the courses she teaches. Also an Adjunct Professor at Reynolds College in their PAVE program again and impacting young adult lives. Member of NJICM under Chief Apostle O.C Brown and Pastor Bishop Joel V. Brown. There she will be kicking off the Marriage ministry along side her husband of 47 years at NJICM.

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