A New Kind of Science

I can imagine a process where one could use a metalanguage to derive syntactic structures with certain formal properties induced by formal maps between them. This is how I imagine Grothendieck toposes are used in Lawvere's categorical semantics. The way this would work would be like the module system in a high-level functional programming language where one could instantiate syntactic structures at any level by  concrete syntactic objects, which might be derivations in some formal deduction system, or they might be programs-cum-proofs in some type theory, or a construction in some algebraic language like a diagram algebra.

However what I imagine is not a single formal system one could download and compile. Rather it would be a network of interconnected systems where syntactic structures defined in one place can be instantiated in many others. So it would not grow monolithically like a proof library, but organically like an ecosystem. 

 

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For more practical ideas, see FUTO FUBS and the Everything App. 

For more theory, see Matt Prewitt on Technology Ethics and John Baez talking to Jason Brown About Applied Category Theory. 

John Baez has a similar idea (18:36):

30:11 It's a project to manage a global catastrophe. 

36:27 That's not the actual problem though. Whatever you plan to do is likely to be swamped by the actions people are going to take when the temperature increases. 

51:42 There's no way of getting out of the economic system. How do we know that? It's much easier in principle to change the economic system than anything else because  economics is purely informational. Is it because we can't figure out how to program computers or something (Yes. 59:09 and 1:20:56)? See System Fω and Total Functional Programming. 

1:04:43 About politics being social networks, or vice versa. So if we could just explain to people how to design communications systems that could interoperate, maybe we would stand a chance of reorganising the economic system. What's the problem? It's too hard to write software? 

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Fire up those CPUs! 

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All we need is a sane economic system. As Aristotle said, five beds are worth one house. What did he mean by house? 

The reason you have to tackle this at the economic level is because people need to be able to move around and learn to live in different places in different ways and they can't do that if they have to constantly find new ways to earn money from each other. See Afshin Rattansi Interviewing Todd Miller of Tucson, AZ on The Border Business then Desert Living in Arizona and Texas and Rammed Earth Construction in Tucson, AZ. 

Part 3:

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