How philosophy created the binary code

How philosophy created the binary code, Three Wise Monkeys...

Vicky Zhao

Jun 27, 2022

Hello intersectional thinkers 👋

Greetings from Nikko where the 🙈🙊🙉 monkeys were carved into the magnificent Toshogu Shrine in 1617, more than 400 years ago.

Today’s line up:

0101010 How philosophy created the binary code
🔍 Carl Jung looking into our deepest fears
🙈🙊🙉 Very intersectional monkeys

Let’s go!

1 unexpected intersection

How philosophy created the binary code:

Claude E. Shannon, the creator of transmitting informations with 0s and 1s, took a philosophy class at the University of michigan to fulfill an arts requirement.

In that class, Shannon learned about how Logician George Boole used 0 to indicate false statements and 1 to indicate true statements (learn more about Boolean algebra here). This way, statements can be solved like math equations.

Interesting, but not wildly applicable to daily life.

Yet.

Years later, Shannon interned at Bell Labs. Thinking about optimizing telephone call routing (if you are too young to know what this means, see here), he remembered Boole's elegant 0 and 1 approach.

Shannon realized 0s and 1s can be used to encode and transfer any type of data (binary code basics here) and created the binary code that underpin modern computing.

In Shannon's own words, he achieved nothing spectacular.