People also did this historically because some categories intuitively seemed more concrete than others. We’re moving away from that because those categories have been explored thoroughly enough that we can see the links between them, and which new hybrid categories this points to.
But, yes, you’re right, the frontier is moving, and cool stuff awaits beyond.
Again, I’m not saying that conceptually we’ll succeed in having no boundaries. I think if I had rephrased it as zooming in on boundaries, it would’ve been clearer.
The examples that I gave have the property that people didn’t even know that these boundaries existed earlier, but in retrospect the collision seems obvious. So that’s the kind of examples I’d be more interested in learning. I think the great limitation of not having the language to meaningfully talk about it is the biggest problem in recognizing these implicit assumptions. For quantum computation to develop, you needed (a) Quantum mechanics (1920s) (b) Computability theory (1930s) (c) Information theory (1940s) and (d) Computational complexity theory (1960s). This lead to people thinking about quantum computing the 1980s. So, if the two fields aren’t expanding to collide, it’s hard to notice.
While they aren’t separated, sometimes you have to make a choice of simplified models with certain boundaries because of limited computational power. See also the sequence about reductionism for more on that.
People also did this historically because some categories intuitively seemed more concrete than others. We’re moving away from that because those categories have been explored thoroughly enough that we can see the links between them, and which new hybrid categories this points to.
But, yes, you’re right, the frontier is moving, and cool stuff awaits beyond.
Again, I’m not saying that conceptually we’ll succeed in having no boundaries. I think if I had rephrased it as zooming in on boundaries, it would’ve been clearer.
The examples that I gave have the property that people didn’t even know that these boundaries existed earlier, but in retrospect the collision seems obvious. So that’s the kind of examples I’d be more interested in learning. I think the great limitation of not having the language to meaningfully talk about it is the biggest problem in recognizing these implicit assumptions. For quantum computation to develop, you needed (a) Quantum mechanics (1920s) (b) Computability theory (1930s) (c) Information theory (1940s) and (d) Computational complexity theory (1960s). This lead to people thinking about quantum computing the 1980s. So, if the two fields aren’t expanding to collide, it’s hard to notice.