Rethinking the notion of oracle: A prequel to Lawvere-Tierney topologies for computability theorists

Abstract

We present three different perspectives of oracle. First, an oracle is a blackbox; second, an oracle is a tool to change the way we access mathematical objects; and third, an oracle is a factor that causes a change in truth values. Formally, the second perspective advocates that an oracle is an endofunctor on the category of coded sets (preserving underlying sets) -- we associate it with a universal closure operator. The third perspective advocates that an oracle is an operation on the object of truth values -- we associate it with a Lawvere-Tierney topology. These three perspectives create a link between the three fields, computability theory, synthetic descriptive set theory, and effective topos theory.