The Siren's call is LOUD!
PostModernism(tm) always struck me as a cheap trick... it is pretty
easy to replace "trying to understand everything" (Modernism/Rational
Pragmatism?) with "you only have to understand one thing: nothing is
understandable". Kurt Godel would bitch slap me with my own hanky for
saying that in public.
That said, I prefer to riff on the concept of "the best way to predict
the future is to create it" (Alan Kay) with the idea that my immediate
(usually geographic and almost always topological) neighborhood is at
least vaguely predictable (referring back to the broken tool) *because*
I not only percieve it, but effect it in a feedback control-loop. And
not unlike a supercavitating torpedo, in my younger years I felt I could
(though I didn't apprehend it this way exactly) move forward fast enough
with enough projected intellectual/emotional energy that the path in
front of me made sense as I clove it open with the shockwave of my
impending passage.
Now, as that innocent bravado slumps into a more morose introspective
cynicism (with a pinch of pollyanna), I wonder that I ever thought I
knew anything well or for sure. I once actually thought I understood
computing from subatomic physics, nucleonics, molecular dynamics,
chemistry, on up through material properties of semiconductors, LSI
design, Boolean Logic, fundamentals of OS/FileSystem/Network design,
parallel and dsitributed computing paradigms, OO and Pattern Design,
etc. ad nauseum. I can probably still tear down and rebuild the engine
(and hydraulic subsystems) on my 49 ford dump truck or my Kubota Tractor
more effectively than ever before in my life, but somehow that just
doesn't satisfy the way it did the first time I pulled off such a
trick. It just reminds me that I can't do the same nearly so easily on
the gen1 Honda Insight Hybrid my wife drives... and if even that, what
got hard with fuel injection and electronic ignition got crazy hard with
embedded computer controls of the same and loads of undocumented details
(or at least obscured to me). Referring to your distrust of a GMail
server you can't field strip in the rain and the dark.
What is this egomaniacal self-serving riff about? As a
neo-postmodernist, I can only say... I don't know and I can't know...
why try? Is there a something in the adjacent possible to PostModernism
more like PeriModernism? Isn't it enough to understand enough to
function within a limited context for a limited time? Isn't that what
all life (referencing C. Elegans and Arthrotardigrada Marcus for
example) are about... apprehending and effecting (and maybe
predicting?) a tiny (both in extent and dimensionality) subset of the
universe in their immediate (physical and logical) environment? To us,
C Elegans and the Tardigrades look almost like Flatlanders (Edwin Abbott
Abbott) to us in their limited ability (and apparent need?) to apprehend
anything outside of their tiny universe.... so why wouldn't some rule of
self-similarity suggest we are just as limited in our own incredibly
expansive way?
That is just my opinion (of the moment), I could be wrong. (WHY did I
let Dennis Miller back in my head?)
- Steve
Slam Dunk!
Maybe dementia is just part of the annealing schedule? Assuming of
course there were actually a Plan(tm).
What blows my mind is the apparent lack of movement in the # of people
who _think_ they understand what's going on around them. I had that
conversation with Nick awhile back. He keeps asking about postmodernism
and my answer to him was that postmodernists are simply people who admit
they have no idea what's going on ... well, authentic postmodernists,
anyway. You always get posers in any domain. Modernists are people who
think there is, should be, or have a plan.
I look around me every day and see all these people who think there's a
plan ... some rock solid ... True(tm) ... perspective from which you can
grok the world.
If I've learned anything over the past decades, it's that a) there is no
plan or b) if there is a plan, I'm too dense to understand it. And the
more my tools ecology grows, the denser I feel. I'll never be liquid or
gaseous again like I was in my youth ... unless maybe dementia sets upon
me like a heat bath.
Roger Critchlow wrote at 03/14/2013 09:57 PM:
Funny.
Going back to Hamming's lectures, again, in one of the early ones he
lays out the case that scientific knowledge is growing exponentially,
that most scientific researchers who ever lived are alive now, and that
keeping current is "a very awkward problem" both personally and
institutionally. It was true in the 50's when they made up the
argument
at Bell Labs, it was truer in the 90's when Hamming was giving the
lectures, and it's still truer now.
I started ignorant, I'm getting exponentially more ignorant all the
time, and I'm never going to the reverse the trend -- now, go back to
work and do something really smart.
So, Google the search is an attempt to ameliorate this problem: if you
can guess what the answer is called, then maybe Google can find it for
you, and maybe you can figure out if it's really what you wanted.
And Google the company is a place founded on the same principle: its
projects and knowledge grow exponentially, no one person can ever know
what it's doing, all they can do is occasionally kill some of it off to
make some empty space for the rest of it to grow into.
So, why is progress supposed to make sense?
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