Greg, I believe that you, and me, and all the rest of us here on this list, and an even greater circle of people within range of our discussion are all suffering from a harmful preoccupation with the western thought.
For example, the significant and far reaching thinking of Freud is broadly and critically founded on the application of Newtonian mechanics, as he learned the subject in his college physics classes, to the problem of understanding the human 'psyche'. Fundamentally, Freud proposed that the human psyche can be viewed in the same way as a problem in ballistics. Just as the fall of a projectile fired from a naval rifle over a 25 mile range can be calculated almost exclusively based on the events within the barrel as the gun is fired, he imagined that the predominant influences in adult behavior could be understood based on the formative processes of the young child within the 'barrel' the first 4 or 5 years of life. Freud's thinking was highly "deterministic". Exceedingly so in my view. What little progress we have made since the early part of the last century in understanding human behavior is pitiful. But, at least, we have moved beyond the belief that human behavior is like firing a projectile from a barrel. (...not withstanding the amazing popularity of psychological profilers as a serious, professional activity.) In my view, we have reached the place in our evolution of information technology (...apologies to the intelligent design folks among us.) where we have created systems of such a high order of complexity that the idea of "correctness" or "decidability" is no longer useful or even appropriate. You see, even today, we are all most comfortable believing things are highly determined, like the ballistics problem. However, note that Newtonian mechanics in the vicinity of a black hole is worthless. If you don't put aside Newton mechanics in favor of relativistic thinking there, you will have some rude surprises. There is always the requirement to examine a problem to be sure that the frame of reference is proper for the analysis at hand. In this present discussion, there is a big risk of making a similar mistake. I suspect that we are entering a time in which the classical ways of understanding and managing complex systems are no longer effective, or even appropriate. Moreover, this turn of events is also a 'chaotic discontinuity'--the progress beyond this point can not be accomplished by incremental approaches based on the recent events. (...can you say "paradigm shift"? I know, the term is hackneyed, over used, and weakened. Even so, I suspect we really are confronted with just such a real instance.) It is reassuring to me to remember that the far eastern view of the world has, since the most remote past, been fully open to notion of indeterminate outcomes, events that are not tied to antecedent events. The far eastern view, even so, still holds a world that is more orderly than not. So, if you can increase your tolerance for uncertainty, if you can allow for GOD to roll the dice now and then (which Einstein never accepted, I believe) then I expect some really revolutionary and evolutionary progress can be made. Software engineering, users of IT, and managers of organizations dependent of such things need to embrace uncertainty and allow it to appear as a matter of routine. (and it certainly wouldn¹t hurt if lawmakers, judges, teachers,.... And so many others in our world could also embrace this world view as well.) ...now, I am going to get another margarita and crank up my tolerance level for uncertainty.... Regards, Richard. P. S. Note that the ZEIT GEIST (the spirit of the times) surrounding the emergence and persistence up to the present of the "relational database" model 'a la' Codd/Date is an example with the IT world that is strongly grounded in deterministic, ballistic thinking. Where I see clashes between "relational" folks and other opposing views, I see at the foundation of these disagreements a clash, not of IT thinking, but of these two world views I have crudely sketched above. I also see many similar examples in the history of information management in the DVA since I became a participant in VA affairs in 1970. This is not an isolated situation, but rather is widespread and commonplace. RGD. ....so, where IS that shaker of salt.... ...mutter... Mutter.. ..... :-) ...anybody seen XAK lately? > From: Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Reply-To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 09:32:40 -0800 > To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Goedelian malaise > > > On Nov 13, 2005, at 12:21 PM, Marianne Susaanti Follingstad wrote: > >> So what is this "underlying theory," Greg? > > The short answer is model theoretic semantics. The long answer may > have to wait a bit, but it is rather stunning to me (at least) how > broad a range of problems in program logics are decidable (with > manageable complexity). The upshot of that is that it really is > practical to describe software at a higher level of abstraction than > that to which we are accustomed and generate provably correct > solutions. That was really my point: though we cannot hope to come up > with a general purpose algorithm for program verification, we can > develop verifiable solutions for restricted classes of problems that > are still general enough to be of practical use. > > === > Gregory Woodhouse > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > "The universe is not required to be in > perfect harmony with human ambition." > --Carl Sagan > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF.Net email is sponsored by: > Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download > it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own > Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php > _______________________________________________ > Hardhats-members mailing list > Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
