
Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences - thsealienbstrds
http://softwareandmind.com/
======
Strilanc
Based on what I've skimmed, which is admittedly not that much, I'd bet the
author spends most of the book making mind projection fallacies like this one:

> _while we can easily recognize a familiar face, we cannot describe that face
> precisely enough to enable someone unfamiliar with it to recognize it as
> easily as we do (see pp. 110–111). Thus, when we know a face, we possess a
> type of knowledge that cannot be expressed as methods or rules. We can
> readily use this knowledge, but we cannot explain how we do it. What this
> means is that the only way to acquire this knowledge is by allowing it to
> develop in our mind; we cannot acquire it by learning some facts. [...]_

> _[...]_

> _For a phenomenon that is a complex structure, the only exact representation
> is the phenomenon itself._

Here the human inability to directly introspect on how we recognize faces is
explained as an underlying facet of reality. A fact about faces, instead of a
fact about the limitations of our mental architecture. That's why no one has
ever been able to write facial recognition software that works even a little
bit /s.

It would be wrong for me to say the book is not worth your time, because I
haven't read enough of it to make that judgement, but I can honestly say I
_expect_ it to not be worth my time.

(Also I want to complain about a minor error the author keeps making again and
again: stating that scientific explanations form hierarchies. This is simply
wrong. The graph of we-use-X-to-explain-Y isn't a tree, it's a directed
acyclic graph. For example, consider jet airplanes, chemistry, aerodynamics,
and physics.)

~~~
fennecfoxen
I got as far as 36ish where he decided that all extant academic study of the
mind is an exercise in futility and that mathematics is incapable of
representing nondeterministic phenomena. (Gee. Warn the psychologists, warn
the statisticians, tell them all to stop wasting their time.)

It seems like the author realizes that behavior of complex and chaotic systems
is really hard to reason about and model accurately (he calls out sociological
systems, which also are lovely and heterogenous), and I guess reasoning about
complex software is similar. Sure. But he tries to parlay that into a quasi-
spiritual characteristic of the systems rendering them immune to simulation,
instead of a limitation of our current capacity to efficiently construct
models.

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quonn
This is the first time I have heard of this. For that reason, I appreciate
that it was posted. Nevertheless, the author is greatly mistaken. I think we
can reject most of what he says, without making too much effort, similar to
how we would reject a conspiracy theory.

To pick out three things:

> Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a
> simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like
> mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because
> most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple
> structures.

Without trying to manage complexity, it becomes impossible to build real
systems.

> Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to
> language, not to manufactured objects.

Well, yes, to a degree. But if you arbitrarily change a word in a 1000 page
book, the book will not fall apart. If you do the same in software, most
likely it will stop working. This is because there is much less dependence
between sentences in natural language and the dependence is redundantly spread
over many pages.

> The software elites have turned software into a weapon, a means to dominate
> and control society.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory too me.

Judging from the description, I also think the book lacks perspective. It's
what a software engineer might expect the world to be, if he lives under a
rock. Most of the world is doing just fine, and is just somewhat affected by
software here and there.

~~~
vinceguidry
>> Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a
simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like
mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most
aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple structures.

>Without trying to manage complexity, it becomes impossible to build real
systems.

Both of you are correct. The real world is too complex to be modeled, and
without trying, you can't build a real system. The answer to the conundrum
that real systems include humans, which can handle the hard-to-model parts.

The author appears to be using bombastic language to communicate what is
actually a simple point. I see the technique used often. There's a method to
the madness. It's the long-form version of "to get someone to give you a
correct answer on the Internet, post a wrong answer rather than just ask."
Spiritual books are often written like this. Without a blend of the overly
pedantic and the utterly simple, the reader won't be compelled to dissect what
the author has written and won't have the intended epiphany where the reader
discovers it wasn't as simple as he thought.

~~~
thsealienbstrds
This is also the impression i get from the first chapter where his point seems
to be that no amount of hip software methodologies can replace an intelligent,
experienced software engineer.

------
Animats
Written by Andrei Sorin. Published by "Andsor Books". Uh oh.

This guy is obsessed with hierarchies and taxonomies.

His rant on Software Irresponsibility, starting at page 828, has some good
points. He starts out with "Partial or total software failures are such a
common spectacle that they are now taken for granted. ... In most cases we
know the actual individuals involved in its development, purchase, or
installation; but we don’t feel that these individuals must be reprimanded,
that they are accountable for their work in the same way that physicians,
pilots, or engineers are for theirs. In other professions we have the notions
of incompetence, negligence, and malpractice to describe performance levels
that fall below expectations. In software-related matters, and particularly in
programming activities, these notions do not exist."[1]

He has a point. Compare, say, the NTSB report on an aircraft accident with a
DHS US-CERT report on a blatant software security hole. The NTSB will name
names and assign blame. Careers can be ended and licenses pulled by those
reports, even though the NTSB has no law enforcement power. Now look at a US-
CERT report for a company which knowingly and willfully put a default password
into millions of products. Was the responsible manager located and identified?
Were there sanctions against the company?

A point I've made about security bugs in open source - who put them there?
That should be made known, and it should be a significant career setback. Yet
the identities of those at fault are seldom mentioned.

[1]
[http://softwareandmind.com/extracts/Software_and_Mind.pdf](http://softwareandmind.com/extracts/Software_and_Mind.pdf)

~~~
sukilot
Amusingly, the NTSB's _software_ fails completely, at step 1:

[http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/_layouts/...](http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/_layouts/mobile/mbllists.aspx)

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themgt
After a quick skim, I would recommend _Master and his Emissary_ as a book with
similar themes about the limits, dangers and over-dominance of reductionism
and mechanistic views of reality, but significantly better written and argued
and ultimately much broader (although not focused specifically on software).
An introduction can be found here:

[http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_b...](http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf)

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platz
Seems to rebrand these two existing concepts:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism)
and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism)
(philosophers generally reject the latter, not sure about scientists regarding
the former, but these are old ideas that are probably out-of-vogue)

~~~
jmcmichael
I would call reductionism and logical positivism the baseline assumed
perspective in much of science - definitely in biology, the field with which I
am most familiar. So they're very much alive and well in science.

As far as philosophy, the philosophers most closely associated with science
and the 'New Atheists', e.g. philosophers Dennett, Churchlands, adopt more
sophisticated versions of these philosophies but I'd still call them a variety
of reductionist/logical positivist.

~~~
platz
Interesting. I thought at least physicists only viewed their models constructs
that have predictive capabilities, but aren't concerned whether their models
actually represent reality in an objective/ontological sense (to say nothing
'meaning' in the LP sense). I'm sure there are different camps of folks out
there especially in the different branches

~~~
jmcmichael
Yeah, I think researchers in physics are more open to non-reductionistic
theories. For example check out constructor theory:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-meta-law-to-
rule...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-meta-law-to-rule-them-
all-physicists-devise-a-theory-of-everything/)

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jamespitts
Reading parts of this may cause a knee-jerk reaction, because mechanistic
thinking is so useful to us in engineering!

What I essentially see in this is a reminder -- that it is easy to conflate
how we look at something with what something actually is.

This is why it is important to be able to step back and understand how you are
thinking about a phenomenon, and to generally cultivate an internal library of
different methods of thinking.

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jmcmichael
Here is a short review of the book:

[https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrei-
sorin/soft...](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrei-
sorin/software-and-mind/)

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PaulHoule
Is this guy a Scientologist or something?

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nickbauman
After programming for a long time everything starts to look like a computer
but everything is not a computer.

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bitwize
Obviously what we need to do is abandon the algorithmic model of software and
switch to a synchronous, signal-based model, as used in electronics and
described in the Biblical account of how the human brain works. Then all
software complexity problems will magically disappear, just like that.

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lectrick
I think that the mechanistic worldview may be flawed, but that this attack on
it is fairly impotent.

