Classification

So much of object oriented programming revolves around classification.  And yet classification is subjective.  Classification is simply an artifice that helps us to organize a dis-organized world.  If gives us a way to think about things in a general way.
There are many properties that we can infer from an item in a classification hierarchy.  But such inference can also get in the way of understanding an item.  It is just another form of generalization. Anyone that has had injury done to them because they were miss-classified, understands the problems with generalization.
But it is an expedient without which the world is a chaotic mess.
Part of what we consider 'reason' is our innate ability to classify, to generalize a set of classes, and then to be able to make predictions about new classes that appear to belong to a set.  We don't see the particulars of this process, we just accept it as part of our thinking ability.
But this expedient that gives us thought fails when we try to apply it in any sort of absolute sense, especially when modeling reality.  It works well, however when we apply it to artifices that we've built ourselves.  So we can build a system that fits into a classification scheme, but that system is artificial.  Reality resists classification.
Another problem with classification is that we tend to classify based on properties, especially static properties.  So we classify animals based on whether they have feathers or fur.  We might be better served by classification based on behavior, but anything that is worth understanding has complex behavior.  Behavior is based on state, which is an expression of properties.  So classification falls back to distinguishing properties, and inferring behavior from that.  We may wish to skip the observation of properties, and simply consider behavior instead, since behavior the the expression of change that we wish to predict in the first place.
In the Java programming world, we classify behavior with interfaces, which ignore properties and state, in favor of defining the verbs that an object is capable of.  I see a slow transition in the object-oriented programming world away from classification based on properties, to classification based on behaviors.  This allows us to define a behavior without being specific about the properties and state that manifest it.  It sometimes means that we have to define the specifics of a behavior more than once, but that can be mitigated by creating a new artifice that defines these specifics for the majority cases, without imposing them on the exceptional cases.
What a mess, there must be a better way of dealing with these computing/communication devices, but I fear that our own thinking processes are getting in the way.  We force our computers to see the world in this way because we see the world in this way.  Philosophy has taken over thinking about computers, but maybe we should get back to looking simply at mechanics without using the terms that we have come up with to define our own imperfect thinking.

Believing in belief

Belief is a funny thing.  We need to believe in something, it is built into our nature.  Religious people formalize their beliefs with written histories that revolve around God, and ritualistic behaviors meant to appease him/her. Scientific people believe in un-provable theories that conform to observation.  Rational people believe in their observations, which is a leap of faith in-an-of itself.  Mathematicians believe in their abstract constructions that occasionally have a correlation to reality.

We are trapped in this reality of ours, and belief gives us something to think about beyond what we can sense.   I will refer to that as a 'meta-reality' without making any claim about it's existence, but as a concept that fits into our fundamental belief that something exists beyond our own reality. But a belief is simply that: 'a belief'.  There is nothing to prove it, nothing to give us any assumption that it is true.  So how do we consider ourselves rational creatures, when so much of our view of the world is a belief.  What makes a belief good?  For me, a belief is good if it fulfills a need and it doesn't cause harm.

I equate belief to food.  Sort of nourishment for the soul if my reader might forgive me a bit if poetic frivolity.  True you wont die in a few weeks if you don't have any beliefs, but you will probably not thrive and you will be plagued with a vague hunger that will probably manifest itself as an unease that is hard to define.  Marx is paraphrased as saying 'Religion is the opium of the masses'.  Perhaps he was being a little hard on people who hunger to believe in something.  Perhaps the quote was aimed more at the established religions, and I will agree with him there.  Many organized religions peddle their specific beliefs like drug dealers, as a way to obtain power without earning it.

Even atheists who are often considered the ultimate non-believers, believe that God does not exist, which is a statement about meta-reality, or even a denial of any sort of meta-reality.  Either way it is a belief about the nature of the un-observable.  I suspect that many atheists are in fact deists, but simply despise established religions as a con-game where we sell snake-oil that feeds our hunger for a belief in something.  For me personally, the idea that this is no meta-reality is akin to the idea that the sun revolves around us, and we are the center of the universe.  So I must argue for a meta-reality without any proof or observable phenomenon, simply based on an extrapolation of the past mistakes of our vanity.  I should, at this point define reality as that which is observable, and meta-reality as an extension of that which is not observable.  We might even define a new term which I will lightheartedly call the googlety which is the combination of reality, the hypothetical meta-reality, and meta-realities of meta-reality.  This does sort of smack of the 'Turtles all the way down' expression, but an infinite expansion of meta-realities has a bit more of an air of seriousness about it.

So what makes a belief good?  I'm going to stretch my food analogy a bit more, and say a belief is good if it satisfies a need, and it does no harm.  So if your belief is all dessert, it may make you feel better in the moment, but could cause problems that build up over time.  If your belief is poisonous, it may even hasten your demise. I like to believe in an afterlife simply because it fills a need, and does me no harm.  I like to believe in a judgement by a higher power, simply because it allows me to tolerate my helplessness to resolve many injustices, and it allows me to add extra motivation to ethical behavior.  I like to believe that my body is a shell for my spirit as a hermit crab moves into a shell, and perhaps moves from shell to shell as it grows.  Again, my rational for these beliefs is 'why not?'.  I don't worry excessively about being wrong about these things, as I fully admit that I may well be and don't care.

It's the people that have trouble admitting that they may be wrong that I have to watch out for.  Not only will they judge me as absolutely wrong, they will condemn me to some terrible after-life that is segregated by our ability to guess what is unobservable. Like a cosmic game of Let's make a deal, we have to decide between curtain number one, curtain number two, or curtain number three. The worst of these people that are tolerance-impaired may dehumanize me and wish to hurry my deliverance to the after-life. At the very least they may knock on my door while I'm busy blogging in a futile attempt to save me, but instead simply waste my time and break my train of thought.

There still is one problem: believing in belief.  While beliefs are a natural aspect of our psyche, when you've pondered the world as much as I have, it's hard not to belittle your beliefs as simply whistling in the graveyard.  Perhaps as I grow older, and face my meta-reality, I will learn better to suspend my dis-belief.

Life in balance

So many of my past posts have talked about balance.  That reflects the apparent fact that there are no absolute answers.  If we want to live an ethical life, any decisions we make must balance our own needs with the needs of the group.  If we want a good government, we must balance societal influence with societal interference.  Even here on the internet we must balance keeping our lives private, and the desire to share who we are.

As a parent of adult children who still consider me a source of occasional advice, the most difficult questions I get are 'what should I do?'  I can go over pros and cons, I can try to put things in perspective, I might even admit to what I might do if I were in a similar situation, and why.  But life is a tightrope that we all must learn to walk.  In the end, the decisions we make are our own, and we are the one's that must live with the consequences, be they good or bad.

The good news is most of the decisions we make have little lasting impact on ourselves or others.  Even decisions that seem important when faced with them, can be seen through the lens of time as actually quite trivial.  The decisions that have a lasting impact are occasionally unforeseen and seem trivial when initially faced. So there is a certain amount of futility to worrying endlessly about most decisions, and when we make our list of pros and cons, we should add in a spoonful of whimsy.  Life is like swimming in a stream, we may swim one way or another, but the stream still carries us where ever it's going.

The concept of balance seems more important in eastern thought then western thought.  Western philosophies seem to want to provide absolute answers, and dictate behaviors.  Concepts such as good and evil are seen as black and white, and not a continuum.  Eastern philosophies see balance as key, with such concepts as yin and yang.  And perhaps this lack of absolute answers leads to a sense of fatalism.  In the west we look to our philosophies for answers rather than guidance. 

To lead a consistent life, and a purposeful life, each of us must come up with a personal philosophy. We can be guided by the great thinkers of our time or of the past, but ultimately we must synthesis the best of these thoughts into our personal guiding light.  We need to see the correctness in the thoughts of our gurus, but we must also be able to see when they over-reach their authority and ability to provide absolute answers.

The problem most people seem to have with this synthesis, is that there is a natural desire to be seen as correct.  So we pick our heroes, deify them, and then defend them to the death.  This is part of how we define us, how we belong to a group.  We see our way as the way, and deny others the opportunity to be even partially correct.  We choose sides and vilify the other side.

We define ourselves not just in the thinkers that we follow for guidance, but various role-models that we choose, be they athletes, musicians, or leaders.  We are all, at our core, fanatics and must resist the urge to be influenced too much by a single person, or a single group.  We need to recognize that other people and groups may be right on occasion.  In this way we can include many different view points when making a decision or judgement.

Having a personal philosophy, one that is well thought out, and not just a blind allegiance to some existing philosophy, is the best way to avoid the fallacies of fanaticism.  Give passing acknowledgement to those that agree with you, but listen closely to those with whom you disagree.  Thinking carefully about the arguments of those you disagree with will help you either hone your rational for why you are right, or see where perhaps you are wrong.

Unfortunately, that sort of critical thinking is like exercise, it is not something we are naturally inclined to do.  But just as exercise is important for a healthy body, critical thinking is important for a healthy mind.  So just as we must carve out an hour of our day for exercise, so too we should carve out an hour of introspection and meditation on who we are and how we live our lives.  That will help us to keep our lives in balance.

Thoughts on thinking

The minute we name something we begin to misunderstand it.  Reality is a continuum of things and motions that is infinite in size, precision, and interconnection.  In order to comprehend reality we need to tear it apart into discreet things and events.  We divide things up into containment units and give them names.  This helps us make sense of reality, while at the same time brings us further away from its true form.

This symbolic expedient can be seen when we are asked to draw something.  An untrained person, if asked to draw a face will draw an oval for a head, a couple ovals for eyes, a line for a mouth, etc.  An artist that is trained in depiction learns first how not to draw a face, but sees past the iconic features of the face they are depicting.  That is a difficult thing to do, as our thinking demands organizing reality into a hierarchy of discreet things.

Time too is a continuum that we must divide up into discreet units.  Time is the medium of change, and we measure one change by comparing it with other changes, usually ones that are cyclic events in nature.  So a day is the amount of change from one sunrise to the next.  If we are thinking machines, that is our thoughts are manifestations of changes in our brains, thoughts, too, are subject to time.  So we often thing of time as flowing, and yet in reality it is our thoughts that are flowing as the changes that bring about our thought are measured in comparison with other cyclic events.  We often speak in terms of the future and the past, and yet these are simply artifices that we use to describe change relative to our thoughts 'at the moment'.

Reality is essentially chaotic in nature, and yet we find pockets of organizations within this chaos.  The chaotic nature of reality means that it can never be comprehended in it's entirety. It is the pockets of organization that we can use to make predictions about change.  This chaos of reality is a measurement of the infinite inter-connected-ness of reality, the lack of boundaries of cause and effect.  We find places where the interconnected-ness becomes so sparse as to be negligible.  A discreet change and it's effects can be seen as a ripple in water, caused by a pebble being tossed into it, the change emanates out in all direction becoming smaller as it's circle of influence becomes wider, until the size of the ripple becomes smaller than the other influences that alter the surface of the water, and we consider them to 'disappear'.

So we understand things by misunderstanding them.  We build up ideal models of things and events that reflect reality to a certain degree of precision.  We tear up reality into chunks that are comprehend-able and assign them names.  But just like the artist that sees past the features of a face they are trying to depict, we can understand reality better by seeing past the names that we give things, and see how all things are one. We can see that events are simplifications of the interconnected-ness of reality, and time is an abstraction that we use to compare one event to another.  These names that we use, person, planet, minute, day; and the verbs that we use, to move, to strike, and even to think are artifices that we used to describe elements of a single indescribable thing: reality.  We can circumvent the problem of defining reality by being all-inclusive: all that ever was, is, and will be.  But that is it's definition, not it's description.  It is the 'granddaddy of all abstractions'.

Our ability to think serves one purpose:  to predict the future.  To understand change, and how it might affect us.  We have a built in desire to understand change in general, as the more we understand about change, the more we may be able to protect ourselves from it, or use it in our favor.  But because it is a general desire, and not necessarily one aimed at understanding of any set of events, we think about many abstract things that may or may not have an impact on our future.  This has give rise to thinking from a purely utilitarian process that evolution has given us to this grand ability that us humans distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.  Right now I am thinking about the nature of reality, not because it may help me to survive, but because I cannot help but think about something.  The only time I am not thinking is when I am in an altered state of consciousnesses, such as deep meditation or deep sleep.  Even while I am in light sleep, I think about things in the form of dreams. When Rene Descartes uttered his famous phrase 'cogito ergo sum' it was not to indicate that thinking somehow brings us into existence, but that this continuous stream of thoughts is inextricably linked to what we call consciousness.

But again, we give something a name: 'consciousness', and then precede to stop thinking about it.  It simply becomes a word we use (or misuse) to communicate some partition of reality to others that may be commonly understood or mis-understood.  It is this set of nouns and verbs that allow us to think, and to communicate our thoughts.  Language and thinking leap-frog each other in an upward spiral of knowledge and the precision in which we understand reality.  But the more common a noun or verb is used, the less inclined we are to think about it's precise meaning.  Again, Rene Descartes describes throwing away all pre-conceived ideas and starting from scratch to build up a more perfect model of reality.  Unfortunately, he then uses this method to simply re-enforce his own pre-conceived ideas, so he had the process right, but was simply unable to execute it.  It is the nouns and verbs of language that allow us to build up a model of reality, but then interfere with our ability to refine it.

As a software engineer, I face this problem very often.  All useful software models something, be it a business process used by businesses, some alternate universe of a game, or a book or library with it's store of knowledge.  If I can identify some ill-conceived model or concept commonly used in a business application, it is an uphill struggle to re-define it, because there are so many people that need to be convinced that there is a better way.  Typically the only way to push forward a new concept it to demonstrate it, which could be so difficult to implement, or so subject to rhetorical argument, that it sits unused.

Expanding our knowledge I consider akin to molting.  We must throw away the things that restrict us before we can grow.  On a personal level, this is difficult for some people because it would imply that they are wrong about something.  For me, it is not as much of a problem, as I believe that all of our knowledge is an imperfect reflection of reality, so therefore I am always wrong to a certain extent, and can always refine what I know.  I often say that if I can't look back ten years ago and say to myself 'how stupid I was', then by definition, I have not grown.  On a societal level, I once read, but cannot attribute the source: 'Science progresses with every funeral'.  Even one of my greatest heroes of thought, Albert Einstien spent the last years of his life trying to refute quantum physics, unable to reconcile the injury it had done to his theory of relativity.  One can only imagine the malice that Issac Newton might have felt towards Einstien had they been contemporaries when Einstien spliced in his own bit of knowledge into Newton's 'laws'.  However, the work that Einstien did in trying to refute quantum mechanics, and coming up empty, makes for a good argument that there is some truth in quantum physics.

So at once we are lifted by our language and abstract ideas, and hindered by it's imprecision and our own stubborness.  Even if we try to use precise language such as first order logic, we can only prove abstractions, and fail to achieve perfection once we apply concrete nouns and verbs which themselves are by definition imprecise (since the things they attempt to describe are infinite in precision and interconnected-ness). Of course, most people don't resort to first order logic, and are plagued by the multitude of cognitive biases evolution (or a capricious God) has saddled our untrained thinking with.  We find that while we are the most complex creatures in terms of our behaviors, we are hopelessly ignorant when our ideas are juxtaposed with reality (hence the old cliche 'the more we know, the more we don't know').

Our understanding of reality will never be finalized, unless we delve into the realm of meta-physics and believe our awareness, consciousness, spirit, or whatever are somehow facets that transcend reality, and that given the right circumstances (perhaps through meditation, or perhaps in an after-life) we can see everything about our reality in all it's precision.  However this begs the child's question when told that God created everything: but what created God?  If our 'spirits' transcend reality, that implies some other reality that we must transcend to.  And then if you define reality as 'all that was, is, and will ever be', this higher level reality simply folds into the original definition.

Is it futile to think about reality?  Perhaps.  But I can't help it, it's ingrained in who I am, it's a biological process like the beating of my heart. I see the world around me and I want to know it's secrets.  This nagging voice within that tells me: 'perhaps with a little more thought it will all come to you' keeps me alive, and looking forward to each day to learn a little more, or unlearn some false concept.  Thinking isn't my purpose in life, making the world a better place is.  But perhaps I can think up of something that will make the world a better place, and I will have fulfilled my goal.