Rengineering

Expressionism / Renato Guttuso/ Campieri

This is the first day feeling human post daylight savings.  I certainly hope that they deign to stop switching the clocks twice a year this time.

Just cruising along with life right now.  I need to get away from here, but haven’t quite figured out when/how.  Gonna be playing some hooky from work soon, that will have to do for a while.

Been thinking pretty hard about Michael glib little comment about reverse engineering.  Some meat there.  As I spent the bulk of my scientific/professional career doing reverse engineering, I feel that I can bring something to the plate.

Reverse engineering is a funny kind of thing.  There is a certain amount of sneering involved when one talks about the process.  I think that it is from the deep-seated self-love of folks that think that they have come up with something new.  The need for territoriality of concept is almost a sacrament in our world of patents and intellectual property.  

It kinda comes back to the idea that everything boils down to economics.  That particular cult has taken over the US to an almost alarming degree.  I think that the only way it could become worse is when the different flavors of Christers start suing each other for damages when they poach parishioners from each other.

But in a sense, with some very rare exceptions, most everything that is done is reverse engineering.  Because reverse engineering enshrines something as an ideal and tries to imitate the process by thinking it through.  You break the ideal down into component pieces and work out the process of putting it together again.  Most of the time you get it right.  A lot of the time what you get goes under the category “good enough” and on a rare occasion you manage to improve the overall process.

But with conceptual “truths” such as natural selection, you don’t even have the luxury of having something to compare the process product.  Natural selection is unprovable and will always just be a theory.  There simply is no way that you can set up a controlled experiment to test the belief.

Now, this is not to say that it is untrue or not useful.  It is a reasonable mental picture of the most likely path taken to get here from Ubbo-Sathla (a bone for you Lovecraft/Smith fiction fans) to our present weirdness.  But it isn’t and will never be proven per the requirements of the scientific method.

Korzybski said it all.  The map is not the territory.