Rengineering

[degringolade]

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.

Comments

REVERSE ENGINEERING ANTHROPOMORPHISM

[mschmidt]

HUMANS CANNOT HEAR

Natural science is anthropomorphic in the sense that it seeks out the wrong answer that seems the most correct to a human. A while back a science writer got famous for saying, “only a bat can know what it means for a bat to be a bat”. If nobody wants to argue, then this fact applied generally explains why natural science is always looking for a wrong answer.

Note: the following paragraph involves complex reverse engineering with regard to thought process.

Incidentally, vice versa applies - a bat cannot know what it means for a human to be a human either, but they might notice that humans cannot hear worth shit. If a human imagines the bat thinking this, then the human can maybe have a better idea of their own capabilities when observing Nature.

When science defines “fitness”, science is so inappropriately anthropomorphic, that it regards Nature as an unregulated capitalist enterprise, wherein the “fittest” individuals are the type that will drive their species to extract continuously increasing resources from Nature.

In a world with limited resources, the “fittest” as defined by science must therefore identify something that Nature will change. This is not how people tend to think about the fittest, because people do not want to think about the workings of Nature, if doing so means they cannot go to the amusement park.

In reality, the fittest is that which Nature attacks, not rewards. The job of Nature is to erase advantages. Everybody knows that being out of balance means trouble with Nature.

The idea that the fittest individual is a benefit to its species is misguided by anthropomorphism and it must be wrong - if benefit means that the species would not do better without them.

When natural science borrows a flawed theory from economics, and applies it to Nature, an irrational concept of fitness is one result. Ironically, the economic theory is flawed, because it does not consider the workings and limits of Nature – so everything fits together nicely in human imagination.

Using the scientific definition of fitness, one way for a male to become the fittest, is to kill all the other males. This possibility is a sure sign that a human came up with the definition of fitness. Such a violent task seems impossible until guns are considered, and not impossible when nuclear bombs are considered. The proposition that the human race would remain in existence longer if the smartest 50% were culled at birth, would seem to be correct, and there is probably no economic theory that would jive with this prediction.