The Philosophy of Engineering

All designs from drawing board to working prototype require three experiments before delivery
1. Where the fuck is daylight, we tried to follow the specs
2. Triage, escape with only critical bugs fixed
3. Overreach - we could make this work like the spec and close those last few bugs.

Then, as experiment #3 rolls off the line we become unusually fond of our one night stand in triage. Proper use of the 80/20 rule emerges from panic and anguish. Just get us hardware boot and get rid of the hot spots across the surface. And for god sake make some improvements on ESD protection.

The last thing we fix are continuously available resources or 'logical' hotspots. It's always hotspots. The reason it is always hot spots that must not intrude is that the die is designed to utmost precision to evenly diffuse current flow and hence.

Every problem in geometry and engineering can be solved with three data points. Bet on the solution from the second data point.

A Hammer's Purpose

I have a purpose for designing a tool; the tool has no intrinsic purpose. A chairs purpose, for example, depends on the intention of the person in the presence of a chair. Chairs in a museum lobby probably exist for people to sit in but the chairs on display in the museum restrict the purposes of the museum visitors who want to exploit a chairs purpose.

The purpose of marriage is procreation. No. Each married pair have purposes and the institution of marriage promotes or restricts those purposes. Marriages, like hammers and chairs promote a vast number of useful and interesting behaviors in humans and their pets.

Well, that is only for pagans who ignore the creator's purpose and sit on a hammer or drive a nail with a chair. But even with an artifact like the Antikythera Mechanism which took archeologists decades to reverse engineer, the multiple purposes of multiple users vary. For a merchant selling the device to navigators or other merchants, the mechanism is an item of commerce. To the craftsman making the mechanism, the purpose of the mechanism is wages. Although I am interested in the purpose of the artificer; the mechanism loose in the world attaches to many, many human purposes.

But you were put on earth for a reason. God wanted your parents to have higher grocery bills.

"How will I pay for all this damn Captain Crunch?"

Reality is Overated

Sensorium

 

"Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time" Smithsonian

 The rich tapestry of perception is woven and unwoven every 100 milliseconds (0.001 seconds) by the ensemble of sensations I swim in. Inclinations from previous perceptions become null behaviors in light of updated evaluations of the cosmic environment of the now - the specious moment. This interval of times is book ended by what just happened and what happens next. The sensorium travels 'out in front' of each interval's ensemble of perceptions that form the life of the mind.

Znatural

Mr. Natural is natural

A Brief Time of Histories

An Argument from Dissapative Structures
Dissipative structures need to replicate exacting duplicates of themselves to further any other aims each organism obtains. The selfish dissipative structure fills all available space in three dimensions and in self-like fashion at another level of complexity, spacetime. And in some cases, and without loss of generality,at some level of complexity and at some generally applicable accuracy and precision be measure, and in some specific case this measurable event erupts in an emergent dissapative structure, creating its own place in the cosmic environment.
It is far easier to advance with the arrow of time but even advancing in the direction of increasining entropy with the bournarys of consistant space time which is in all cases a measurable constraint of the cosmic environonment.

Every one is marching forward together in an ensemble of dispositions. Those elements or centroids of effect within the larger structure enlivening and being enlivened in a cascading emergence of advantages of enduring the slings and arrows  or the lucky fate by the hand of providence.









Mark Twain was a rationalist and surrounded himself his entire life with the best rationalists on the planet. Darwin's Origin confirmed a confirmed stance repeated at intervals that there is no particular notice of our race than there is of a single pole cat because no one is there to measure us. We ourselves are the measure of a man and the fix was in from the beginning of the tragic spectacle. "What is it all for Mama?" his youngest daughter had asked and this confirmed this universal condition of the race. I sincerely believed that a rose could not smell like that unless I got a proper explanation of sufficient reason for smells. My senses would not beguile me with the experience of sensation without explanation.

A rose emits complex biochemical compounds that are absorbed by my complex biochemical compounds. To the selfish rose, I exist to extend the phenotype of roses by spreading the genes of the roses. To a rose I am for more roses and perhaps other unexplainable behavior that does not affect roses.

This is one answer to the question Clemens posed and he knew it. We all know it and we all deny it. We are here so that bigger things can happen to people, places and things greater than ourselves. The slave exists because a god and the slave owner made a bargain. The new owner could treat the slaves as he wished without risking calamity from the god as long as he continued to agree that god was cool and all for not sweating the details.



n fiction and by the rich and diverse experiences

Three Empires: 3. The Aztec Century

When conquered by Cortez, the northern boundary of the Aztec civilization stretched to our US border states. Under the Spanish, the northern border of the Aztec people stretched to a northern border that ran from San Antonio to San Francisco.

Most of the northern third of the Aztec empire was annexed by the manifest destiny of the United States by 1860. But taking the view that there are few, if any geophysical barriers to population diffusion, the manifest destiny of Teotihuacan, the triumph of the Southern Eagle over the North eagle inevitably triumphs by 2050. From this vantage point, the Aztec empire ruled by Teotihuacan with the consensus of the the Empire ruled by Washington, steadily displaces the former majority admixture of Western Eurasians and West Africans.

The fact that Mexican Americans vote in low percentages is offset by the phenomenal fecundity of Westernized Aztecs. I can now buy the raw material for tamales from any grocery store in Austin. In 1980 there was one local grocery on East 7th that could claim that.

 

When I drove through the Rio Grande Valley in 1975 I could not read many of the billboards and menus. Now there are whole neighborhoods in Austin that look like the Valley did in 1975. Western Eurasians had never really taken San Antonio from the Southern Empire and that was my first bit of evidence for my conjecture.

Viva la Raza
Viva la Revolution
Viva los Indios

Three Empires: 1. China's Mandate of Heaven

Aztec - from Teotihuacan to northern border of San Antonio to San Francisco.
United States - capitulate to the Nixonian troll Patrick Buchannan, an admixture of mostly eastern eurasians and west africans with an indigeous mesoamericans.
China - a 5000 year old civilization. Chinese exceptionalism; continuous return from a lost Mandate of Heaven

It seems to me that Chinese exceptionalism; a recurring return from the loss of the Mandate of Heaven, completely subsumes American exceptionalism; a recurring dominance of all things under heaven. There must have been several discredited mandates for the middle kingdom. Some witnessed a recurring dominance for a period. Our naturalistic fallacy writ large consists mainly or entirely of the fruits of a frozen accident - a Constitutional Republic forged by Bacon, Hobbs, Locke but most especially Hume and Darwin. These two brought forth the witness of science on the fleeting quality of the frozen accident. The retreat from reason on both fringes threatens our exceptionalism. Our recurrent dominance depends on emotions tempered by reason - the roots of the tree of liberty.

Our economic liberty beguiled us into giving our old enemy; our defeated enemy Marx, the clearest victory imaginable. We are slaves to the very communism that American exceptionalism defeated - you read the blogs you know in your heart we won a cold war. We tied the hangman's knot with rope manufactured in China.

But leaving off the fringe we still have a vast wisdom in the crowd. Republican sentiments continue to whither with each Medicare payment until an independent is born into the middle.

The upshot for the PRC is that they don't put a land war in Asia in the five year plan. What they have is 5000 years of history that proves they can come back from circumstances unimaginable to a centrist American suburbanite.

Opposites are Complementary

Contraria sunt Complementa - Neils Bohr's knightly crest

My drunk self and my sober self are complementary. I have this label on Right Livelihood. [6.62606896(33)×10−34 J·s]

1. forming a complement; complete
2. complementing each other
3. complimentary color or style.

avocation complements occupation.
My avocation complements my occupation
These entangled operations produce a fractal surface of probability where information is created simultaneously across the multiverse.

Yesterday I said 'harder they come' aloud and it was the next song on the iPod shuffle. I slipped into a possible world where the only difference was Jimmy Cliff instead of Beyonce playing on an iPod in the exact relation to the cosmic environment. All the trains, planes and automobile were traveling the same velocity between each universe.

The complementary nature of the duality or ensemble of entangled dispositions, is called quantum behavior. The Shannon Entropy of the move is quite low. That means that it is hard to guess the next step given the last step of a string of bits, the preferred method of exchanging information. Claude Shannon did two things
1. defined information transfer at zero energy
2. showed the fractal nature of information.

But landing in the right spot takes practice. That is the Tao, a path which has no marked route. The path and not the path are complementary.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-%< =-=-=-=-=-=-
[6.62606896(33)×10−34 J·s] [1.054571628(53)×10−27 erg·s]I use physical constants for footnote index pointers. The order is completely arbitrary. This is also Planck's constant in Joules/sec. But the point - and I do have one - is that we are surrounded by the kind of order that convinces us that life is a pointless struggle.

[1.054571628(53)×10−27 erg·s] is both Planck's constant in erg*seconds AND a footnote to a foot note.

Science and Engineering H.P.

 

HeteroPhenomenology

Emergent, metaphysical contrivance supporting a substrate of physical consciousness built on many, many proto-conscious means including sensation, memory, cognitive meat-puppet phenotype -or- an ensemble of pre-conscious dispositions. Popper originally pronounced Darwin's Theory a metaphysical project to join many, many scientific disciplines because IMHO Darwin's achievement was distinctly Kuhnian. Popper later admitted that Darwin followed his Logic of Scientific Discovery with sufficient rigor and put it inside the line of demarcation between science and the absurd. The fact that this distanced one more discovery from Kuhn was a delicious side dish.

Full story here.

Emergence of Everything

"Science is that discipline that replaces the hard questions that we are unable to answer by simpler questions to which we are competent to seek solutions" Jose Ortega y Gasset

"A theory might well be meaningful without being scientific." Karl Popper on the Demarcation Problem

The layers of emergence are as follows:
1. The Primordium - why is there something rather than nothing?
2. Large-scale structure - Non-Uniformity, entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium
3. Stars - gravity versus electromagnetic radiation.
4. The Elements - from first generation stars
5. Solar Systems - from the heavy debris of first generation stars
6. Planets - sweep their orbits.
7. The Geospheres - the emergence of replicators
9. The prokaryotes - the DNA replicator
10. The eukaryotes - cell walls
11. The Multicell organisms - differentiated function, structure
12. Neurons - an action potential with a difference. The birth of memory
13. Two Animal Subkingdoms
14. Chordates to Vertibrates
15. Fish
16. Anphibians
17. Reptiles
18. Mammals
19. Arborial Animals
20. Primates
21. The Great Apes
22. Hominids
23. Tool Makers
24. Language
25. Agriculture
26. Technology and Urbanization
27. Philosophy
28. The Spiritual
29. The Rough Beast of the Technium - The Singularity
30. The Omega Machine

Motivated Reasoning

"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false." Alan Turing.


A more basic theory of the phenomena might include the tendency of Bayesian Inference to just get things completely wrong. The prior probability of an untested hypothesis might start at 50% or coin toss chance. When the first new evidence arrives, let’s say ‘paper’ vs. ‘Plastic’ bag at the grocery store. Repeated cognitive effort might lead two different agents, let’s say a Soccer Mom in a big hurry to get food on the table vs. a green hippie tree hugger will use each factoid differently. As a hippie I believe (my first hypothesis) that plastic in any form will harm Gaia. A soccer mom likes plastic because it fits all of the bathroom trash bins and saves on buying MORE plastic in the form of Hefty Trash Sacks. The agents both agree on the PROBABILITY of the evidence – plastic bags are worse than paper bags because of two orthogonal factoids. But the Bayesian method lead to possibly matching or possibly mis-matching desired outcomes. The soccer mom may decide not to line the trash-can and change the INTERPRETATION of the Bayesian result. Paper sacks win the contest when the kids go away to college.

But motivated reasoning outside of a controlled study can never be pinned down. Think of it this way. I know that of the 100 employees I hire only 20 of them will deliver 80% of the goodness I hired them for. The obvious solution is to continuously cull at least the bottom 20% because these individuals actually detract from good outcomes. This is a just so story. The real trick – correctly FINDING the lower 20% is now the big problem to solve. But what are the factoids and what probability do I assign to the evidence that Joe is a water cooler jockey that detracts from the strategic and tactical success of the organization. Again, the HR manager thinks Joe is okay because he turns in his performance objectives on time and always meets the idiotic HR guidelines while guarding the water cooler.
Which facts wins the day? What alternative facts lose the day?
Of course this is just my cognitive bias, I could be wrong.

Becoming a Philosoph

 

"But eventually, through constant practice, you get to the point where, scientists believe, these processes get pushed down into the subconscious. They don’t need to be consciously worked out anymore. They become a subroutine. Suddenly you realize you’re saying things you haven’t heard or memorized. You’re able to free-associate. Your brain begins exerting control at a higher level, directing bigger chunks of information that can be expressed as whole ideas." Aaron Berkowitz

Read this out loud

RED

BLUE

RED

RED

BLUE

BLUE

In each case, my anterior cingulate cortex lights up as I attempt to suppress the confusion and pick the right word. This is a meat based Bayesian machine.

I Think Therefore I Argue

The Argument Clinic

"That's not an argument; that is the automatic gainsaying of my position" - MP

"No it isn't," - JC

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments." - Hugo Mercier

In "Why Do Humans Reason: Arguments for Argumentative Theory" the authors present an emerging theory which supports the proposition that our capacity for reason emerges from our need to win arguments. Cognitive Bias and Motivated Reasoning defy methods of rational choice or rational actor paradigms - we are the argumentative monkey.

My conclusion - my argument here - surrounds the efficacy of operant conditioning and not cognition as the most common paths to provisional conclusions that we consider worth acting upon or avoiding. I am more likely to reject the behavior of argumentation and yield to the other man's argument to save time and effort. Bad ideas that I am ordered to carry out will emerge as well-conditioned behavior either for or against the desired solution. I may agree to satisfy the customer then avoid doing the things that might serve the customer but force me into behavior I am not prepared to demonstrate.

[see Chris Moody at Mother Jones on motivated reasoning]