[FRIAM] On old question

[Prof David West]

I would like to introduce a bit of a zig or zag into the conversation by bringing up something a bit far afield and then relating it back to the thread.

In a direct message to Nick I mentioned that I was doing a workshop (January, in Amsterdam, at Domain-Driven Design Europe) on ‘Natural System Design’. Being the prolific author he is, he directed me to several papers of his on the same subject. Of course we are using the same phrase in quite different ways.

My use derives from software development and the first business computer LEO, (Lyons Electronic Office), was built by J. Lyons and Company in 1951. The same team built the hardware, programmed system software, and programmed a set of applications that included: payroll, order entry, inventory control, production scheduling, etc.

A number of assumptions made at that time have shaped Comp Sci and Soft Eng ever since: e.g., programming is all about the machine – taking a complete, consistent, and unambiguous set of requirements and then programming to satisfy them — totally isolating the programmer from the domain: and second, assuming that there is no difference between ‘application’ programming and ‘system’ programming; which is to deny any qualitative or substantive difference between a ‘natural’ domain like a business or business process and an ‘artificial’ domain like a network router and protocol.

Carnegie-Mellon had a contract a while back from DoD to study Ultra-Large Scale systems – which coincidently are also Complex Adaptive systems. That study quite firmly said that the precepts, principles, tools, and models of Software Engineering would not be applicable to this type of system.

The premise of my workshop is to provide an alternative approach, and set of concepts and techniques, for designing and deploying software/information artifacts that enhance naturally occurring systems like businesses, cities, ecologies, etc.

What Nick wrote and referred me to could provide a lot of interesting and important ideas about “design-in-nature” that I can use in a biomimetic fashion to enhance my work on “design-with-nature.”

Which brings us back into the thread and a comment I made previously about the ‘alchemical’ or ‘alchemical wanna be’ status of most of what we know about biological and cultural ‘living systems’. And, why I, and it seems others on the list, are tantalized but disappointed by folk like Rosen.


davew



On Thu, Oct 25, 2018, at 12:03 AM, glen wrote:
> On the contrary, the question can ONLY be answered by pointing at 
> something. Your abstracted, essentialist, linguistic tendencies will 
> fail us every time. I think I've mentioned Luc Steels' language games 
> before. And you seem to be fond of semiotics. So why isn't the question 
> best answered by pointing?
> 
> Playing along though, if the experience evoked by a model is good enough 
> to trigger a similar enough physiological response to that evoked by 
> reality, then the model passes for reality. I.e. if the effect is the 
> same, then the cause is equivalent.
> 
> 
> On October 24, 2018 8:08:01 PM PDT, Nick Thompson 
> <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >Glen, 
> >
> >Interesting website ... .  But the question can't be answered by
> >pointing at something.  I meant to ask the question, "What are the
> >properties of something you would call real?"   
> >
> >Nick 
> -- 
> glen
> 
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