[FRIAM] What is an object?

[glen]

Of course it's reasonable for you to dissent! But over and above the most important example Marcus raises of biology (because *everything* is biology 8^), even your historical account is a litany of WHAT, not WHY. 

Sure it may seem like you're examining the why of these artifacts. But you're not. Why questions are always metaphysical. What you're actually doing in your list and analysis of past events is inferring the WHY from the WHAT. And your inferences, no matter how good you are at inferring, will always just be your best guess at WHY. 

Like with the Great Man Theory, the actual causes of any phenomena in a complex and complicated system like Xerox Parc (embedded in culture, society, psychology, physiology, biology, chemistry, etc.) are multifarious and occult. No oversimplified *narrative* like yours will fully circumscribe those causes. To think otherwise is to fool oneself into false belief ... a kind of faith-based world view.


On July 19, 2018 3:01:57 AM PDT, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>"The IDEA of Smalltalk derived from the IDEA of Simula; the philosophy
>and ideas of Englebart, Bush, Sutherland; the metaphor of cellular
>biology, and undoubtedly more. Alan Kay coalesced those influences and
>led the team that implemented the team that actually created the
>language at Xerox PARC."
>
>For example, I don't see analogs of cytokines, hormones, or
>neurotransmitters in Smalltalk or any computing systems today.    The
>closest that comes to mind are functional reactive programming systems,
>e.g. game platforms tied to a physics engine.   
>The idea that top-down intent matters is preposterous if the motivation
>is biology, a massively-parallel bottom-up phenomena that involves
>physical stuff.


-- 
glen