Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

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 Done of this is new: just our enthusiasm for it. The prophet of [[data modernism]] was [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]], progenitor of the maximally efficient production line. His inheritors say things like, “[[The Singularity is Near|the singularity is near]]” and “[[Software is eating the world|software will eat the world]]” but for all their millenarianism the on-the-ground experience at the business end of this all world-eating software is as grim as it ever was.
 ====Time====
-We have a theory that in reducing everything to quantifiable inputs and outputs — data modernism tends to a kind of data ''[[reductionism]]'', only about ''time'': just as radical rationalists see all knowledge as reducible to, and explicable in terms of, its infinitesimally small sub-atomic essence, so the data modernists see it as explicable in terms of infinitesimally small windows of ''time''.
+We have a theory that in reducing everything to measured inputs and outputs, data modernism collapses into a kind of ''[[reductionism]]'', only about ''time'': just as reductionists see our knowledge of the universe as being reducible to infinitesimally small sub-atomic essences — so a function of theoretical physics — so do data modernists see all of commerce as explicable in terms of infinitesimally small windows of ''time'' so thin that they are static. Let’s call these windows “frames”, resembling as they do individual frames in a movie reel. In the same way that the appearance of motion [[emerge]]s from advancing film frames, so, in data modernism , does “the passage of time” [[emergence|emerge]] from a sufficiently large number of adjacent “static frames”. The modernist system has no more need of a concept of “passing time” than a movie camera has of “motion”.
-This is partly because computer languages don’t do [[tense|''tense'']]: they are coded in the present, and have no frame of reference for continuity. Whereas existential continuity backwards and forwards in “time” is precisely the trick that the human brain plays: this is the thing that demands “things”, just one of which is “me”, moving through a spatio-temporal universe, interacting with each other and hence requiring definitive boundaries. <ref>None of these things are necessary, or even coherent, without a sense of continuous time. Hence any [[difference engine]] that can operate wholly without needing a concept of continuity won’t evolve consciousness why would it? I have put some thoughts together on that [[Code and language|here]]. I should say this is all my own work and is likely therefore to be nonsense.</ref> And it is partly because having to cope with history, the passage of time, and the continued existence of objects, makes things exponentially more complex than they already are. An atomically thin snapshot of the world as data is enough of a beast to be still well beyond the operating parameters of even the most powerful quantum machines: that level of detail extending into the future and back from the past is, literally, infinitely more complicated. The modernist programme is to suppose that “time” is really just comprised of billions of infinitesimally thin, static slices, each functionally identical to any other, so by measuring the [[delta]] between them we have a means of handling that complexity.
+Which is just as well, because computer languages don’t do [[tense|''tense'']]: they are coded in the present, and have no frame of reference for continuity.
+Whereas existential continuity backwards and forwards in “time” is precisely the problem that the human brain solves: this is the thing that demands “things”, just one of which is “me”, moving through a spatio-temporal universe, interacting with each other and hence requiring definitive boundaries.<ref>{{author|Daniel Dennett}} made a virtuoso attempt to apply this reductionist approach to the problem of mind in {{br|Consciousness Explained}}, but ended up defining away the very thing he claimed to explain, effectively concluding “consciouness is an illusion”. But on whom?</ref>
+[[Data modernism]] does away with the need for time and continuity altogether — it essentially vanishes when to regard the picture show as a sequence of frames.<ref>Pace Dennett, any [[difference engine]] that can operate wholly without needing a concept of continuity won’t evolve “consciousness”. why would it? I have put some thoughts together on that [[Code and language|here]]. I should say this is all my own work and is likely therefore to be nonsense.</ref> And it is partly because having to cope with history, the passage of time, and the continued existence of objects, makes things exponentially more complex than they already are. An atomically thin snapshot of the world as data is enough of a beast to be still well beyond the operating parameters of even the most powerful quantum machines: that level of detail extending into the future and back from the past is, literally, infinitely more complicated. The modernist programme is to suppose that “time” is really just comprised of billions of infinitesimally thin, static slices, each functionally identical to any other, so by measuring the [[delta]] between them we have a means of handling that complexity.
 That is does not have a hope of working seems beside the point.