The basic problem of software engineering is the creation of a computer system which solves some human problem. But the satisfaction of a human problem cannot be reduced in a straightforward way but instead forces a designer to solve many problems in parallel which ofter are in contradiction or interaction with each other. This is a design challenge and has not yet given us a linear way to perform software engineering that at once ensures logical perfection (is functionally correct) while also satisfying what are called emergent properties. This essay begins to layout the structure by which I am approaching this engineering challenge to make it tractable through a series of essays that I hope will coalesce into a book which puts a human face on the role of software engineering in human society.
The Role of Functional Engineering
We have not yet achieved technical perfection in the realm of functional engineering but we have made huge strides in the past few decades in engineering and the education of software engineers. A banking system ensures balanced books and accurate balances for the customers. A hydro-electric plant operating system will ensure safe and efficient operation of the many complex components of the system. But as computer software is the manipulation of abstractions of the real world which only later are transduced into reality, the primary task is one of model building.
The marvel of the modern computer is that of the blazing fast logic circuits that reduce even complex computation into tractable solutions. The process of programming is the reduction of the physical problems into abstract mathematical models, which after all are nothing but logical models of the real world. If the model represents a useful homomorphism to the real world, the manipulation of those abstractions through logical operations will give us control over the physical universe that solves the human problem. In the vocabulary of object oriented programming and design, we create objects for computation that model the real world. We are creating cyber models for the real world.
Software Qualities
The Linguistics of Computer Communication
The Differences Between Human Processes and Machine Processes
Merriam-Webster define avatar as the incarnation of a Hindu deity in human form. This basic definition is extended to mean any concept embodied in human form such as the avatar of charity and concern for the poor, for example. The cyber models we construct are similar to yet the inverse of this definition of avatar since those avatars are physical manifestations of abstract beings. The word seems to have no prior and accepted antonym.
Word origin and history: 1784, "descent of a Hindu deity," from Sanskrit avatarana "descent" (of a deity to the earth in incarnate form), from ava-"down" + base of tarati "(he) crosses over," from PIE root *tere- "to cross over" (see through). In computer use, it seems to trace to the novel "Snowcrash" (1992) by Neal Stephenson. If my understanding of Sanscrit is correct, the opposite of ava- would be aro-. So I backform a noun, arotar to be something from the physical world lifted into the otherworld, in this case cyberspace.
I suggest that the process of software engineering is the construction of these arotars and the success or failure of the complete computer system depends upon the accuracy of this transduction between the real and cyber world.
I want to also suggest that there is reason to go back to a philosophical debate raised by Descartes in his conception of dualism. For sometime we have comfortably accepted the mind as a physical device no different from any other device in our physical universe. Yet the dominance of social constructs in our lives gives us as many objects of an abstract nature as we have in the physical universe, allowing for the abstractions we subject our universe to in making it comprehensible. After all, by the very nature of our brain we cannot comprehend all the grains of sand but subject them to collective nouns which are abstractions of the multitude of individual grains. These social constructs result in some avatars which inhabit our physical universe such as currency which is an avatar for money. But in computer systems these objects are mere informational objects whose representation is almost infinitely mutable so long as we have an agreement about that translation from one form to another. Just as we can exchange currency, we can pour cyber objects from one object into another.
The way we build software models is with the use of specialized languages which we hope are unambiguous and useful for the task of building these models. They must allow us to build structures (nouns) and processes (verbs) and then weave these together into ensembles that will collectively solve a problem in cyberspace that hopefully maintains its correspondence to the human problem in the real world. This parallel operation has such a strong similarity to the substance of mind that Descartes spoke of I question whether we must completely reject dualism as a practical matter and instead admit of a cyberspace that is a stand in for what Descartes may have meant were he familiar with modernity. So I use this as a starting point to explore an alternate way of conceptualizing the software engineering process, if only as a thought experiment. Let's make a leap and think of cyberspace as some alternative universe that is in parallel with our own and intersects through a collection of avatars and arotars that come into existence, cross over that barrier and cease to exist. Does this buy us anything in our understanding of the place and use of computer technology as it is experienced by human beings?
You can take most any major corporation today that does business with customers and you see arotars. They interact with us not as individuals but as cyber entities. It is not our actual attributes they see but the attributes that have been set in those cyber objects in their databases. Anyone who has had problems with identify theft fully understands the implications this has in our lives. It is not the reality of our lives that controls their interaction with us but their belief about us that is formed by their databases. Once those databases have been corrupted, the responsibility falls to us to struggle to bring correspondence back between the arotar and our reality, often at great expense to ourselves. For the corporation, the arotar IS the human being.
This concept has been fairly well explored in science fiction as was suggested by the definition above which used avatar to represent the "embodiment" of the real in the cyber. This was also repeated in the movie of that name. But I am choosing to make a distinction between the physical brought into the cyberspace, what I am calling arotar, with the more traditional understanding of avatar which would be the physical embodiment of some abstract cyber object into our physical and social lives. But with that small adjustment in language the science fiction works have nicely explored the way the mind grapples with this interaction between the physical and cyber worlds.
Human Society, Its Construction and Maintenance
memetics
The Creation and Maintenance of the Social Meme Structure
speech act theory
The construction of a social reality that uses abstractions that are not directly found in nature long precedes cyberspace. Those who study linguistic pragmatics recognize that humans use language for that very purpose. We construct new concepts and then use language to communicate those concepts to others. Some of those concepts construct, constrain and mould our society. Human relations, hierarchies , and organizations are formed using these words and people have a predisposition to accept many social conventions without thought. Richard Dawkins offers a compelling argument that these concepts are in fact an evolutionary step for social creatures to break the shackles of our genetic adaptation and instead have bundles of information that are passed from one generation to another which gives the society some evolutionary advantage over other societies in the competition for scarce resources. Whether or not you accept Dawkins memetic argument may not be important to my thesis but it at least offers one way in which we discuss abstract concepts which are communicated with language and have profound influence over a society and its members. This is not possible without language.
The specific ways in which language gave primitive societies an advantage is a subject of speculation. We can assume it enabled more complex forms of coordination among the hunters and gatherers. But even the earliest recorded inferences we make about language suggests it was used for means other than mere survival. There was an oral tradition of stories that served some purpose in their societies. One use was in the telling of stories. Some of these stories purported to be retellings of history. But the standards of accuracy were not strict by modern standards and the telling of an entertaining yarn were as important as staying true to historical facts, even if the memory was accurate. In time this gave way to stories that were complete fabrications and fiction was born.
The Counterfactual, Fiction and the Communal Construction of the Intended World
Even linguists stumble when discussing fiction. When someone is acting a role in a play they do not become the character despite their best attempts. And no audience member believes the player becomes the character, no matter how convincing the performance. There is an odd social transaction that the player(s) and the audience enter into a mode of suspension of belief so as to inhabit this constructed universe of the playwright. The playwright has license to create an alternate universe and populate it with anything that can be conceived by the human mind. I do not think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that from its earliest manifestations that these alternative universes were an early cyberspace.
Of course from story telling and plays passed through an oral tradition humans found a way to fix their language using physical devices like clay tablets and other forms of writing. This innovation in fixing a story helped to constrain story telling making a distinction between that which was meant to be historical from that which was allowed to be fanciful. A written history would belie the fable teller's altered version but still allowed for embellishment where the written account was silent.
While the volume of alternative universes has grown at an every increasing pace, things did not change in any fundamental way until the creation of new technologies for the capturing of visual images. Photography, cinema, sound recording, television and radio have increased the amount of information that can either be recorded or fabricated to inform and entertain. These new media extended the evocative power of story telling to allow an even greater suspension of disbelief and engagement in the alternative universe.
The realization that language and all media can be reduced to flows of information with the most minimal and effervescent of physical trace allows for the convergence that has been long anticipated. Cinema can become virtualized with constructed actors and scenes. Music need never involve physical instruments that manipulate air. While composers may be able to construct music without the realization of the sound, most people can appreciate the realization but not the idea alone. One is the design, the other the construction and implementation of that design.
Software As Memes Trying to Live
Software is in the realm of ideas that at best are realized statically as text or binary files on a disk. However they are mutated into something else once transcribed or translated into the memory of a physical machine. Once there and once given agency, they command the machine to do its will. The machine is in the realm of the atoms while the software reaches through the machine to create an interaction between the world of ideas and the world of atoms.
One aspect of software engineer that departs significantly from computer science is the realization of the idea using physical machines. Unlike idealized logic machines, a computing device may not behave as predicted. For example all modern machines have the operating system as an intermediary. Various conditions may result in unexpected and illogical results, such as a read failure from storage because of a software failure in the OS. To the application program this cannot be anticipated and makes no sense yet it is a condition that must be programmed for and handled. The contingency of many software instructions must similarly be allowed for and has created a great deal of art. Unless and until we have physical machines that achieve their logical perfection, we must program contingently and always include a fair dose of risk management in those systems.
Software Engineering Through the Lens of Dualism
I believe it is time to revisit and old philosophical position, Cartesian dualism. No modern is willing to suggest that the abstract thoughts of humans is metaphysically separate from the physical universe of atoms. But there can be little doubt that abstract thoughts pass from human to human using language and have little or no physical presence other than their representations in human minds and the various representations they take in the physical universe such as spoken word, written symbols or the various representations they take in computer systems. By themselves they do not interact with the universe of atoms unless mediated by human beings and the effect those utterances have on us.
These abstract ideas can of course of profound consequence on the world of atoms. One only need consider the choices societies have made since the invention of agriculture. We are now seeing the effect of anthropomorphic climate change based on the behaviors of civilizations over eons of using fossil fuels. This change only happened because of human behavior. And that human behavior was shaped by the accumulated knowledge of how to exploit the natural resources to propagate the species.
One cannot place humans in some category that is completely different from any other animal. There are after all many species which can create profound changes to their environment as well. Populations may grow beyond the limits of their ecosystem and starve. Changes in weather patterns or meteor strikes may present challenges that a species may not survive. But humans are different in their adaptability and their ability to grow in number beyond most any other species. It is this unique ability of humans that must be examined to understand how software engineering plays a pivotal role in our society today. And this requires an examination of the work of Richard Dawkins who coined the word memetics.
Computers as Machines to Propagate Memes
Unlike other animals, humans are far less bound by their genetic destiny than most any other animal. The adaptation of civilizations to the various environments in which humans moved conferred a benefit that could not be possible without some genetic pre-determinism. And that benefit is clearly bound to the ability of humans to form civilizations and work cooperatively. But many other species are social. What makes humans different?
Insect are simple creatures. It is possible to completely decipher their DNA and given time we can create models of their behavior and mimic the relatively simple behavior they exhibit given the stimuli of their environment. Yet despite their simplicity they can become a formidable species. Such is the power of social behavior. Mammalian behavior, especially the ability for complex speech, dramatically improved the ability to communicate and coordinate. Even more important is the ability to transmit information from one generation to the next. Now adaptive behavior discovered by one generation could be passed forward to the next. Now one generation could benefit from the mistakes of the past. How to grow, hunt, build, organize society, etc, was not lost. Civilizations grew and became more powerful. Dawkins called this transmitted information memetics borrowing the analog of the gene to suggest that somehow there are bits of information that the human mind could receive from parents and elders yet carry forward and pass on to their progeny. While the science of memetics is perhaps still a bit controversial and ill-formed, the basic premise that information in a society influences that society and has a remarkable ability to resist change seems hard to refute.
The Dance between the Static and the Dynamic
Communications Protocols through Linguistic Eyes
