Method Worship by ~mmagueta
Chess was a constant in Marcel Duchamp’s life. A logical endeavor, or a Cartesian one, he said. It’s about logic and mechanics rather than mathematics – “Mechanics in the sense that pieces move, interact, destroy each other. They are in constant motion, and that’s what attracts me”. This is a customary assertion that invites us to contemplate what irradiates from having a constant in our lives: transitions.
Heraclitus and his thought mark the transition between the anterior and posterior Ionic schools, altering its cosmology significantly. Observe that Heraclitus does not say that everything flows and therefore we cannot make any judgement about reality, this is a Hegelian interpretation of it. It’s an attempt to make a remark about unity in diversity. He saw a principle of harmony between the interaction with change and a new cosmology of oppositions. The essence of being however, as Aristotle later replies on his refutations, is the reliance on the permanence within change. The perfection of being is in the it not being susceptible to change.
In this framework then, something that exists, change. Diversity within unity, while saying that it is reality’s nature to be mutable, it is necessary to confess that all things are one. My pen, you, me and my late cat Tixo are the same reality. In fact, even Newton himself had this notion when he added the idea of absolute time to his physics; and also Pythagoras from a more orphic standpoint, reached that foundation with music. The notion of eternity is fundamental to the idea of reality.
Duchamp’s taste is rather peculiar when you put this into perspective. Atop of the notion of a change, we can predicate the necessity of a constant. But how can we rely on a method to bring about knowledge? The method worship comes into play.
I heard a talk of a clever fellow a while ago. He did something of true hearted intent. He designed a meta language that has an auxiliar proof assistant to it, that helps him to come up with a design for some world of discourse. After the domain is in a decent shape, he transcodes that to some high level multi purpose programming language and applies event sourcing to that domain, where these actions are mapping events, obviously. In the end, possibly without realizing, he is intending to design a normalized (relational) schema. It is exactly that: an isomorphic mapping between the world of discourse and the relations.
A friend wrote an interesting article enticed to debunk event sourcing just recently, and gazing at the responses is somewhat tragic. What event sourcing actually is hardly matters as a topic for this discussion, so let’s indulge into a heraclian dialogue.
One trend seems awfully familiar in many branches of computation, and perhaps I dare say, the most dangerous of them all. It is the perception that computers are mechanisms. It’s the idea that the whole point of computation relies on the intoxicating transition of states. Change.
This seems natural, after all, computers are things that we often relate to the Turing Machine, or even as things that runs algorithms. My claim however, is that computers are abstraction automata. In a way, that is to say that computers do already reason; just like turtles and your most disliked politician.
Let’s observe an excerpt of an unfortunate case of the worm in the brain:
[…] The motivation for event sourcing does not stem from any confusion - kind of insulting to people that put in the work and proved its effectiveness as a default approach to LoB systems automation. Nothing is simpler than capturing input data as a source of truth for everything. Versioning is one of the biggest benefits of event sourcing, only screwed up by inexperienced event sourcing practitioners that want to scale such systems by optimizing projections by reuse of data and code, forcing their old crud habits back in.
We all of a sudden hear Pindar yell “become who you are by learning who you are!”
Note that in the middle of the jargons, lies in slumber the grammar of lust. The corruption of any abstraction: no mention to the substance, only to its potential qualities. Strangely enough, it doesn’t seem to entice anyone that this is the so-called method worship. Instead of debating in terms of what something is (substance), we debate in terms of qualities of something. If they happen to be isomorphic after all, it seems to be just a matter of taste, isn’t that right?
If perhaps the idea that everything changes and nothing in fact is, it seems to be the case that things are determined by merely its distinguishable qualities. To use Luigi Pirandello – “in life we see many masks and few faces”. With Heraclitus we see the great possibility of being wrong with our senses, and the signs that point such faces are incomprehensible. It belongs then to the nature of reality to be inconstant: we can only say that something is, in a sempiternal language. If that is found in the perfection of being, relies on the fact that it is not susceptible to change.
For our colloquist however, such sempiternal idea does not exist. All there is, is the method. We must ask then what is up to debate? The defense of the method, it seems. We are in search of benefits without the comprehension of correctness, we are no more than beggars living by the spoils of the heavenly city. Or as someone else put it best when talking about Carl Jung:
[…] Jung’s work consisted in cataloging his findings in certain groups, once he realized there were patterns, he’d put a name on it, like the shadow or the animus and anima, however, it’s imperative to realize that the name itself doesn’t explain “what” the thing is, as this would be a metaphysical statement, these labels are simply a map to help us better navigate the nature of the phenomenon […] – (Rafael Krüger)1