Re: Wiki software for genealogy (long)

Don Moody wrote:
Tony, there is no doubt at all that humanity has learned to do powerful things with 0 and 1, and will no doubt go on through people like you doing ever more. But you and all developers will have to accept that there are places where you cannot go, however clever the entire software world gets in handling 0 and 1.

You can't handle maybe, ifs, buts, fuzziness, illogic, perhaps its 0 or perhaps its 1 or perhaps its even somewhere in between but we can never know what it actually is and it'll not necessarily be the same next time we look. The oddity is that the very thing which conceived the orderly use of 0 and 1, and dreams up the systems of orderliness, is also the engine that doesn't work that way but works well with all the ifs and buts and fuzziness and changes. The human brain can know, but it also knows it cannot know and it has evolved to use that cannot know state for survival and advance. That is why there always will be problems and human activities which fall outside the power of 0 and 1 however cleverly those values are manipulated.

Nevertheless if you want someone else's brain to acquire the ifs, buts fuzziness and changes your brain has gone through you don't rely on that second brain to follow that same path, you record them and then communicate them. Recording and communication are what we're dealing with here.

This paradox was understood an exceedingly long time ago, before the modern computer could have been thought of. It is recorded in the Bible, and I refer to that not in any religious sense but simply as an old tome of wisdom expressed allegorically. Ponder on the saying 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's.' It's a clear recognition that there are some things which are calculable and some which are not.

The parable certainly deals with the fact that we need to deal with things which belong to different domains. I see nothing in it that says that calculability is the differentiator between its domains. In any case as we're dealing with recording and communication I see no paradox in relation to whether what we're recording is calculable or not; many people, including yourself, have recorded and communicated their thoughts on incalculability.

--
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk
.

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