Fallible, Chaotic, Fragmented, Brilliant...

Following on from last night's reflection on the precipitous state in which we've managed to leave the world, with its over-reliance on poorly-designed and badly-maintained monolithic systems and structures of economics, technology and politics; I want to add a phrase that cropped up in conversation during the drive home from town yesterday afternoon: '...in any given system, one needs multiple points of entry and exit...' to be safe in the knowledge that not everything will turn to rat-shit instantaneously and irrevocably. Again, the lessons can be learned from the history of engineering and the development of technology in particular, and life in general.

However, the human brain/mind/consciousness that creates such systems is simultaneously fallible, chaotic, fragmented and brilliant. What it most definitely is not, is inherently organised or capable of that oh, so tired and fallacious cliché, multi-tasking. We just can't do it so forget it, right off the bat. In computing terms, we can achieve quite a high-level of pre-emptive rather than true multitasking: ie. you do a bit of one task, move to another and then to a third, maybe back to the first, then the third, then the second, in whatever order presents itself, until all the tasks are either complete or ruined, depending on one's mental and physical dexterity.

We have to train ourselves to think linearly and logically and we have to use precisely that disorderliness and brilliance to devise methodologies that sit abstractly outside of our untidy skulls, in order to corral that chaos into some semblance of practical sense and utility. The essence of self is that our very sense of it is both absurd and absurdly commonplace: an accident of existence. That we are able to act on our physical world with agency and apparent intelligence is both a function of the survival instinct and a need to try and find some order out of the entropy that enshrouds us: we like to organise stuff, to make it real, solid and useful to us. To do this with any degree of success we have to build robustness and safety into any system that we construct to aid us in our lives.

These systems have to demonstrate an element of self-governance, independent of their creator, and their operations need to be as accessible as possible to anyone charged with their maintenance or repair down the line. Only when a system can be deemed much better than 99% reliable and safe, should it be trusted, and then only with several layers of redundancy built into it: the multiple points of entry and exit, AKA failsafe, mentioned earlier. Test, Break, Fix, Iterate: without adherence to this mantra, we will continue to unleash chimeras such as the Post Office Horizon system into the wild, with disastrous results. We have to rely on the things we make; and the laws and conventions we discover, guide and assist us in that making. The brilliance, and the absolute sense of it all, is in this synthesis: the realisation that in the abstract world that is not of ourselves or even the world itself, there are rules and order which have to be divined and defined by us out of that abstract realm and applied to the chaos and brilliance of our minds. Oh, and we need to own up when we fuck up too: that's of prime importance in the learning/making/using process...