Posts in philosophy

Programming on Both Sides of Your Brain

A lot of disagreements in software engineering seem to have a deeper background than mere technical considerations. Should you move fast and break things, or should you reinvent the wheel? Does it matter how the code looks like when it does what you want? And what is the purpose of it all in the first place? I propose that many of those arguments arise from different people using different of two possible fixed worldviews in a variety of contexts, which they assign automatically and mostly unconsciously, in a similar way to how our brain resolves bistable perceptions. Furthermore, I propose that the ability to consciously switch between the two worldviews, and the experience needed to decide which one to use in the given context, are crucial for the work of a software engineer.

Read more ...

Political and Practical Worldviews

Before we were somewhat brutally brought into the loving embrace of the Roman Catholic Church by our considerate neighbours, my country had its own “pagan” religion, with its own mythology and traditions. A lot of the traditions survive in some way, because you can’t tell people they no longer have a holiday on a given day just because they are worshipping a different god now, but most information about the beliefs of my ancestors have been judiciously eradicated by the same people who were at the time responsible for preserving history – the chroniclers were mostly priests at the time, after all. Some of it has been reconstructed from mentions in various historical texts, but there is very little that is certain. Which is a great shame, because those “primitive” mythologies often were records of knowledge about the world and its workings, presented in a form that is easy for people to understand – attitudes and relationships. That’s why gods in them are mostly humans with special powers connected with the nature. And that “pagan” mythology could tell us a lot about how the society functioned back then.

Read more ...