Tag: Philosophy

Naur on Code as a Shared Mental Model, Google AI explains

In his seminal 1985 essay, Programming as Theory Building, computer scientist Peter Naur fundamentally redefines software development as a deeply human activity. He argues that the primary product of programming is not the tangible source code, documentation, or specifications, but rather a shared mental model—a “theory”—constructed within the minds of the engineering team. Drawing on philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s concept of mind, Naur stresses that successful software relies on an active, intuitive “knowing how” rather than a rigid list of rules. Code and design specs are inherently lossy media; they merely capture what a program does, completely failing to communicate the “why” behind historical constraints, structural exclusions, and architectural trade-offs.

Consequently, Naur views a software system as “alive” only as long as its original engineering team actively possesses and maintains this underlying theory. When the group of programmers who understand this philosophy completely disperses or leaves the project, the program is effectively considered “dead”. Subsequent developers can execute the software and even mechanically modify it, but they are forced to treat it like a mysterious black box. Lacking the original theory, their subsequent modifications manifest as disjointed patchwork fixes that introduce unexpected side effects and ultimately accelerate overall architectural rot. In Naur’s view, reconstructing this lost theory purely from source code text is so difficult that scrapping the codebase and rewriting it entirely from scratch is frequently the cheaper, cleaner option.

This perspective has gained profound significance in the modern era of generative AI and Large Language Model (LLM) coding assistants. While AI tools can effortlessly churn out complex, syntactically perfect code, they inherently lack any structural intent or broad cross-module architectural awareness. When engineers reflexively accept these AI-generated blocks without integrating them into an evolving mental model, projects quickly fill up with theoretically orphaned codebases. Naur’s work reminds the modern software industry that writing text is no longer the primary bottleneck of software engineering. Instead, the true value and survival of software reside entirely in the human developer’s ability to maintain, communicate, and expand the underlying theoretical framework.

Footnotes

Epistemic Asymmetry and Traveling to Unfamiliar Cities – ChatGPT on

What you’re describing isn’t just novelty—it’s epistemic asymmetry. Everyone around you knows what’s going on, and you don’t. You’re the only person in the café who doesn’t know why that group is celebrating, why there’s a line outside the theater, or why that particular neighborhood seems to come alive at dusk. The city is full of meanings that are visible but inaccessible. That asymmetry creates a kind of gentle tension, and I think our minds naturally find it compelling.

It also reminds me of a distinction made by John Dewey in Art as Experience. Dewey argues that we don’t merely perceive objects; we perceive situations—ongoing patterns of activity. In a new city, you perceive countless situations whose beginnings and endings you don’t know. You catch life in medias res. It’s a little like walking into the second act of a play: you understand enough to know something meaningful is happening, but not enough to explain it. That incompleteness invites attention rather than closing it down.

Drama and the Idealization of Life, Eric Bentley quote

And this constitutes a supreme idealization of life, for it signifies a life which has a clear and unitary meaning, a direction, an utterly purposive movement toward an end. In this respect, dramatic art is one of the great wish-fulfilling fulfilling dreams, for there is nothing human beings more ardently crave than to be persons in such a drama. In the Middle Ages, it was official doctrine that humanity did belong in such a drama; and so the art of the drama represented a metaphysical fact. But this art has as great a poignancy – or greater – in an age like our own when the universe is generally felt to be unintelligible, amorphous, undramatic. For today art offers the only integrated drama, and we can be persons in a perfectly constructed Action only, it would seem, when we read or see a play.

The Life of the Drama
Eric Bentley

The Pleasure of a Decent but Not Great Ball Game – Wilfred Sheed quote

Eventually you have to tell your son that this is not the longest ball game ever played or maybe even the best. It is fatally flawed in the ninth inning. However, it’s the only game we happen to have right now, and it fills the moment as full as a great game would, even sharing some of the same textures. If you don’t enjoy it, you wouldn’t enjoy a great game either, except for it’s damn greatness.

The Good Word and Other Words
Wilfrid Sheed

From the essay:
The Art of Reviewing

The Grass of Far-off Years – George Eliot quote

These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedge, such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and grass of far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.

The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot

Found as footnote in:
Art as an Experience
John Dewey

Here’s the footnoted text by Dewey:

But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead of trying to live upon whatever may have been achieved in the past, it uses past successes to inform the present. Every living experience owes its richness to what Santayana well calls “hushed reverberations.”

The Question Concerning Technology – Heidegger, ChatGpt on

The core source for the idea is his essay The Question Concerning Technology (1954).

Heidegger’s argument is subtle. He does not mainly think technology is dangerous because machines become powerful. He thinks the deeper danger is that human beings begin to see everything — nature, other people, and eventually themselves — as resources to be optimized, ordered, and used.

One of his key terms is “standing-reserve” (Bestand). Under technological thinking:

a forest becomes “timber inventory”

a river becomes “hydroelectric potential”

a worker becomes “human resources”

even a person’s attention or personality becomes something measurable and manageable

So the irony is:

machines can seem increasingly adaptive, responsive, or “alive”

while humans increasingly behave according to systems, routines, metrics, and procedures

That’s probably why your remembered quote feels Heideggerian.

A famous genuine Heidegger passage says:

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”

Meaning: the real issue isn’t gadgets themselves, but a whole way of seeing the world.

Another important idea in the essay is “enframing” (Gestell), Heidegger’s term for the mindset that organizes reality into calculable, controllable units. In an enframed world, spontaneity, mystery, contemplation, and individuality tend to shrink.

This connects strongly to a lot of 20th-century literature and film:

Modern Times — humans reduced to machine rhythms

The Trial — impersonal systems dominating individuals

Player Piano

2001: A Space Odyssey — the machine appears calm and rational while humans become helpless or procedural

Brazil — bureaucracy becoming absurdly mechanical

There’s also an interesting tension in Heidegger: he was not simply anti-technology or nostalgic for the past. He thought technology revealed something real about the human desire for mastery and certainty. The danger was that this mode of thinking could become so dominant that we forget there are other ways of relating to reality — art, contemplation, ritual, poetry, direct experience.

That’s why he often turns toward poets like Friedrich Hölderlin late in his work. Poetry, for Heidegger, preserves a less mechanical relationship to being.

Being Nowhere on the Road

Where can you be alone? In a crowd. How can you be nowhere? If you don’t stop moving. Where had I seen people meditating? In cars. What place is most conducive to introspection? The motorway.

On such roads which are abstractions of roads I would progress towards knowledge. As they are plain and always the same, skirting towns and flattening the landscapes they cross, they teach people that what’s important is purification.

Looking Inwards on the Autobahn
Charles Dantzig

Found in:
The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: 2: From Colette to Marie NDiaye

Everyone Lives in a Circle – Jafar Pahani Interview

JP: In my view, everyone in the world lives within a circle, either due to economic, political, cultural, or family problems or traditions. The radius of the circle can be smaller or larger. Regardless of their geographic location, they live within a circle. I hope that if this film has any kind of effect on anyone, it would be to make them try to expand the size of the radius.

DW: While the film treats women, what are the consequences for the men in their lives?

JP: Iranian society, particularly in comparison to this part of the world, is a man’s world pretty much. The radius might be marginally larger for men. The purpose of this film was not to be against men or to be a feminist film—it’s a film about humanity. Men and women are part of humanity. In the film I never showed any kind of maltreatment or anger from men. For example, we see the women afraid of the police. This may or may not be real. When the police are shown in long shot, they’re menacing. However, in medium shot, you can see the policeman has a kind face. And he asks the woman: ‘Do you need any help?’ And also in the scene when the woman was buying a shirt for her fiancé, the store owner measured it against the soldier’s chest. And at the end of the film, when they’re in the paddywagon … throughout the film, every single woman wanted to have a smoke. Once they’re in the paddywagon, there is this humanitarian atmosphere.

Joanne Laurier: Is your point that the army and the police are just made up of ordinary people?

JP: In all my films, you never see an evil character, male or female. I believe everyone is a good person. It could be the result of social difficulties. Even the most dangerous criminal has that sense of humanity. At the bottom he’s still a human. It doesn’t mean that a criminal shouldn’t be punished just because social difficulties have driven him to it. He’s guilty because he didn’t try to expand the radius of his circle.

An interview with Jafar Panahi, director of The Circle

Working with the Quotidian Materials of Life

“The core insight I received from my second reading of Office Politics was that, if I thought I could stand at one remove from my place of employment and regard it as a kind of diorama or spectacle, I was deluding myself. As Rilke wrote in a very different context, all this seems to require us. I had fallen into the quotidian and was going to have to work with the materials at hand, pedestrian and unpromising as they might seem, to make of my life and career something meaningful. This was no small gift of self-knowledge to receive from a novel.”

Office Politics
Wilfred Sheed
From the foreword by Gerald Howard

In William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, “seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.” The Bard’s use doesn’t make it clear that quotidian comes from a Latin word, quotidie, which means “every day.” But as odd as it may seem, his use of quotidian is just a short semantic step away from the “daily” adjective sense. Some fevers come and go but occur daily; in medical use, these are called “quotidian fevers” or simply “quotidians.” Poor Orlando is afflicted with such a “fever” of love.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quotidian

Sometimes Vague Language is Better

Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled. This is why poets will often use metaphors and contradictory language; it is a meaningful inarticulateness. Vague language is the appropriate vessel for speaking from a position of uncertainty.

If you value what’s fun, what’s interesting, what’s curious, what’s creative—those concepts have imprecise edges. Applying these terms always involves dealing with fuzz and unclarity. But you should feel uncertain when you’re in unknown territory. Fuzzy values are appropriate when you don’t yet know everything about what’s important. They encourage exploration, because they don’t have sharp edges. Fuzzy values build in an open-minded attitude.

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game
C. Thi Nguyen

Intuition and Intellect – Ingmar Bergman Quote

Intuition, says Ingmar Bergman, is the essence of creativity and the foundation of his unparalleled success as a film maker.

”I make all my decisions on intuition,” said the 62-year-old Swedish director. ”But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”

In a rare public appearance, Mr. Bergman spoke today of success and failure, creativity and laziness to drama students at Southern Methodist University. A Lazy Man at Heart

”I’m very, very lazy,” conceded Mr. Bergman. ”I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing. Writing is boring, very boring, and it takes so much patience.”

”You feel that this is going to be the best scene ever made and you want to protect it from others,” he added. But the magic dissipates and is replaced by tedium when it comes time to write, a task Mr. Bergman clearly disdains despite his success at it.

May 8, 1981

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/08/movies/ingmar-bergman-confides-in-students.html

Eternity is the Eve of Something – Chesterton Quote

To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.

Heretics
Gilbert K Chesterton

Restaurant Manager as Revelation

His favorite was the manageress of the restaurant, a handsome blonde with a very sweet motherly smile, about thirty years old. Bergmann approved of her highly. “I have only to look at her,” he told me,” to know that she is satisfied. Deeply satisfied. Some man has made her happy. For her, there is no longer any search. She has found what we are all looking for. She understands all of us. She does not need books, or theories, or philosophy, or priests. She understands Michelangelo, Beethoven, Christ, Lenin—even Hitler. And she is afraid of nothing, nothing.… Such a woman is my religion.”

The manageress would always have a special smile for Bergmann when we came in; and, during the meal, she would walk over to our table and ask if everything was all right. “Everything is all right, my darling,” Bergmann would reply; “thanks to God, but chiefly to you. You restore our confidence in ourselves.”

I don’t know exactly what the manageress made of this, but she smiled, in an amused, kindly way. She really was very nice. “You see?” Bergmann would turn to me, after she had gone. “We understand each other perfectly.”

Prater Violet: A Novel
Christopher Isherwood

Best Books I Read in 2025 that Weren’t Published in 2025

Selections mine. Comments via Amazon. In order of publication date.

The Night of the Gun
David Carr
Publication Date: August 5, 2008

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” David Carr’s riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can’t write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader’s trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it’s hard to love David Carr–sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it–will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls–makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. –Brad Thomas Parsons

Planet Funny
Ken Jennings
Publication Date: May 29, 2018

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
Eugenia Cheng
Publication Date: September 11, 2018

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can’t be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic — for example, emotion — is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.

The History of Bones
John Lurie
Publication Date: August 17, 2021

In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment.

Historians Point of View – David Blight Quote

I also like this little passage, to just put into your craw, about any History course, about any interpretation. And of course I’m going to have a point of view at times in this course; all historians do. Don’t even listen to a historian if he or she doesn’t have a point of view. None of us are blank slates. None of us can just tell it like it was–“stop interpreting, please.” But I always try to remember William James’ passage in one of his Pragmatism essays, an essay I think that should be required for U.S. citizenship. If I ruled the world you’d have to read this for U.S. citizenship. In it, James says, “The greatest enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths.” It’s as though James is saying, “damn, every time I think I really know something–that’s the truth–along comes some other possible truth and it screws it up.” Why can’t history just be settled? Enough already. If it was, it wouldn’t be any fun; if it was it wouldn’t be interesting; if it was it wouldn’t be good for business either.

HIST 119
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877: Lecture 1 Transcript
Professor David Blight