a tale of two systems

«There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on
the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen
with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was
clearer than crystal to the lords of *the State preserves* of loaves
and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.» -- Charles
Dickens (my emphasis)

Here I'm thinking of two very different sorts of systems. On the one
hand, Drupal... known to be a somewhat chaotic and hard to learn
system for building websites. On the other, Mathematics, also
reputedly hard to learn, but considered by many to be "elegant" and
somehow tied up with the foundations of the known, and perhaps even
the unknown, universe per se.

What (on earth) do these things have to do with each other? Let's
imagine Drupal evolving, say 10, 20, 30 years into the future (...
please, I know this is the *time of incredulity*, but bear with me at
least another 2 minutes!) -- along with the Web as a whole, of course.
That figure of 10, 20, 30 years into the future should be enough to
whet our imaginations.

And mathematics in the same time...? Ah, now perhaps you start to see
what I'm getting at!

* * *

What is this dream we call human life? We are stuck with our sensoria
and our ambitions, our drives and our predilections... in short with
our humanity, and it's all too obvious limitations.

When we consider how we take this whole bogged down morass and
actually try to *relate* to one another... try to *convey meanings*...
or perhaps to satisfy ourselves *in private* for a bare moment...
things really do become endlessly complicated. At the present time,
our models of human existence -- like Drupal (or any stand-in, but I
particularly like this system as an example, since it is so manifestly
a 'cybernetic system' in the sense of NORBERT WEINER, i.e. in the
sense of being a system expressly designed for facilitating "the human
use of human beings") -- these models, are, after all, rather shabby.

Whether you call it "understanding" or "operationalising", the Tin
Man-cum-Frankenstein's monster of /homo casses/ (or /homo nassa/?)
whose body (sensorum) has been replaced with machinery... is, as the
metaphor indicates, nothing new at all. He/she/it has existed at
least since the dawn of human language, albeit in nascent form.

But what we see today is an increasingly detailed "clockworking" of
/homo casses/, getting down down down in its atomicity to the level of
"human moments". At the same time, our mathematical understanding is
increasing, as well, slowly (but less slowly than before), and in its
own characteristically misunderstood way.

The relevant philosophical idea is that mathematics is *our model*
(not the model *of* us, but the model we *use*). Some would say
"language" here instead of "mathematics", but what is mathematics but
a stripped-down and decorous human language?

Now (glossing over those details) - smash - the singularity I'm
predicting is a future "mathematicised" version of Drupal (or again,
please, bring in some appropriate stand-in...) that merges the exo
model with the endo model. This means: that we will think in code, we
will talk in code, we will commune in code, etc. -- and by "code" I
mean something that machines understand just as well as humans. The
test is whether our virtual/real (does it matter?) environments are
built of the stuff.

At present, that sounds dystopic and horrible, because the computer
environments we are used to are so dehumanising. And yet, we love
them, we are drawn to them like moths to the light, because -- this is
the punch line -- in these systems, we see, narcissistically, what we
are. That is, we see as if in a watery pool -- a reflection of our
"machine nature". And this, of course, spells death for human nature.