RE: VMs: could it not be a hoax (I would like it not to be it)

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

At 10:48 21/05/2003 -0400, Larry Roux wrote:
> Personally, I find people sending suggestions/caveats very helpful ("Did 
> you think of how your solution might fail in case b?" - "Your attack is 
> interesting, but flawed in that ....").  There are a lot of great minds on 
> this list.  It seems such a shame that they are all being used as 
> individual units rather than some powerful network.

As a long-standing (well... long-sitting, mostly) computer geek, I 
completely understand where you're coming from here. One early thing I did 
was try to build up a list of challenges, kind of trying consciously to 
coordinate/focus efforts in the way you broadly describe.

However... there's something basically wrong with the VMS: for want of a 
better description, it's not an Enlightenment-era artefact, and doesn't 
seem to respond to Enlightenment-era thinking.

I've been researching abstract problem-solving recently, and I may have 
something of an explanation of (though not quite an answer to) this issue.

I believe that the specialisation of modernist thinking has most people 
trapped in uni-modal (or discourse-limited) thought-patterns ("logics") - 
and so are locked within the prisons of different language games, which 
seem largely to have been derived from a single pre-Enlightenment mindset. 
(Postmodernism (specifically Lyotard) only serves to point this out, not to 
suggest an answer.)

So: when we now try to bridge between different discourses (each with their 
own internal logic), there are two methods - the *easy* way (which is 
simply to appeal to the logic of the shared parent), and the *hard(*way 
(which is to form a composite logic based on a synthesis of the two as they 
have become).

However, I think that the VMS was created specifically to frustrate 
problem-solving of our discourses' ancestral proto-discourse: so the easy 
way simply won't work... we'll have to do it the hard way. However, while 
the hard way has been described in principle (I'm thinking specifically of 
Wolfgang Welsch's "transversal reason" here), it hasn't yet emerged in 
practice.

So (digression over) I think that the list really *is* functioning as a 
powerful network - but that the mode of thought it's trying to use is only 
just emerging, and is really quite hard to put into words.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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