[MD] Stacks

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> Since Pirsig lifts his stack from the organizational structure of most
> university curricula it is obviously very useful.

[Magnus]
Don't know if you read my lashing out at Marsha over that word "useful" 
the other day. It's sooo defensive! You can make it mean whatever you 
want it to mean. So what you say is actually nothing. You only put as 
much faith in the levels as you want, and when it doesn't suit you 
anymore, you can just disregard it. That's "useless" in my book.

[Krimel]
Odd that on a forum littered with pragmatists you would be uncomfortable
with using usefulness as a criteria.

> [Krimel]
> Not to belabor the point but the creation of "stacks" is arbitrary, done
> with some specific aim in mind. Magnus's notion of a universal stack seems
> farfetched.

[Magnus]
What I call the "universal stack" would not be this most general stack, 
but that general stack adapted to our universal physics.

[Krimel]
I don't know what you are getting at here. I also don't see much difference
in your usage between the terms stack and level.

> [Krimel]
> But Pirsig's claim that the levels are discrete and independent just
doesn't
> fly. Despite Magnus's hope that they can somehow be made more discrete, I
> don't see that working out well. Look for example, at the OSI model in
> computer science. Even at the first layer of the stack, the physical layer
> there are blurred distinctions. What for example is BIOS. Is it software?
It
> is hardcoded into a chip and while modern BIOSs are over writable the
> original BIOSs were not. And there is lots of "code" physically embedded
> within processors and other computer chipsets.

[Magnus]
You have to come up with a better example to wreck my hopes. Of course 
BIOS is software. And microcode embedded in CPUs is also software. And 
as soon it's software, we can use the computer logic stack to analyse 
it. Of course it can make it easier to analyse the rest of the computer 
if we disregard microcode, or BIOS. But then we can simply change the 
purpose of the stack and limit ourselves to higher functions of the 
computer, but then of course we need to be really sure that the lower 
level functions work as specified.

A borderline I can think of is hardcoded, logic gate arrays where the 
output is not really computed by software but by lots of logic gates, 
but in that case we can simply not include that gate array in the stack, 
not in the software logic stack anyway.

Try to come up with a really good example from the universal stack. I 
can understand you doubting my big aims if you get stuck on a BIOS. But 
I applaud you taking up a new example. We see way too little of that 
here, only old replays from the books over and over again.

[Krimel]
I'll stick with this one a little longer before moving on. BIOS chips are
one example of firmware which as its name implies lies on the fuzzy
borderland between hardware and software. As the wiki article on firmware
confirms: "There are no strict boundaries between firmware and software, as
both are quite loose descriptive terms." So sure you could insist that it is
software or you could insist that it is hardware but in either case your
decision is arbitrary and not forced by some underlying necessity.

> [Krimel]
> Pirsig's example of the platypus comes to mind. Here was an exemplar that
> did not fit readily into the biology stack. Rather than throw out taxonomy
> on metaphysical grounds biologists just tinkered with the design of their
> stack and voila the platypus fit in nicely.

[Magnus]
The thing is, if we chose our level borders carefully, and make the two 
levels orthogonal and mutually irrelevant, platypus kinds of unfitting 
things become impossible.

[Krimel]
Beyond specific example of fuzzy borders there is a certain futility in the
very act of attempting to render continuous reality, discrete. This is the
problem of percepts and concepts which I described to dmb yesterday. Here is
a quote from William James that is especially telling in this case:

"Although, when you have a continuum given, you can make cuts and dots in
it, ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will not give you your
continuum back. The rationalist mind admits this; but instead of seeing that
the fault is with the concepts, it blames the perceptual flux."

All you are doing in attempting to force discrete boundaries on continuous
processes is piling arbitrary definition upon more arbitrary definition. In
the end all you are doing is creating an endless playground for
disagreements.