October 24th, 2024
Why hasn’t the Great Dichotomy been widely recognized? Over 2,000 years ago, Greek philosophers recognized the difference between what they called Substance and Becoming, and ever since then, philosophers have argued about the roles that Substance and Becoming (sometimes they use different words) in defining reality. But nobody has paid much attention to this argument (other than philosophers) because, well, we all know what reality is, right?
However, while philosophers have expended gigawatts of brilliant thinking on this problem, the empirical approach I have taken — noting that many different fields of thought have an Object side and a Process side — does not seem to have attracted much attention. Perhaps it just isn’t that important to most people. But if you’re going to design software, you damn well better understand this concept, for reasons that will become apparent on this page.
Here’s the killer problem: our perceptions are innately biased towards Object and against Process. We can see Objects with our eyes, but none of our senses directly perceive Processes.
Consider what happens in your mind when you regard a tree: You see the leaves, the branches, and the trunk; perhaps the roots have been exposed and you can see them, too. But those are the Objects of the tree. The Processes taking place inside the tree are all invisible. There’s no way for you to know about them from your own direct experience.
We can’t help but see Objects; our brains automatically interpret the visual scene as Objects:
Our language reflects this: we have about 600 words for nouns, pronouns, and the adjectives that describe them; these words describe Objects. We have only about half as many words — 300 — to describe verbs and adverbs, which describe processes. Bias!
Our bias shows up in each of the fields of study I described previously. Isaac Newton nailed down the basic laws of physics for particles in 1687; we didn’t start thinking seriously about waves until nearly 200 years later. Similarly, in economics, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, which dealt with services almost exclusively in terms of labor. Karl Marx did much the same in Das Kapital in 1867. The role of services was slowly developed during the 19th century. Military science showed the same bias towards Object; almost everything written about military science prior to the 19th century obsessed over assets and paid little heed to operations. The Roman physician Galen wrote the first treatise on medical science nearly 2000 years ago, but he concentrated on anatomy and disease; he wrote almost nothing about human physiology. It wasn’t until William Harvey published his discovery of the circulation of the blood that doctors began to think about physiology.
But the computer lives at the other end of the Object-Process dichotomy. The heart of the computer is the CPU: the Central Processing Unit.
Thus, we live our mental lives at one end of the Object-Process dichotomy and the computer lives at the opposite end:
This is why we are doing such a lousy job of creating software: we don’t understand computers because we think in terms of Objects and the computer thinks in terms of Processes. We’re like a shark out of water — or a tiger IN the water.
The moral of this story: The computer is a Process-machine, and we are Object-thinkers. That’s why we fail.