Musings on hierarchies

Throwing away the assumption that absolutes exist brings about an opening to a perspective from which we observe the transitive nature of knowledge and things in general. This notion is perhaps more apparent in the context of culture.

Generally accepted norms in one’s culture might be deemed insane in another’s. What are norms anyway? Looking at a grid of evenly distributed squares, one would say that boxes lined from left to right are rows, and those lined from top to bottom are columns. Well, if the same grid is turned about an angle of 90 degrees, columns become rows, and rows become columns. Rows and columns are merely labels. Nothing more than labels subject to mutation when the context of observation switches.

Parameters are agents of mutation. Not entirely. They draw things in and away from contexts. They alter behavior. And any system that strives to be scalable and modular exposes an interface for this kind of behavior. A bottle is only a bottle. If it doesn’t expose an opening for filling, it remains just another object with perhaps no real value. In fact, it ceases being a bottle. But with that opening, it can become a bottle of water, of juice, anything. The agent of change here is the content with which it is being filled. The parametric nature of that cylindrical object makes it usable, thus valuable. Parameters are not just agents of change. They are agents of enhancement. They are context switchers.

The aforementioned notion of knowledge being transitive can be further explored by examining the biased nature of humans. It’s usually our brain’s quests to lower cognitive stress by resorting to pre-existing beliefs. It’s merely an optimization technique. One interesting side effect of this behavior is knowledge mapping. The brain tries to leverage what it already knows whilst exploring new territories. This enables one to bring in a thinking framework from a previous discipline into an entirely unfamiliar one. In fact, Object Oriented Programming in all its glory strives to mirror the characteristics of naturally occurring objects and entities. Programmers are structuring their programs to mirror how they think of concrete objects in the real world. I bet you haven’t read a piece on the browser’s Document Object Model without a reference to trees.