Re: Software Engineering and Dreamers

[Craig Franck <clfranck@worldnet.att.net>]

fwf27775@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu (Fritz W Feuerbacher) wrote:
>Craig Franck (clfranck@worldnet.att.net) wrote:
>
>: (I don't think calculus is "technology" but represented an advancement of
>: mathematics when it was invented by Newton (or that Leibnitz fellow)). 
>
>: So, a NAND gate is not technology, but transistors and the ability to 
>
>Isn't "technology" a relatively new word?

I would imagine. The concept of technology and its diffusion through
society started in Europe in the 16th century. This is from "The 
Reenchantment of the World" by Morris Berman: "Technology was hardly
new in the sixteenth century, of course, but the level of its diffusion
and the insistence on its being a mode of cognition were novel, and
these events inevitably began to have an impact on scientists and 
thinkers. No longer restricted to such devices as catapults and water
mills, technology became an essential aspect of the mode of production,
and, as such, it began to play a corresponding role in human conscious-
ness. Once technology and the economy became linked in the human mind,
the mind started to think in mechanical terms, to see mechanism in 
nature. Thought processes themselves were becoming mechanico-mathematico-
experimental, that is to say, "scientific". The merger of scholar and 
craftsman, geometry and technology, was now occuring within the 
individual human mind."

[He is a very interesting author and is sort of a scientific philosoper.
He feels that people today are quite literally hypnotized into believing
a view of the world that is false, and cannot be maintained for more than
a few more hundred years before it is replaced with something else, or
we annihilate the planet and ourselves along with it. Basically, every-
thing was fine for about 50,000 years or so, and in the last 3,000 years
all hell has broken loose. Needless to say, his work is not for everybody.]
:-)

-- 
Craig
clfranck@worldnet.att.net
Manchester, NH
BBN has the brightest bit-heads on the planet. -- David Goodtree