Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences

Book Description

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, "Software and Mind" discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a neat hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple structures. In our software-related affairs, particularly, we attempt to reduce complex real-world problems to neat structures of data and operations. Ultimately, by restricting ourselves to mechanistic software, we impoverish all aspects of our life that depend on software.

Andrei Sorin

Andrei Sorin lives in Toronto, Canada, where he has been working as an independent consultant in software development, support, and research for nearly forty years.