Differance is Differing and Deferring, i.e. the relation of the supplement in writing to the work itself, like in the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind where the preface written at the end changes the meaning of the whole work. Differance I call Hyper Being. It is the Third Meta-level of Being after Pure Being (Parmenides, Stasis) and Process Being (Heraclitus, Dynamism, Becoming) and prior to the fourth kind of Being which Merleau-Ponty calls Wild Being in The Visible and the Invisible. In that unfinished work Merleau-Ponty calls Hyper Being the Hyper-Dialectic between Heidegger’s Monolithic combination of Pure and Process Being which are seen as equiprimoridal and Sartre’s Nothingness which is the antimony. We see differance in the Paul Simon song where he sings about slip-sliding away. Differance is always sliding away from us so we cannot hold it in mind as something determinate, either in space or time, dynamism or stasis, or in any other dualism. Hyper Being is the difference that makes a difference between Pure Being and Process Being, the differences between kinds of Being must also be a different kind of Being. If Pure Being is present-at-hand being-in-the-world and Process Being is ready-to-hand being-in-the-world, then Hyper Being is the “in-hand” the expansion of being-in-the-world that comes from bearing new affordances. Where Pure Being has the modality of pointing according to Merleau-Ponty, and Process Being has the modality of grasping, then we take it that Levinas’ bearing which is Beyond monolithic Being is the modality of Hyper Being. Best example of the meta-levels of Being are the meta-levels of learning in Bateson’s Steps to the Ecology of Mind.

It is an important concept because it is a distinction that Plato makes in the Timaeus where he calls it the third kind of being. We forgot that in our tradition until Heidegger rediscovered it by accident, and Derrida took it up to make something interesting of Heidegger’s discovery. Heidegger did not follow up on the idea of -B-e-i-n-g- (crossed out). See John Sallis Chorology for more details about the role the third kind of Being plays in the Timaeus.

http://bit.ly/A8l9OI

http://www.quora.com/Jacques-Derrida-philosopher/What-is-Differance

Differance = Differing and Deferring = Plato’s Third Kind of Being in the Timaeus. We just forgot it was there in the Western tradition until it was rediscovered by Heidegger as -B-e-i-n-g- (crossed out). See John Sallis Chorology.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-a-simple-definition-of-the-philosophy-of-Derrida

Time is . . . . .

Time and Being, Being and Time . . . . Heidegger wrote works by both of these titles.

Would it shock you to find out that time has no Being?

Dogen Kaigen talks about ExistenceTime.

Kant thought that he could achieve objective unity though the schematization of time. He said that it was though the unity of time that objects attained their objective unity.

This is similar to Husserl’s idea of the Noematic Nucleus being the object as phenomena seen from all sides, which is the external coherence, and the dual of the internal coherence of the essence. He said that our apperception of the essence was an intuition.

Kant said that happened though the imagination.

The basic idea is that as you move around the object and see it from different perspectives that it takes time, and one is seeing it on the background of the world horizon, so you don’t need bracketing, as in Husserl’s early phenomenology. Heidegger made use of this breakthrough in Being and Time. However, there is also essence intuition where one grasps the internal coherence of the object as constraints on its attributes directly. This takes time too but less time if you have already schematized the object.

Now Essence is suppose to be tied to the Substance of the Object, and that substance’s persistence is seen as Being. But Being is more than that, it is an illusory gloss on the object that produces an abstract idea of it, and ideas are something different from essences, which are not simple ideas. In fact the difference between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand is this difference seen as two modalities of being-in-the-world. It is the difference between Pure Static Parmenidian Being and Process Dynamic Heraclitian Becoming. But where Ideas tend toward unity via the look, essence perception tends toward totality though circumspective concern, i.e. the glance. Thus these are extreme opposites tending toward the duals of either unity or totality. Notice that the insight into totality gives one access to the essence, while insight into unity gives one access to the idea.

The nondual between these two extremes is wholeness. Wholeness is not captured by any of the meta-levels of Being. Hyper and Wild being go too far, while Pure and Process Being do not go far enough. We are speaking here of Primal Archetypal Wholeness.

Primal Archetypal Wholeness is found as nondual ExistenceTime. This means that Western philosophers never reach time, but are merely caught in the veils of Maya, Dunya, Dukkha, etc. Time isn’t. What there is of time exists only. The whole idea that Kant has that you can get the unity of the object out of the schematization of time, seems pretty far fetched, especially since he did not have the ready-to-hand as a distinction at hand.

It is only a few steps from this that leads to the idea of Heterochrony, i.e. the state of affairs With ExistenceTime that utterly destroys metaphysics.

http://bit.ly/zpwYaF

http://www.quora.com/What-is-time

Negative information?

There is negative energy, negative mass (anti-matter), negative entropy, so what is negative information? Lies? Secrets?

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-unsolved-problems-in-information-theory

A good Quora question goes through states prior to its being in the initial state on Quora which is in the mind of the questioner.

1. What have I always wanted to know but was afraid to ask?
2. Is my question inherently biased, if so take out the bias
3. Does my question have assumptions that others would feel are unwaranted or uncounded, if so either identify the assumptions or take them out of the question.
4. Does my question have a problematic, or context, or come out of a specific situation that I need to explain in order for it to be meaninful to others.
5. Have I written down what drives me to ask the question, if not then include that in the clarifying information attached to the question.
6. Can I just look up the answer on the web or wikipedia, if so don’t ask it but rather go to the sources that already exist.
7. Do I have other related questions, if so write them down and figure out which one needs to be asked first.
8. Is my question relevant, significant, meaninful, if not don’t ask it.
9. Is my question something that others would be interested in also, if not then ask someone directly via email, twitter, namesake.com or some other service.
10. Is my question superficial, obvious, inane, or stupid, then don’t ask it on quora, but rather bother someone else who you don’t like instead.
11. Is my question deep, ultimate, meaningful, life-changing, or in some way crucial, then make sure you ask it.

Once you have formulated the question then ask whether it is in the proper form, i.e whether it is spelled correctly, has a question mark, and is not too long or too short, i.e. make sure it is a well formed sentence you would be proud of when it is answered.

Search Quora to see what other questions are related to the one which you are asking and see if it has already been asked. If so then second that other question by adding a comment to it rather than asking again with similar but different wording.

Basically you should spend as much time formulating your question as you would spend answering a question. The better the formulation of the questions the better the answers are going to be. The more time you spend making the question right, making sure it is a good question and well ordered and with appropriate context and background, the more pleasure you will get from the answers, and the more pleasure people will have answering the question who think they have an answer.

When all this has been done, then enter you question into Quora with its supporting context and references if necessary.

Wait for answers patiently. As you are waiting think about meditating, contemplating, imagining, exploring with curiosity, and do some background research of your own into the question on the Web, or by reading a good book on the subject of your question.

When the answers start coming in then read them, and think about them and consider the intrinsic production of variety by human beings, who all see things differently from you. Attempt to reconcile their answers with the way you were thinking about the question when you wrote it down. Consider other perspectives and consider the limitation of your own perspective, and what you can do to widen, or improve your own perspective.

Take the answers to heart. Those who have answered your question have invested some of their precious lifespan in attempting to give you knowledge, or at least information if not wisdom about the topic of your question, so you should respect their efforts by thinking about their answers.

Don’t answer your own question right away. If you asked it just in order to make your own point, then try to restrain yourself and let others answer first, and then put your own answer as a response to the answers you get. It is best of course that you don’t answer your own question.

After the answers come in consider summarizing the answers on the Wiki page after a sufficient time has passed and a good number of answers have accumulated.

Then consider asking follow up questions, which are then linked to the original question, either in your own answer or in the comments to the question. However, all questions should remain comprehensible if they are encountered on their own.

Engage with others who are answering the question either in the comments or on Namesake.com.

Then given what you have learned from asking your question and getting hopefully good answers go on to ask your next question.

Bateson says that there are meta-levels of learning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind

The first meta-level above knowing what you know is what we all know as learning, and learning is based on the asking and answering of questions. The better your questions the more you will learn, and know matter how knowledgeable one is there is still a lot to learn, because knowledge, especially these days is endless. It is gained mostly by reading and thinking, and then questioning those who know.

The second meta-level of learning is “learning to learn” which means there are different ways of learning, and everytime you learn a new way of learning then you increase your becoming-in-the-world, i.e. you become a deeper human being with greater potential to learn, and thus you become potentially more knowledgeable.

The third meta-level of learning is learning-to-learn-to-learn. This is learning how to learn new ways learning. It is equivalent to making paradigm shifts in your understanding, because a new vista opens up when you learn how to learn differently. Say you learn by reading good books, and then you learn to diagram the ideas in those books, in order to understand them better. By learning to make diagrams of the concepts in books you have learned a new way of learning. But say you come to understand that mind-maps is only one way of diagramming, and it is better to adapt the way of diagramming to the content of the of the concepts being diagrammed, and you realize that the symbols that you use in your diagram have semiotic meaning themselves which you can also interrogate because they say something about your own thinking about concepts, then you have encountered the third meta-level of learning, where your learning how to learn itself has adapted within the learning process.

The fourth meta-level of learning is “learning-to-learn-to-learn-to-learn” which Bateson thought was the highest level of learning that he likened to achieving enlightenment, where your whole way of understanding is transformed such that your knowledge and comprehension is enhanced in a complete change by apprehending an insight. Getting an insight into the way your mind itself works, and learning to look at things in a completely different way, so that ones actual thinking process changes is attained at this meta-level of learning.

The fifth meta-level of learning is where one confronts non-knowledge, forgetfulness, oblivion, the clearing and openness in Being, and where learning itself becomes a singularity. At that point learning itself becomes a form of knowledge which has intrinsic wisdom.

When you are asking questions and learning from the answers then if you are wise you will be attempting to scale these meta-levels of learning so you can attain the various meta-levels of knowledge which are aligned with the meta-levels of existence, which are correlated to the meta-levels of Being. In this process you learn the nature of yourself and your worldview and the relation between the two, and you become who you really are, rather than merely being a phantom of yourself, because according to Plato, we recollect knowledge, it does not come from the outside but from inside ourselves, and those who give use their knowledge are only midwives like Socrates to our own intellectual and spiritual rebirth when we ourselves must pursue, because no one can give us what is already within ourselves, which is true, real, identical and present knowledge that is lost in oblivion or just forgotten, When we climb the meta-levels of learning we are approaching the meta-levels of knowledge which are the truly perduring things in our experience, which the meta-levels of Being only pretend to be.

When you ask questions of others you are actually interrogating yourself, and learning what is inside of you which comes out in your questions and your reactions to the unexpected answers. Questions of others are the key to self-discovery. As Hegel said the only way to self-consciousness is through the comprehension of otherness, and it is in this interaction that Absolute Spirit is forged.

We need to learn questioning, and also question learning. We question learning when we understand that the way we are taught in schools is not what we need to do to actually learn things in our lives that will increase our useful knowledge and will help us live in our lifeworld. But the alternative to questioning learning is to learn how to question, because the deeper our questions that we pose to others and ourselves at the same time, the deeper we become and the more likely that we will go beyond knowledge into the realm of wisdom, and then perhaps insight, and possibility even achieving self-realization. A good way to embark on that journey is to begin by attempting to ask good questions about the right subjects, in an orderly way, in order to understand ones own fate and thus attain the sources of ourselves in order to approach the root of our unique human existence.

http://bit.ly/zabZWP

http://www.quora.com/What-stages-does-a-good-Quora-question-go-through

It is interesting that there is a question answered by Quora staff about good answers but no such question about good questions. The answers are not the problem here on Quora, but I think this shows that the staff is not looking at the problem of the questions being sub par. So following up on the post about good answers I thought I would give a similar answer about good questions.

A good question is rooted in a problematic. That is to say it is not something you pull out of the air. I get the picture that people get on Quora and they suddenly feel as if they must ask a question, so they think uha….What is Existence? Typing the first thing that comes into their head. And of course many of those questions are full of assumptions and biases and are really not true questions that are worth answering.

For instance, just taking a random example:

“Why are Republicans not as intelligent as Democrats, on average?”

But people like me take these crazy and seemingly worthless questions that pretend to be philosophical and go to town with them because they are just begging to have substantial answers just to show how ludicrous they are. The disparity between the questions and the answers are somewhat laughable.

So how do you ask a good question?

First you have to know something to ask a worthwhile question. So the first thing is to attempt to learn something, by reading, living, exploring, all the good things that make life worth living in what passes for civilization.

It is not true that there is no stupid questions. We see them here on Quora all the time, they are questions that reek of bias and assumptions and actually have no other content. These are stupid questions. And they create a lot of clutter and they are part of the nihilism of quora. So one way to spruce up your questions is to take out all the bias and ungrounded assumptions that are pointless. They merely show your ignorance and that is really not something you want to show in public. Just because Quora in their wisdom decided to make questions anonymous is no excuse. It is still you that people are thinking about when they see a really dumb question that is yours.

But what can we do, if we actually want to ask a decent question?

Well once we get rid of the biases and unfounded assumptions then it helps to have a real question in mind. In other words it is a good idea if you really want to know the answer. Genuine questions have a ring of truth about them or at least earnestness. So just ask yourself if you really care about the answer to the question, and don’t ask any that you could care less if someone answered. Even simple questions that are genuine are readily accepted by those who know. In other words if you genuinely want to know something, and ask a straight forward question about it, people will be generous with their knowledge. Knowledge is something painfully acquired ( as in the book by Lo Chen Shun), but no matter how one has struggled to attain it, everyone with genuine knowledge is happy to share what they have discovered, because everyone was ignorant once, no one was born with knowledge. And so everyone knows what it is like not to know, and they are happy to share what ever they have learned, if they are wise as well as knowledgeable.

Now once we have gotten rid of as many biases that we can, or are aware of, and attempted to free our questions from unnecessary assumptions, and we really want to know the answer to our question, then the next thing that helps is to have a problematic. In other words good questions don’t just pop out of thin air, but are in fact born from an exploration, or intellectual adventure, or experience, or suffering, or something going on inside us that drives us toward knowledge of some specific domain of knowledge. So the next thing is to figure out what the problematic of your question is and to state that as part of the context. Quora helps us to do that by providing a place to give more information about the question. But also you can write a post that talks about what you are passionate about learning and why. If you go to the trouble to offer this context people will see a lot more in your question, rather than thinking that it is merely some passing thought you might have had. If you are thinking about something yourself, and you ask a question at the limits of your knowledge, then that is the best way to advance your thinking, but it is difficult to guage where someone is coming from and going to from one line questions with no context. They are just as bad as one line answers with no explanation, rationale, or point worth making.

Now if you want to know what your problematic is just think about what fascinates you. What ever that is, is the central vortex of your problematic, no matter how refined your approach to the subject might be. It is best if you consider yourself as being on an intellectual adventure and attempting to go beyond the horizons of your thought. Then when you are pushing that boundary is when you are most likely to ask a deep question, that is universal. Universality for humans flows from their particularity. Humans are variety produces as Stafford Beer has said in The Heart of Enterprise. Thus everyone will have a different point of view, and interpretation of questions and answers. But it is that peculiarity that comes from this natural variety production that takes us deeper into our humanity, and that is what good questions are bound to do for us.

Now there is a recognition of the intelligence of a good question. A good question makes us think. It makes us stretch our own viewpoints, assumptions, biases, and problematics by recognizing the variety which we have together. As Heidegger said thinking is thanking. In other words we thank the person who has asked a genuine or even deep question by answering it, and through that we recognize kindred spirits who are on intellectual adventures of their own, and want to go beyond the horizons of their current habits and plateaus of knowledge into unknown realms of deeper knowledge.

Now the next step is to realize that an answer can be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of a polemic, and a good place to have those realtime conversations is Namesake.com, which supports realtime conversation. So it is good if one can engage the others who are interested in a question in Dialogue. Comments here on quora don’t really cut it. They are pretty lame. But I guess it is better than no interaction between the members of Quora. Of course, there are always personal messages as well. It is best to make contact with those with whom you share an interest.

We occasionally see follow up questions here. And in fact it is through follow up questions that matters are clarified. Sometimes comments are used for this purpose. And what I do is if the answer to a comment is worth while I include it in my original answer. That way the answer does not get lost in the comments section which few look at. It would be good if one could link questions. But the only way to really do that is to put links in the questions themselves. But the person who is asking the follow-up question has no place to put that link as
Quora is now constructed. This is poor design in my view. But what is needed is for the follow up questions and answers to form a braid of linked questions and answers, like a thread in email. This kind of braid of dialogue consisting of questions and answers is called a dialectic. We see these in Plato’s Socratic Dialogues. But the best model of it is the Skepticism of Sextus Empiricus. That school developed what can be thought of as the Buddhism of Q&A which in Buddhism is called Skillful Means. I won’t go into that here but Hegel was influenced by Heraclitus and Skepticism in his development of the Dialectic of Sublation (Aufhebung). Hegel said that moving through us is an Absolute Spirit which was an expression of Absolute Reason. It is that which we embody according to him when we partake in genuine discourse. Genuine discourse about what we care most about and what fascinates us in our pursuit of knowledge on our intellectual adventure should be the driving force behind the questions we ask and the answers we give.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism

Sextus Empiricus

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sextus_empiricus02.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextus_Empiricus

Pyrrho
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhonism

Briefly the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, Pyrhoism, has as its goal to keep the conversation going. the Skeptic finds peace in the ongoing conversation and will do anything to keep it going including playing the devil’s advocate, i.e. say things he himself does not believe just to egg others on to deeper and more conversation about the topic under discussion. The goal of Skepticism is to keep the conversation going at all costs, even if the means leads to nihilism. Because he recognizes that is the way that everyone continues to learn the most and to mature into deeper knowledge though mutual instruction.

http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-good-question-on-Quora-look-like

As far as I know, this question is unanswerable as stated. There are wisdom literature in both Egypt and Mesopotamia I believe and Proverbs is the reflection of this in the Bible, however whether these wisdom literature predate the bible is open to question because the copies we have of the bible are rather late. I am not familiar enough with these wisdom literature to know if the same statements are in both the bible and those literature from the two close civilizations, but even if they were then it would be a problem knowing which was the more original source because of the lateness of the Bible versions we have for Proverbs. But this is not my area of expertise. So perhaps someone will come along who knows the real answer. There may however be a book on it you might try to find, because I know this question is of interest to scholars. There may be a dissertation on it somewhere.

In general I will say this. The bible has many genres of literature within it. It is really a mini-library, and so proverbs are just another genre which was definitely popular in the Middle East in general during early times. It is not something specific to the bible, but I have never seen a study comparing the wisdom literature in the bible with that in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But one would imagine that they are very similar. But what has had the greatest impact on our understanding of the bible is the discovery of the library at Ugrit. This literature shows that the bible and heroic literature we see in Greece, and plays all differentiated out of proto-literature that was a mixture of Genras from our point of view. We also now know because of that literature that the Greek Literature derives more from Mesopotamia than from Egypt. I have seen a study on that which was very good.

So the real question, is not so much whether wisdom literature in the bible is similar to similar kinds of works in Mesopotamia or Egypt, but rather how did these genres themselves differentiate to give us something like the bible, i.e. a book containing multiple genres. What were the forces that produced this differentiation. The Ugrit material suggests that the Bible, with separated genres is rather late. However, I defer to others who know more about these things than my meager studies have turned up.

BAAL
See http://www.historywiz.com/images/neareast/baal-lg.jpg

But since I brought up Ugarit, I want to tell you my favorite story from those tales. It is about Baal, who asks the maker God whose name I forget, to build him a palace. The Maker God asks Baal if he wants a window in his palace, and Baal says yes, and in the very next line death comes in and seizes Baal and there is a life and death struggle that ensues. To me this is an incredibly significant scene. This is because Baal is essentially the same as Zeus. Zeus is a two faced God of dark clouds with thunder and lightening, i.e. who represents nihilism which is either too light or too dark. Baal is also the god of covetousness. I talk about this in my book Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void. Baal has a genealogy in Greece which is very interesting. When we realize that Baal and Zeus are the same then that Genealogy becomes even more interesting which I trace in my book. But to me the story about Baal and the window is about groundlessness. As soon as Baal asks for a window, then that gives an entry way for death and leads to his struggle with death. The window might have been for Baal to look out over his kingdom but in fact it was a weakness in his palace defenses. The fact that Zeus has two faces one dark and the other light tells me that nihilism is at the center of the Greek worldview in the form of Zeus, and the fact that Baal, the earlier Zeus was covetousness explains Zeus’s behavior, his philandering has its root in covetousness. And in the bible it specifically says you should not covet your neighbors wife.So as we already know the Jewish faith was anti-Baal and this comes out by the specific denial of covetousness. But also we see in Baal this acting out of the problem of groundlessness. To see what is outside the palace you must create a weakness in it, and any kink in the defenses allows death in and leads to a struggle for life. If we think of Baal’s palace as a bit of technology, then what we see is that this bit of technology, the palace for a god, is fragile, by exactly what makes it something with a view, i.e. an important affordance, to be able to see outside. Nietzsche and Heidegger both point out that
technology is connected to nihilism and to fragility and ultimately groundlessness. In this story we can see that these concerns can be seen to go way back but this only becomes when we realize that both cultures had a maker god who builds things for the other gods, and this maker gods contraptions sometimes get out of hand, for instance in the case of Pandora’s box. But even more profoundly, it is when the maker god makes a home for Baal that a choice is given to Baal which leads to the hole in the wall of the dwelling of the God and that place of looking out on ones kingdom is precisely the point of entry of death and thus the groundlessness of the entire structure.

Zeus http://blogoscoped.com/files/zeus.jpg
Thetis Appeals to Zeus (by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1811)

Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism is a key book for understanding the nature of the Western Worldview. Both Heidegger and Nietzsche make Nihilism a center piece of their philosophies. Rosen pursues the nature of nihilism by contrasting the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein as Nihilistic opposites. Nihilism was originally coined as a term by Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, where it basically meant how youth who embraced science did not appreciate traditional norms any longer. From there the meaning of Nihilism morphed into a position that everything was meaningless and basically took the place of skepticism as the strawman to be discredited by philosophers. Nietzsche was the first one to attempt to show it was a central feature of the western worldview, and Heidegger took this up and specified that it was the essence of technology.

Once we begin to understand nihlism we can see that it is one of the core phenomena generated by the Western worldivew, and that it is itself the nihilistic opposite of Emergence. In order to understand this nihilistic and emergent duality of emergence and nihlism within the western worldview we must appropriate the meaning of nihilism, and it seems to me that Rosen has the best definition. Basically Nihilism when two antagonistic forces in society that produce a dynamic of conflict are recognized to be exactly the same thing. If you were caught up in the conflict and suddenly looked at the enemy and said “we confronted the enemy and we were them” then that would be a loss of meaning in your world. This is precisely what happens to Achilles in the Iliad when he realizes that the Greeks are no better than the Trojans when Agamemnon takes his war prize Briseis. He withdraws from the conflict, but then when his friend Patroclus is killed he goes into a berzerker state. Both of his reactions are themselves nihilistic. Thus the Iliad functions as a users manual for living in a Nihilistic worldview. It also tells us about the nature of emergence. And so this fundamental duality is at the core of our epic tradition and needs to be understood by those encompassed by the Western worldview. Stanley Rosen’s book on Nihilism clarified the philosophical meaning of this term so it can be a basic tool in our attempts to understand the Western worldview.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Rosen
http://books.google.com/books/about/Nihilism.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Turgenev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briseis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_Patroclus

http://www.quora.com/What-is-software-architecture

There are quite a few good books about Software Architecture. So I think the literature defines Software Architecture well. But what you are really asking about is where the Architect fits into the Software Development Team. With the change over from Agile and Scrum approaches to Software Development the architecture and requirements seems to be left out of account in most of the agile process models and so it seems that the architect role and requirements role have been eclipsed and we seem to think that architecture and requirements are no longer needed and systems can accrete, but of course this leads to Technological Debt. So what I would like to address is the agile at scale where the project is big enough to need the differentiation of requirements and architecture to produce a coherent product.

Now the problem seen with Architecture and Requirements is that they produce documents that are not executable, and thus get out of date, and are not kept up throughout development, and thus are seen as waste from a lean perspective. And as you say all developers have a view of the whole system they are working on in their heads, so why do we need architecture? I am going to try to address that question.

We should recognize that Design itself is applicable at all levels of System and Software development. Thus developers who do not consider themselves or are not considered “architects” are doing design when ever they create something new or different in software. We have software patterns, but the combination and adoption of the patterns is still a design task, even if we do not have to make up new patterns. Design is ubiquitous in development and no one has exclusive access to design within software development, and especially if we adopt agile methods, we should realize that everyone owns the design, and autocratic approaches that give design rights to one developer over others may be expedient but in the long run is harmful, because everyone on the team needs to share the architectural design of the product they are developing together. We know how to share implementation, but we are not as good at group self-organization of the architecture. But the self-organization of the team should reflect the self-organization of the architecture.

I would like to mention that I have just done my dissertation on Emergent Design and what I am going to say is based on that research See http://about.me/emergentdesign

The problem is with agile (scrum) type methods is that although they espouse self-organization of the team there is no real theory of self-organization upon which they are based. Therefore I would like to offer a model of self-organization upon which I will base my remarks.

See http://www.mediafire.com/?jfkjoe2bkddky6a

See also http://www.mediafire.com/?y122wwv7d89qp5u

I have constructed a model of software process based on this model in my book Wild Software Meta-systems. http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer/

So given that context let me begin by saying that self-organization can be seen in the nature of knots that are organized against themselves by their own self-interference. So we have a very precise model of self-organization in knot theory. Knot theory is a new discipline, and probably one if the youngest of the mathematical disciplines. The best work on this is that of Louis Kauffman http://www.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/ whose work I follow. Particularly because he is interested and takes seriously the work of G. Spencer Brown in Laws of Form. http://www.lawsofform.org/

Self-organization is related to self-production which is Autopoiesis, and we are talking about teams that produce these complex systems in most cases so that means that we have reflexive autopoietic systems exhibiting this self-organization. Self-organization of the team, and the organization of the product developed by the team are two different but deeply related matters. What we need to understand better is how the alleopoietic organization of the product of the team reflects the self-organization of the team.

In other words we are arguing that requirements and design are intrinsic to the self-organization of the team, and that this is reflected in the requirements and architectural design of the product produced by the team. So let us consider what requirements and how they relate to functions. Requirements have to be developed in relation to a functional model of the system. This is because without the functional model you would not know whether the requirements set is complete, consistent, or clear or balanced, or fully describes the intended system. Requirements are ideally Godellian statements of the hypothetical emergent properties of the system that is desired. I like the statement that I read somewhere that the requirements carry the customer value of the system being developed, and allow us to keep our focus on that during the development process. But Requirements are un-ordered, they are axiomatic statements.

The physical and functional architecture are related to the Agent and Functional viewpoints on the realtime system which are partially ordered. But those partially ordered viewpoints ultimately have to yield embodiment in spacetime as eventdata computation that is fully ordered. Thus the relation of requirements, design, and implementation are determined by what Klir in Architecture of Systems Problem Solving, the methodological distinctions with respect to the ordering of variables in the system.

At the highest level we have unordered requirements, and then at the next level we have partially ordered functions and agents, then at the next leve we have either partial order with distance or linear order without distance which are duals of each other. Finally we have full order with distance which is the condition that is necessary for computation and full implementation. So when we say organized, there are different levels of order that we may be alluding to.

Now what is fascinating is that once we realize that the methodological distinctions orders determine the level of organization which is present in the system being developed and that there is a duality in this lattice between linear order without distance or partial order with distance. These two duals have the kind of duality that exists in the minimal methods. The minimal methods are the information order that is necessary to capture the relations between viewpoints. Since there are four viewpoints on a realtime system there are six different transformations between these viewpoints. Interestingly these more or less correspond to what exists as methods in UML and SysML. Functions were taboo in the original UML specification but this minimal method has been added back in with SysML. The only difference between object oriented and functional dataflow minimal methods is whether you are looking at data from the point of view of function or function from the point of view of data.

Now once we understand the minimal methods as bridges between the viewpoints on a real time design we can start thinking about this in both allopoietic and autopoietic ways in order to relate the self-organization of the team and the alleopoietic organization of the architecture of the system.

My own research led me to create the Integral Software Engineering Methodology (ISEM) which was a domain specific language to give a model based description of software architectural designs. Recently I gave a paper on how this might be updated to work at the Systems Design level based on the research in my dissertation. This paper can be seen at http://kentpalmer.name which is my resume page. But at the bottom you can see my CSER paper on the changes that I have made to my design language to make it easier to do Systems Design.

First I advocate using Domain Specific Languages to express design. You can see why in my critique of SysML: http://holonomic.net/sml01a03.pdf.

The key idea that instead of diagrammatic visualization that we get in UML and SysML we should express designs in text like we express code. This way as text we can keep it like the code and even put it within the code as comments. It could act as constraints on the code structure and thus be part of the execution strategy when we build the code or even be the basis of code generation. The problem with UML and SysML is that they are semantically weak being composed of only relations.

So let us go back to the question at hand, which is how the self-organization of the team is related to the organization of the structure of the software. Architecture can be seen as a protocol for organizing team coordination over the structure of the product being built. In other words the team provides a reflexive social meta-system within which individual team members function together and coordinate their development work. But part of the information they have to convey to each other and preserve is about the internal structure of the application that they are building. Requirements and Architectural Design is part of the protocol for communicating about the structure of the program that is based on the self-organization of the team. In other words the team is producing an intersubjective synthesis. The production process is structured and that allows the product to be structured at the macro level. But this means there must be a protocol which will allow the team to develop different parts of the system without working against each other or stepping on each others work, such that the whole system works together when integrated, verified and validated.

If we see requirements and architectural design as this communication protocol that holds the macro synthesis together then it is possible to see how architecture and requirements are nothing different from the value stream of the team by which the emergent properties sought are projected into Being. If one is doing software within some predetermined framework then the framework is giving the order to the whole application that the various team members are contributing to. But if the application has a unique structure that needs more than the framework then we will need an architecture that is designed to give a macro structure to coordinate work.