[Rant] Duplicated keys, Truth of nature and trust issues
Purely rant
A few months back I lost my house keys and probably threw them in the dustbin unconsciously while collecting garbage, the fortunate thing is, it was not a single one, we had another spare. Later a friend suggested to get a duplicate based on that spare. After a series of procrastinated days, I finally found a key duplicate shop and asked a guy to create a clone. He was watching YouTube until that time, he paused, got on some machine, and made a duplicate key. The entire process is no more than 130 seconds. He just handed that to me after I paid and he unpaused his YouTube video. I just thought, “Is that all ?”, and posted that an important question came to my mind, which was “Does it work ?”. The guy didn’t have any doubt about this process, I don’t know whether it has something to do with his craft or the brilliance of the machine. This question is important because, it is not a truth of nature, such as gravity or physics laws and chemistry equations. We don’t ask questions about them often, such as “If I throw this towel via the top hole, could it reach my friend who is in the next room ?” or “If I throw this stone near the pond, will it go inside ?”, because all of them are embedded in our reality and very much outside of our sceptical radar. On that day, I realised, there are things outside nature, which can earn that “truth of nature” quality, such as that duplicate key for that guy who made it.
Original Key (left) / Duplicate Key (right)
I don’t think a human can earn this type of trust from others. Anything which has concise, could not be trusted like the way we believe in universal laws. Because those systems are not deterministic and not a finite state machine. Human will gain knowledge and information which can change decisions of their action and create priorities between the choices, which will eventually create trust issues. So it’s a mere hope than the type of natural trust that we are discussing here. It doesn’t mean that systems which don’t have a consciousness are always trustable. A system which has more dependency on external factors to decide the state might have potential to lose reliability over time. For unnatural systems or man-made systems, To gain more reliability on trust, it takes great engineering effort and determination. Below is one of my favourite quotes from the book, “Designing data intensive applications”.
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a tech‐ nology with a scale like that was so error-free? — Alan Kay, in interview with Dr Dobb’s Journal (2012)
It is an interesting point of view, that how a man-made thing can earn this universal trust, such as ocean, rock, gravity, particles and other behaviours which exist in nature. When you open Google, type something in the search bar, Have you ever doubted whether it will pass or not? That’s the success of the engineers who have built those systems. Of course, these system needs concise maintenance unlike the universal rules, which are maintained by no one. For example, when I bought the phone initially there was no hang while scrolling the screen, after a few years there was a huge difference, my fingers didn’t have the confidence to swipe fast and I unconsciously expected the delay between swipes, at the end these systems will not complete our “trust of nature” test. If reliability is compromised even once in the lifetime of a system, its trust will be at a huge stake.
On the contrary, are natural rules never prone to trust issues? Definitely yes, take the biological structures for instance. DNA has the code to form organs, behaviours and hormones, which creates a sort of state machine which is highly deterministic. But genetic mutations are completely random and unpredictable, which is kind of an external factor here that we talked about previously. So mutagens which are the external factors are the reason for unpredictable changes in the rules of a biological system, which I reject as I am talking about “mostly under practically good conditions”. Here being practical to determine the trustability of the system, is much more important, as it draws the boundary between calculating determinism. Because if we assume the system from the particle level, all particles are deterministic and behave the way it was supposed to behave when they were created at first. [I don’t want to bring those quantum-level arguments]. In all the above arguments, I have assumed a system from a utility perspective and under practically good conditions from a human’s knowledge.