The reason programming captivated me so much back in the day was definitely, absolutely teaching me to think in a way I had never thought before. In most situations, what matters is reaching a conclusion and being able to make the right decisions in the process that leads to that conclusion. So, I couldn't make a very grand introduction.
Or I could make this kind of introduction: if you're someone who loves undisciplined, independent, and intuitive thinking, you probably haven't thought about the "shortest path" of a thought reaching its target. Of course, this is often criticized, because once a person gets used to solving something superficially, they continue that way. Especially the high work pace brought by industrial periods doesn't allow for deep examination of things. You need money to live, and you need speed for money. If you don't have a craft inherited from your father and you're not one of those who can open shop whenever they want, unfortunately you need to learn to be fast; the worst part is that when the "survival" instinct gets mixed into this, stopping to think for even a moment feels strange to a person.
I think this created a freak human species. I mean, we're talking about a human species that refuses to even cook for ten minutes in the name of being fast, and when encountering something new, instead of thinking about it first, takes society's general interpretation ready-made.
However, there's also this: producing quick solutions is also necessary to continue with big plans. If I divide the state of my mind into before and after programming, I can think that the thinking programming instilled in me at least comforted me. I'm a man who loves creating fictions - I don't know what kind of artist people see me as, but I love taking life's randomness and examining it with an artist's perspective. However, I'm only now understanding to what degree I embraced chaos to stay in the mind's natural flow.
I wasn't uncomfortable with this, but I realize that small details were blinding me thoroughly. Details are important, but if we need to discover every detail, we'd need to discover and experience a truckload of things from subatomic particles to the sparkling infinite stars of the sky. This means slowing down too much for a human life to accomplish anything noteworthy. So while criticizing people for getting autistically attached to things, you end up at the other pole of that extreme.
What prevents people from drowning in everything yet keeps everything from remaining in an unpredictable state of chaos is accepting temporarily functioning systems as representations and not thinking about their details.
The essence of this matter came to mind while I was scribbling something about "recursion" somewhere. This programming technique can be translated into Turkish as "Özyineleme" (self-iteration), and essentially aims to break a problem into parts while solving it. However, when writing the code that will produce the solution, not the solution to the entire problem from start to finish, but only a solution that will repeat itself is produced. In this way, it's calculated that both the smallest particle and the largest part of the problem can be solved in the same way.
If this marvelous technique is hard to grasp, you can think of fractals - one of those topics you saw in middle school math and questioned "Teacher, what will this be used for in real life?" Fractals look like shapes where even the smallest part is the same as the general appearance. Here too, we repeat the operation (or function) we've prepared to have a fractal-like effect.
If smoke is rising from your brain at this stage, this is understandable - keep reading. Explaining this topic is as difficult as understanding it. What I want to focus on is not having to think about the operations it will produce after itself when designing this thing we call "recursion"; because eventually it will repeat itself infinitely. I used to get terribly confused when writing "recursion," but once we accept that we can't calculate everything, we assign it a mental representation and continue from there.
So if we think of things that can't be calculated in one sitting as representations in our minds, we think of all the chaotic things whose end the mind can never reach as representations so we can make a plan and reach conclusions quickly.
For example, when a person says "I'm from Aslanapa," this might mean nothing to you. When that person tells you that Aslanapa is a district of Kütahya, something immediately appears in your mind. Kütahya province here creates a representation that unites districts like Aslanapa, Simav, Tavşanlı, and you can guess the common characteristics of these districts. You might not have knowledge about Kütahya either, but based on Kütahya being an Eastern Aegean province, you can estimate the general personality of someone from Kütahya through other Eastern Aegean provinces like Afyon, Uşak, and Manisa: Generally talkative, having a dialect that's hard to understand, and mostly traditional. Even if you don't have knowledge about the Eastern Aegean, you've surely heard something about the Aegean region. But when applying the Aegean generalization to Kütahya, you see that the non-traditional aspect of the Aegean coast contradicts this. In places like İzmir and Aydın, you see a synthesis of the "Coast" representation and the "Aegean" representation. For example, when commenting about "people from Antalya," you might think of İzmir, which is a coastal city, but here you encounter a culture that's more phlegmatic, not very talkative, doesn't like socializing, and is hardworking.
Just as you can't equate Kütahya Aslanapa with İzmir Karşıyaka and you know very well why you shouldn't equate them, you can't equate Antalya with İzmir either. But most people think of both places with the "Coast" representation and apply this coastal representation directly to Antalya. This is an example of the fast thinking habit that ignores details I mentioned at the beginning of the article. You can't think of exceptional situations as representations; their characteristics must be discovered. Otherwise, that rakı bottle might break in your head while wandering around Antalya Serik asking "Don't we have some rakı tonight?"
Biology also relies on representational thinking. Most of you know evolution theory as a political view, but it's also something practical. The fact that cheetahs and our familiar domestic cats have a common ancestor very easily explains to us why cheetahs meow instead of roar, why they can be kept at home, and why their face shape resembles house cats. Thanks to the common ancestor idea, we can guess the common characteristics of both species and estimate the nature of cheetahs much faster than examining each characteristic individually. (Useless information: Did you know that the psychopaths we love and feed as house cats are one of the rare species that kill for pleasure? Moreover, they're more successful at hunting than species like wolves and bears.)
I often believe that differences should be understood and supported, that diversity should be increased. If representational thinking goes to extremes, it heads toward homogenization - the danger that Antalya culture faces, for example, is this. But when writing a computer program, solving a problem, creating a fiction, we have to draw a representation to reach a conclusion.
(Wow, I managed to finish an article in one sitting, let me add the date and place to make it complete)
May 16, 2023, 17:12
Esentepe