A Programmer's View of the Universe, Part 1: The Fish

Bravo.

Here's hoping I never reach the end of that vine. I like to think there's always more.

Incredible.

Thanks for this post, Steve. It's very thought provoking.

Wow... that's a fascinating perspective.

Richard P Gabriel has a paper of a talk called "Design Beyond Human Abilities" which deals with some of the deeper problems of how to manage systems that are too large and complex for the human mind to comprehend.

Many of the essential steps involve a major change in what we think of as 'programming', away from slamming out lines of human readable syntax, towards curating and evolving code/circuits that are more biological in nature.

Thank goodness. When we programmers give up on a complex system, we do not normally choose to die. We might want to kill someone else but would not try.
Probably your betta also wants to kill you(or the one who catched him in the first place) and is so eager to try; however, that's something far beyond his ability, so he died in desperation and with hate.

beautiful, steve. i had the same exact experience with a cockatiel once. i think about it all the time.

Thanks a lot for the beautiful story. Since your business reqs thoughts I can't wait for your next entry and I've yet to get disappointed.. keep up writing!

You are the best blogger. Period.
This post was by far one of the best I've read in a long time. Simple yet deep, thought-provoking, beautiful. Thanks!!

Thanks for sharing with us.

That was great - thank you.

for my birthday?? Thanks! Just the right size! (it is usually the highlight of my day to find a Stevey post while I go up and down the vine)

Wonderful piece of writing, Steve, thanks for sharing it with us.

I'm a bit depressed now, tho.

Excellent post. Thank you for sharing.

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So if the universe is our fish tank, is the world your oyster?

We like to think of ourselves as being pretty smart. Admit it. We do. But in the grand scheme of things we're intellectually little better off than that fish

Maybe there is little difference between us and fishes, but I like to think that the real difference is this: when facing an impossible problem, we don't lay down and die. We keep trying.
We are trapped in this planet, but we never gave up trying to go somewhere else, we faced impossible problems, but they became possible just because we never gave up.

Again with the space analogy, we haven't send a man to Mars yet, but we send one to the Moon. And prior to that, some guy reached America when everyone thought Earth was flat. And before that someone must have traversed Africa, and so on... We always lived in cages, but we made them bigger each time.
That's the reason, I believe, we are not fishes (or monkeys) anymore. Because we never gave up.

What a beautiful post! I didn't even knew fishes could have such deep emotions!

Wow, I never actualyl looked at it that way before. Amazing!

Jiff
www.online-anonymity.kr.tc

Thanks for sharing Steve, and I'm sorry about your betta :(

Sad story about the fish. But instead of going all philosophical on it, you should just have gone back to basics (must like you do when tackling a complex computational problem).
If man-fish is unhappy, introduce woman-fish. Although the female betta is somewhat scarce compared to the males, they do exists and they will make the males very happy (and the courting behavior and the nest building of the bettas are quite fascinating to watch).

Quite a good story, although I'm not sure about the central metaphor that programmers are like your Betta.

Your betta was trapped in a world of boring simplicity.

I think my fish did the same thing. As in their death was not from physical disease but they decided to die and stopped eating.

I don't think this is the sad outcome everyone else here is seeing. The betta did figure out how to escape the tank.

If we're going to use the story as a metaphor for the programmer, think about the phrase "career suicide". When you leave the rat race to strike out on your own, your more conservative friends talk about it like an ending, not a beginning. What they really mean is that the future you have chosen is unacceptably (to them) uncertain.

This matches nicely to the differing views people have of death, depending on their religious/cultural background.

What you had was a spirit guide, fish take your prayers to the spirit world. You may should have offered him something to do.

I don't usually comment here though I read every post. This is by far the most terrifying story I've read or heard this Halloween season. Thank you for such a personal glimpse of an amazing, painful event.

That was a beautiful post. However, I wanted to point out that perhaps, the fish was simply sick and exhibiting stereotyped behavior, then died?

People and animals often get stuck in patterns of behavior when they are sick, and since we tend to ascribe purpose to any behavior we see, we automatically assume they're tenaciously trying to solve whatever problem would most logically be solved by their behavior.

But I agree that your view is more inspiring.

Really great post! It's a very touching, and entirely relevant metaphor. I was taken by the content, as well as being impressed by the quality of the writing. Nice work.

Beta maybe has an underlying meaning now since it is really close to betta and perhaps some of both die of unhappiness.

Also a new perspective on working for a large company... being that fish on the vine... and not wanting to be the one that dies of unhappiness. An entrepreneur could be seen as that betta out in the wild blue, not in the tank.

"Being a career programmer gives you an interesting perspective on issues not directly related to programming."

Indeed -- like how to "open source" the elections process and make it possible for anyone to perform a recount or verify the integrity of the process, and (nearly) impossible for elections officials to pull a fast one. More info at http://sea-cat.info.

Wow.....What a blog....superb....you are really a programmer with experience....who experiences each and every minute details of his life...

"He died of unhappiness."

Or psychosis. Being cooped up days on end in an invisible prison ought to do something to your mind, especially a fragile fish's mind. When he starts to pace in eccentric ways, you know that the stress is getting to him.

Animals in captivity often exhibit these sorts of obsessive repetitive behaviors, called stereotyped behaviors. It's a sign of psychological distress, and is frequently seen in zoos. The wikipedia article on stereotyped behaviors has a bit about these behaviors in animals.

Animals aren't meant to live in tiny little tanks or cages, just to entertain us. If you want to enjoy seeing animals, there are lots of great nature shows, and for the more adventurous, you can always go visit their native habitats.

Really, animals aren't that different from us humans. Just like us, they value freedom to do as they please.

+1 on Gabriel's Design Beyond Human Abilities. http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/DesignBeyondHumanAbilitiesSimp.pdf

Great story and analogy, but very sad. I could never own one of those fish only to keep them in a tiny bowl. However I have wanted to rescue one and give it a good home as you did, thinking if one must live out of its natural environment then at least it should have a good quality of life.

I wonder if being in those tiny bowls with next to no sensory input is the only way for those fish to be at peace, except for being in their natural environment of course?

Being naturally intelligent and curious, it might then be better for then to have nothing to be curious about. It's terribly sad that it died from the realization of its situation.

Maybe round tanks are better in that respect as there are no perceptible edges. Whereas in a rectangular one, the beginning and end and limits of the space are easily measured.

I wonder if it had a very nice tank like you provided, but in a large bowl, if it would have suffered the same fate?

Sorry about your fish, but this story is about you...or rather more accurately, about how you have projected your own feelings, intellect, and opinions/behavior etc...onto your fish...this story is like you describing a dream...it might appear abstract, but on closer inspection, this is how you feel and so you project it in explaining your fishes behavior - or maybe more broadly how we as humans assign what is familiar to us into animals. Your fish was not curious or exploring in the way humans do...he was executing a program, perfected by time and genetics (evolution) based on his environment. I'm sure these actions make complete sense and have no tragic or sad (lonely and trapped fish exploring the nature of his tank) component in the context of it's natural environment. For instance, traversing the vine...perhaps in the Amazon, in tiny, muddy puddles where these things live, a vine shows up which has a tendency to let more water into the puddle which might make it more likely for a mate to show up?...and it will instinctually do this in the same way a mosquito follows carbon-dioxide, pheromones, and heat to my skin. I guess it's comparable to people assigning grander purpose through God when a tsunami takes out heathens. Not all things can have human attributes assigned to them...and if we do assign human attribute, we find those really describe US.

This really is about you per my previous mention but also is an indication of something good; you are a thoughtful and caring person...so much so that you project human traits to a fish...but I think you might be more at peace with all of this if you explore what really caused the behaviors in your fish from a standpoint of logic and evolution (in other words study this type of fish to understand that these behaviors are a reaction from his programming and not really a realization that he was stuck in Seattle with no hope of escape.

Just because a mosquito finds me an attractive meal by the same method a woman finds me as an attractive mate, we can't really project any kind of advanced human behaviors onto the bugs.

This is weird, because my betta just died last night. He did the same thing -- stopped eating, stopped swimming, and just gave up.

I'm sorry that your betta didn't make it to RC...

It's fish. What is it about humans that they need to project human characteristics on other lifeforms? They are unique and they have their own life, don't judge it by your standards.

brilliant stuff, steve. i do look forward to your blogs

Did you tried with a female betta companion?

thanks for this steve!

Sooooo... I _definitely_ didn't mean to imply that programmers choose suicide (or career suicide, or whatever) when faced with complexity. It didn't occur to me that so many people would jump to that conclusion.

The statement "we're no better off intellectually than the fish" was just that: there's unimaginable complexity out there. On an absolute scale, what we know is effectively zero.

But there's no need to get depressed about it! It was sad that the fish died, but I didn't mean to imply doom-and-gloom for programmers. Sorry about that.

I've got something big in the works: a thesis that I'm working my way up to. It's controversial, so it's going to take some prep work. This post was the first step: trying to illustrate in a memorable way just how small and constrained our perspective really is.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has done a much better job of explaining this idea in several of his books, usually in the scenes dealing with Trafalmadorians. Slaughterhouse Five and the Sirens of Titan in particular.

Stay tuned. :) There's definitely more to come, and it'll be much more thought-provoking and probably a good deal cheerier. Although I won't necessarily do the whole series sequentially. (I have other stuff to write about too!)

This is a really touching article. I just really wish you had dropped him (the betta) off at some freshwater lake or something...

It is highly possible that the cause for the betta's incredible sadness was the denial of its need to procreate.

The reproductive drive is so fundamental to life, especially in lower organisms that the lack of a mate has have serious consequences.

This has been observed in dogs, elephants (lone elephants - they're basically male elephants doomed to celibacy, which turns them into very violent creatures), and many other animals.

In fact humans are no exception. See the Psychology Today article "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature" - http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-4...

I agree with SørenSkov, Dave and Rolsky, However at the crux of it lies the question: Did or did not the fish die of depression (or anything like it)?.

This is a binary question, obviously for "maybe" isn't really a programmer's answer.

If the fish did die of unhappiness does it not prove that intelligence helps us in self-destruction? Since the ultimate aim of any system is death/the final stage of entropy. Intelligence is a method which helps us commit suicide by proving to us the worthlessness of it all, thereby solving all our problems.

If the fish did not die of unhappiness, then that raises some serious doubt about the whole "fish-suicide" scenario, for if it did not die of unhappiness, then what did it die for? could this be attributed simply to stupid animal behaviour or was it exhibiting some sort of intelligence? I guess one could argue endlessly, but the fact that this was a pretty interesting post isn't debatable.

While reading, I was trying to relate the words with programming.. but, God! I was so sad that I forgot the damn programming and found myself in deep solitary confinement! Life in Betta's eyes, through the tank..

Thank you.

-Saj

It's interesting how the programmer's perspective never really leaves you- I certainly find it helpful as I am trying to learn to be come a horseman, although horses get by on something close to pure emotion so it's an entirely different logic to discover.

Funnily enough I was thinking about Trafalmodorians and what I learned from them only an hour ago. Today seems filled with small synchronicities. Of course, my logical side has read up on the statistics involved and dismisses such things outright, but my illogical side is contemplating purchasing a lottery ticket.

I look forward to hearing the Yegge theory of Eudaimonia or whatever the upcoming total perspective vortex will turn out to be.

Forget complaints over length: I'm always thrilled to see one of your essyas/posts/rants precisely because you're willing to burn 'ink'.

:o)

Damn can you write and what a story. Perspective what a powerful and scary thing it really is

Even I had a similar experience when my Siamese fighting fish died in it's solitary confinement. Never dared to get another one again.. It's heart breaking & reading your post was indeed thought provoking.

Way too short article! ;)

wow. nice post. in case of a programmer career suicide, you can *really* enjoy writing (sci-fi maybe) :)

Great story, thank you for sharing!

Wow, I mean just wow! Best. Post. Ever.

Its tempting to think.. One way handling complexity is procedural abstraction right?

Which means basically team work, you take some boxes and use them to build bigger boxes. You don't have to know whats in the box you are building with.

Maybe.. Maybe the fish would have survived with a companion?

No matter how much we think or how much smart we are, some problems are just hard... like the one thats troubling me right now. Rather than depressing over it, i'll just let my mind wander over something else --play a game perhaps-- and then come back with a fresh perspective.

This has worked for me in the past. I hope it would in the future as well.

As a former Betta keeper, you have my utmost sympathy. They are, without question, the most interesting fish I've every had. Losing one is far more hurtful than losing a hundred goldfish.

I wonder if the fish could have been saved with a smaller tank. Male Bettas feel a deep need to defend their habitat, and to control their environment. Anything over a couple of gallons is too much territory for them to patrol, so they get terrifically stressed out and often die.

In essence, they become deeply (often fatally) bothered when they know that the potential complexity of their system is greater than their ability to manage it. We should all be so self-aware.

My current "hobby horse idea", that this blog entry provokes in my mind, is Charles Moore. Charles Moore has been quite successful, and almost radically opposed to code reuse (he will not even use other people's device drivers, but other people are allowed to reuse his code if they like). He has gone into VLSI design because of how, in part, code reuse induced problems had created such a business opportunity for him in that area... so anyways, this hobby horse idea of mine (that has probably already annoyed anyone reading here) seems to have some relevance when I think about how we can tackle the limits of abstraction. At some level, trying again with a better understanding becomes a really important tool for us.

But I have been ignoring the tragic side of this essay...

If Bettas die because of intellectual boredom, I would expect that other people would have noticed this because of all the other Betta deaths. Of course, this does not exclude the possiblity of individual variation in Bettas, but it also points at some of the character of such problems.

If Bettas die because they have too much external change, that sort of makes sense but not really, because how would they live in the real world? And if they die because they have too much territory, I wonder how they could ever live in the wild? I also wonder if fighting and/or companionship comes into the picture.

I was also envisioning adding a separate tank with perhaps a swim-able tube connecting them, but now I am wondering if a very small tank added in this fashion could have worked -- perhaps one with lots of cover? Or perhaps he was getting stressed out because he knew another Betta was going to attack him and he could not figure out how to place himself defensively. But remembering how depressed I have gotten when pets have died, I am also so very glad that I have not tried to raise Bettas.

Actually, I have given up on such things, myself, which might say something not very good about me.

You totally lost my interest somewhere around 'betta fish'. Learn to get to the point sooner. Like many of your posts, I end up skimming, hoping for something salient. Other posts of yours, the shorter, I-have-a-point ones are good.

If you are interested in the topic of how system complexity can overwhelm us mere humans, here's my favorite piece of writing on the topic, "The Lessons of ValuJet 592",
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98mar/valujet1.htm.

It's about how complexities in the system that is supposed to keep planes from crashing CAUSED a plane crash in this case.

Great post Steve, as always.

Greetings:

I noticed that several owners of Betta fish (also called a Siamese Fighting Fish on Wikipedia) had similar experiences. I once wanted to get a Betta from a fish wholesaler for whom I did a lot of consulting work.

He told me to always make sure that I had at least two males in different aquariums so that they could see (but not touch) each other. They really are extremely territorial and will constantly try to get to the other one. This keeps them active without getting hurt. He also suggested that if one died to put a mirror up where the Betta could see himself until I could get another.

On other thing - he called them "Beata" even though their name is Betta - also in agreement with Wikipedia. Mine lived for several months and when one died I replaced it with another. I should have gotten a couple of females for each one and started breeding but I didn't think of it at the time.

A close friend of mine told me about this post and we talked about it, on how we're like the fishie. It depends on the level of reality we speak of, I think. If it's the physical reality, of what our senses can comprehend, of course there's a limit to it.

Although if it's the reality of what surrounds us,it's a whole different level. Although I believe blogger martin is right in saying that we all live in cages, we just expand it bit by bit. There's just something about us that drives us to explore and go out to up til where we can, where our bodies can reach.

I'd like to think of your fishie as the soul. No material thing can ever satisfy what it needs. If it is where it can never grow, then it will free itself in any way it can.

I don't know if that made sense, just some thoughts of mine that you yourself provoked. =) kudos, write more.

liked the line:"he died of unhappiness.."
waiting for what 'A programmer's view of the Universe, part 2: ...' would be about :-)

really moving. i like ur story, and i believing God. i subscribed ur blog now. keep posting pl.

that was beautiful =')

Thanks for sharing... It's really heartwarming. I like to think that animals do have emotions too. :)

You know mate, that article did two things for me.

1) It (bizarrely) made me want to get another fish.

2) It made me want to get on and write a JAXB extension in my spare time to solve a problem that my company doesn't have budget for right now.

Hmm.

Wow... I've definitely been in that fish tank

Thanks for this lovely post. Wish one day I can live life to the fullest just like your fish.

I have a betta too. While I don't give him the same attention, I have noticed its intelligence. I wouldn't ascribe the same level of awareness to them that you do, but I was surprised to see how he perks up when I pick up his yellow bottle of fish food. Sadly, I've neglected him lately and his little bowl needs a cleaning.

Great piece! Thought provoking (and touching I might add!) Thanks for sharing.

I just saw this post about a species of spider that tackles tasks of mammal-level complexity by methodically working things out over several hours. It reminded me of the betta.

http://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem.html

I don't know how serious you were really being but..it was bizarre to read this because *my* betta made me very sad too. He was a blue fella a lived in a big tank with a bunch of other fish (I decided to discredit the whole fighting thing plus there was no way I was keeping him in a tiny bowl). I was mesmerized by my little blue. I actually (imagined?) he would see me and swim up to my finger when I would dip it into the tank. But in a couple of months he suddenly started to get sick and fade (now I know why he was fading) but he would still try and swim up to say hello. Finally he just languished and died...I was crushed :-/. SIGH.

By the way, I heard this great interview on NPR's Fresh Air with Nick Trout, a veterinary surgeon (I have three dogs so this was pretty poignant for me) - you should check it out if you have a chance:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88597767

An extremely fascinating perspective. It may bear out to be true - after all, which other species destroys its own habitat? Humans aren't as smart as we think we are - in the grand scheme of things, we are pretty stupid really. At least the fish tried to change its circumstances - we seem to be charging towards oblivion and can't seem to force ourselves to change at all.
"And we can just as easily envision problems thousands or millions of times more complex: problems beyond the reasoning abilities of any person, any group of people, or even our entire species" - Very true and perhaps a pertinent point in view of the above.
An excellent blog - extremely thought-provoking.
tanzanite jewelry

hi steve ... apropos of nothing in this latest rant of yours, but relevant to one you wrote in may, 2006, in which you mention your experience w/ 'anagrams,' i felt it devastatingly important to share this site with you. Before posting the link, however, you should know that your brother has every reason to be upset about what can be found in his name (afraid and in fear as he grieves as a friend is dying - for example), as should you, regarding the 'piggery' and much more. The site is (and you have to type in the whole url) http://www.lexigramsofthemoment.com/index . Be sure to read the 'About' and 'Funky Monkey' along with everything else in there. As you said, you're weary of blogs, but this site is beyond the pale.
Happy Reading,
LOTM author
(btw, one of your fans sent me the link to that particular article because he wanted me to see your take on anagrams. Adore your writing and stories. Sorry to see you've wrenched back ;)

Thinking on this topic reminded me of a view i hold that i haven't had the time to think about for a long while.
I think we are stimulated in life to follow what interests us. Like the old Greek tragedy life distracts us with a myriad of things to keep our mind occupied. With careful thought we either realize that the world is too complex and big for us to understand and we give up to a higher power or we forge ahead and keep optimistic things will work out. we as humans are an optimistic bunch, without we would seep into depression and probably end up like your proverbial fish who kicked the bucket. when we give up, life gets the best of us. with so much around us today to distract us we try to cling to whats familiar to stay sane. for those of us who think too much it is a blessing and a curse because we are always drawn to the inevitability that life is futile. we try to combat this by justifying the meaning of our lives by our actions, when in fact at the end of the day you have to just be able to live with yourself. we are just psychotic apes because we cannot accept the simple inevitability of simple lives because our minds must have more. the constant doldrums of life wears us down until we give up and become your fish passing time until the inevitable end. no one on this earth is normal and life sucks and then you die. i myself just enjoy the little moments in life until its my time. most call me eccentric and a little off but that's because i almost died and i enjoy what little time i have left on this marble spinning in the infinite void of space. i no longer sweat the big stuff. i think it takes a big experience to waken one up to the true beauty in this world. and yes, i am an optimist. sharing the planet with 6 billion others we sometimes feel alone; how ironic. but the fact stands we need to do whats right for those who come after us, to give them the best chance at a future where there is possibility and worries are not so necessary. our job is to fix the mistakes of the past the best way we can and try to make it better for those who follow. lead by example. silly little things are the most profound. all in all i hope you all fare better than his fish.

wow that story was unbelievable. it reminds me a lot of the first hamster I ever owned. it would interact with its surroundings much in the same way that your betta did. it would even watch tv with us, and not just stare at it. unfortunately, it was also very curious about escaping from its prison. it actually did succeed many times although in its last it was squashed by my brother in his sleep :/