Dealing with reality

Rejecting the idea of the global omniscient observer capable of overseeing and modelling the global state of the system does not negate the scientific thinking. Rather it approaches modelling as a variant of participative / collective sense-making¹. The distinction can also be explained in terms of two ways of "dealing with reality":

1. First, immensely powerful and largely prevailing, is based on the assumption that there actually exists the true understanding of the world and that the task of science is to gradually approach this truth;
2. Second, advocated by some philosophers and social scientists (i.e. social constructivits), does not assume single truth in advance, but emphasizes the social process of agreeing on a most suitable model of reality for specific circumstances and goals.

Later we will relate these two approaches to the concepts of synchrony (first) and asynchrony (second) in computation. Important to note, that in computation any model of synchronous communication is built-on asynchronous communication ⁶. In some circumstances it may be beneficial to assume a single truth (e.g. in physics in a form of unified theory of everything) but in others (e.g. social, economic and human development) such assumption is not only unnecessary, but is counter-productive. Yet in general, whatever we consider 'truth' (moral, value based, or even scientific) is a social consensus achieved via coordination of different approaches to the 'problem at hand'.