In my journey.

My journey, in the context of this blog entry, is the set of events and an interval of time that have led me to this point in my development of my Clique Space(TM) thing.

In my journey, I have been witness to a changing code base. In my journey, my code base has both grown and shrunk as realisations have born the creation and growth of new structures as well as the atrophy and destruction of structures rendered redundant. In my journey, I have seen my code base changes flow and boil in consequence to the effect of my intellectual endeavours to construct a system that is faithful to the purpose which I conceived in 2004.

In my journey, I have witnessed the following: my code base accrues the software equivalent of carbuncles and stretch marks that one would observe in any part of one's body subject to the stress of general use. My code base has accrued its own set of idiosyncrasies that one might observe of a car or a house over an extended period of time and use.

There is something else I have been witnessing about this code base over possibly the most recent six months: it has been drawing closer to my concept. I suspect this change is significant because up until about six months ago, I thought that my concept could have been the product of insufficient reflection on the problems that it tried to address: namely, how does one make a claim on the devices in one's environment as if these devices were part of one's body - visceral claims about one's own car, one's Facebook page, one's PC, one's golf ball, one's bank account etc that are as strong as the same individual's claim to one's own hands, one's feet, one's fingernails, one's eyes, one's intestines etc.

Now, up to six months ago, the evolving code base - the changing implementation of the concept - was generally saying to me that it might only work if I made certain compromises to my concept. However, since I had worked out the Sovereign's Clique Space (this happened on 17 December 2012 when I posted my first account of this phenomenon) it now appears that what I had correctly labelled as "speculative faith" up to this point, had become a testable hypothesis.

In effect, I saw the way to the goal-posts when I observed the role that the Sovereign (labelled as the Account in my patent that I published in 2008 and a part of the data structure present in my concept since 2004) and the Sovereign's Clique Space played in allowing the individual to make visceral claims about things outside of a hominid form. These deliberations in December last year concluded my philosophical deliberations on the relationship of the possessor and that which is possessed in a detail which appears to have coincided with another event: the code base began to diminished in size by a significant amount. I am unaware of just how much it has diminished so far, but I believe it would be at least 20%. Other structures like the relationship between the Identity (erstwhile Active Affiliation), and its component Connections and Affiliations have gained clarity and robustness.

My deliberations on 17 December last year also demonstrated the efficacy of the Media Profile. This development included the overlaying concept of the Media Profile spine first thought useful as a mechanism to admit a process of obtaining progressively more delegated functionality through a particular device. The notion whereby subclass adaptations of the Media Profile, the Connection, the Active Affiliation, and the Participant to a specific medium was retained on all classes but the Active Affiliation after the deliberations on this earlier blog entry pointed to the redundancy of these "delegates"; it is not considered necessary that devices using a specific medium go through a multi-stage login process to obtain their Participant in their serving Agent Device's Clique.

I hope to see the observer mechanism, as a (Media Profile) spinal adaptation will realise a component almost as profound, and no less intertwined with, the concept of the Sovereign and its Clique Space. Although the specific specification of the observer mechanism is an artefact of development which emerged subsequent to the publishing of my patent, my original inspiration in 2004 was that Clique Spaces are manifest though collections of Agent Devices, each cooperating with others forming Cliques which may grow, shrink, and disband. The observer mechanism simply draws on the data model disclosed in the patent to ultimately realise this behaviour of the Agent Device.

Another line in my email signature: "Philosophy. Atheist gap-filler."

Sometimes this Clique Space thing gets me thinking about the nature of the self. Such thoughts are often the subject of religious dogma. My family background is Anglican, but I am not an adherent to any religious philosophy, save any familial and traditional ties to customs originating from Anglicanism and Christianity in general that still roost in my secular atheist belief system.

So, I like the quip in the title of this entry. It'll be my repartee to the conundrum that theists think they're presenting with the oft heard argument that "If one doesn't have God (a god), then how can one have morals?".

I think it'll also make a handy repellent. Make it so.

Implementation of the observer mechanism.

As I write this entry, I am taking some time away from coding the observer mechanism.

This observer mechanism, like any other mechanism that models and moderates the behaviour of devices within Clique Space is a medium. Hence, the observer mechanism must exhibit the structural components necessary for the representation of any medium in Clique Space: the abstract classes for the Media Profile, the Connection, and the Participant require implementations that can be instantiated.

However, the observer's medium is a medium that models a functional subset of the behaviour of the Agent Device, and hence, there are other structures that need to be implemented.

The Clique needs a subclass on the Agent Device: the observer Clique must contain only observer Participants. This Clique is importantly distinct from a Clique that models the way other media are modelled and controlled in that the observer Clique indicates which Agent Devices have knowledge of a specific component. Every observable component has an observer Clique when an Agent Device responsible for the creation and management of an observable component transmits knowledge of this component to another Agent Device. The Agent Device that created the observable component is the observer Clique's Owner, although in an observer Clique, like any other Clique, ownership can cede to another Agent Device, and so like any other Clique, the observer Clique is not anchored to any one location.

There is at least one minor issue with this model. If an observer Participant is a component (all of Clique Space's Elements are components), and if the observer Participant, in being a component other than a Clique, is observed, then how is that observer Participant observed? One cannot create another observer Clique because the creation of another observer Clique (Cliques - including the observer Clique - are components, but they are the only type of component that is not observable) would involve the creation of more observer Participants. This is an infinite regression, and so to avoid this, any specific observer Participant's observer Clique is the Clique which contains the observer Participant. This solution not only appears to be a convenient way of avoiding the infinite regress, but it appears to have a certain (though circular) logical necessity; in this mechanism, I feel echoes of the same necessarily visceral emotional base (the ego) that I seem to observe when I observe myself.

With this mechanism, component transmission can be tracked and controlled by a collection of Agent Devices. It appears that this mechanism is crucial to the cooperative activity of Agent Devices, and I believe this mechanism will have something to say about cognitive function in biological neural systems.

Anyway, implementation awaits...