Déjà Vu—or, Whatever Are We Doing Here?...

It is said that long ago, in primeval India, there was a kingdom of blind people. These were in all respect endowed with human traits save for sight. In particular, they were warriors. At one point, King Bat, the king of the Blind, thinking of expanding his kingdom's hegemony, sent out (blind) scouts to the neighboring (seeing) kingdom. That other kingdom was a powerful one. Its army disposed of a famed and formidable war unit of elephants. Elephants were unknown to the Blind and their king King Bat. The scouts soon came back, all excited with intriguing news

“An elephant,” said one, “is like a rough-textured wall!…”

“Not so,” said his neighbor, “an elephant is a snakelike beast that blows foul-smelling air and putrid water in and out of its maw!…”

“Nay!” said another, “it is thinner than a snake, stringlike, and has a tuft of hair on top of its small head!…”

The last, older, scout, snorted his scorn at his inexperienced younger comrades, and stated unequivocally, “May your Blindness forgive these three stooges for their poor senses! An elephant is in fact a bunch of trees that hammer the ground with their trunks in turn to frighten their enemies! They have long and sharp low-reaching branches that are sharpened to needlepoints by African elephant trainers…”

The blind Bat blinked, then saw the light: “We shall ask Our Royal Cornputer Astrologer of Scient-O-Logic Programming, Holy Mole Ravi Olly, to advise Us. We shall blindly follow what she will tell Us—she shall query her oracle and let the Answer be Our Fate!…” Thus spake King Bat to Holy Mole

Soon, the solemnly clad Scient-O-Logic Programmer performed a neck-cut and gutted a goat, executing her higher-order priestly functions in a monotone language. “Aha! Let's see what we have in store,” said Holy Mole, adjusting her multifocal stained-glass spectacles, “an elephant is simply an invention of our wicked neighbors to make us believe that they possess that which they do not—L'arme ultime!”

Dixit Holy Mole Ravi Olly
She paused to enjoy the effect, and as an aside, added, “I submitted a seminal Braille paper on the topic to the Bombay Symposium of Scient-O-Logzc Programming last year, but it was rejected. The referccs, silly bunch, did not decipher my Braille slates upside right!… And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to see to my sabbatical in Egypt…”
Exit Holy Mole Ravi Olly

Thereupon, everyone applauded, King Bat led the attack, and all but one of the Blind were blindly leveled to platitude by a stoic stampede of myopic elephants who did not even care to see them for it was night. The only survivor of the Blind was Frau Doktor Professor Ravi Olly, on sabbatical leave in Alexandria

Indeed, Holy Mole Olly went to the Library of Alexandria where she taught at the Research Institute for FUEL Programming. Let us hope that her class' inheritance is not the object of this panel, for what happened to that Library of Science was but blaze and cinders

History tells us to ask ourselves not to repeat it.… We, this panel's actors, should perhaps heed its message?

What follows is an appendix. It is a Graduate Seminar proposal that I am thinking of teaching in Spring. Its contents might he both relevant and revealing. Where does the Logic start or end? I do not know… Do you? I include it here in this controversial position paper to illustrate that there is more that meets the eye in the logical functionality of computation and information