[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

[wobblygong@gmail.com (Wesley Parish)]

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Allow me to add my 2 cents:

Ancient Greece, like all other "primitive" societies that I am aware
of, had beliefs in "spirits" as well as in the CxO level deities (Most
hunter-gatherer and farmer/hunter Stone Age societies didn't get to
the level of CxO dieties, they stuck with spirits behind everything.).
The CxO deities made the policies; very few of them actually carried
those policies out themselves; they relied on a bunch of lesser
spirits to do them. In Classical Greek, daemonoi.

Where the connection with the English word "demon" comes in, is this:
the Christian Church by and large did not believe in the goodness of
most of those alleged daemonoi and labelled them evil, in large part
because in the Christian mythology, there is very little room for
subsidiary spirits; The Christian God is a god without a specific
portfolio: he runs the whole show. Heaps more history there. too much
to cover.

So Maxwell with his Classical education with its heavy emphasis on
Latin and Greek language and culture, would've had a handy metaphor
immediately understandable by all his scientific peers in the Royal
Society, in France, Germany, Russia, the USA, and elsewhere.

And as such, it would be easily extendable to computer science looking
for a handy term to cover system-level background programs handling
details that were between low-level OS procedures and functions and
high-level user programs.

Wesley Parish

PS FWVLIW, JRR Tolkien took one specific subset of these "spirits",
the woodland spirits, "baptised" them so to speak as he was a devout
Catholic, and turned them into one of the axes of his fiction. Some
years later Cordwainer Smith played the same trick with his Daimoni,
except these Daimoni are more like spirits of the stars. So if you're
a fan of both JRR Tolkien and Cordwainer Smith and wonder why they
seem at times so similar, that is part of the reason.

On 3/21/18, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:
> This seems like an unduly complicated theory.  Maxwell had a good
> 19th-century Scottish gentleman's education (he knew great chunks of
> Paradise Lost by heart as a child) and he would have been far more familiar
> with classical literature than most scientists are today as a result.
> Chances are he knew what daemons were in mythology because he'd  read either
> the Greek originals or Latin translations at school & university.
>
> Even today the term can be used without the connotations of evil that it
> often has: His Dark Materials has daemons which are not in any way evil.
> Perhaps significantly it is heavily influenced by Paradise Lost as well:
> perhaps the common source is that.  I have a copy but I haven't read it,
> sadly.
>
>> On 20 Mar 2018, at 18:46, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 14:04:38 -0400 Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Dan Cross writes:
>>> >
>>> > On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 1:56 PM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >
>>> > I think daemon/demon came from printers demon, which is carved into
>>> > > the government printing office in Brisbane. the printers demon is
>>> > > the
>>> > > one which stuffed up letters in the tray, to make printers tear
>>> > > their
>>> > > hair out. Did I say tray? I meant case, upper case, the one above,
>>> > > with the big letters, and lower case, the case with the little
>>> > > letters. oh dear. really? is that why they are cases?
>>> > >
>>> >
>>> > While this story (and the others I trimmed for brevity) is (are)
>>> > great,
>>> > "daemon" is actually from the Greek, I believe: an intermediary
>>> > between
>>> > humans (users) and the gods (the kernel).
>>>
>>> From http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Daemon.html
>>>
>>>   Fernando J. Corbato: ... Our use of the word daemon (@
>>>   Project MAC in 1963) was inspired by the Maxwell's daemon of
>>>   physics and thermodynamics. (My background is Physics.)
>>>   Maxwell's daemon was an imaginary agent which helped sort
>>>   molecules of different speeds and worked tirelessly in the
>>>   background. We fancifully began to use the word daemon to
>>>   describe background processes which worked tirelessly to​​
>>>   perform system chores.
>>
>>
>> ​Right -- that is what I was under the impression from where the term came
>> for computer use.   Although, I was also under  the impression that
>> Maxwell had taken the term from ideas from some his Cambridge colleagues
>> that were working on human thought and described the ideas of these
>> daemons running around in your head supporting things like vision, hearing
>> and your other senses.   The later was formalized I believe years later by
>> Oliver Suthridge (IIRC my Cog Psych of many years ago) - into the
>> something like the Pandemonium model of cognition.
>>
>> i.e. I think the term was used first in Cognition, then to Physics and
>> finally to Computers.
>>
>> As for Paul's comment about the daemons.  Yes, Kirk McKusick who actually
>> drew the original BSD daemon with purple sneakers, was wearing the
>> infamous blue tee with said logo out walking on the street, as one someone
>> else in the party (maybe Sam Leffler) sporting a 10 anniversary USENIX
>> shirt in San Antonio many years ago, which has the daemons shown top of a
>> PDP-11 with pipes, the null device, et al.   He has quite a tale of the
>> experience.
>>
>> Clem
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ᐧ
>