Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

Knowledge and truth are "centralized" concepts. I prefer "models" which don't have such issues, all models are imperfect and provisional, and there are many models for the same process. Knowledge and truth have a way to lead to endless debates, while models are better understood in their limitations and nobody claims they can reach perfection. In programming we call them abstractions and we know they are always leaky.

I think there are plenty of philosophical problems that emerge from our desire to describe things in centralized ways. Consciousness, understanding and intelligence are three of them. I prefer "search" because it is decentralized, and cover personal/inter-personal and social domains. Search defines a search space unlike consciousness which is silent about the environment and other people when we talk about it. Search does what consciousness, understanding and intelligence are for. All mental faculties: attention, memory, imagination, planning - are forms of search. Learning is search for representation. Science is search, markets are search, even DNA evolution and protein folding are search. It is universal and more scientific. Search removes a lot of the mystery and doesn't make the mistake to centralize itself in a single human.

But search is a functional term, while consciousness is experiential. Deep philosophical problems exist because there are very puzzling things about existence. Changing terms doesn't make that puzzlement go away.