You certainly provide a lot to think about, and thank you for the quick response.

But I still must respectfully disagree on at least some points. I don't experience "all areas of your life in a relationships fashion or a systems fashion." Rather I move up and down the levels of abstraction constantly, sometimes consciously and sometimes sub-consciously. When I am playing with my kids, I am often more concern about being "in the moment" to borrow an overused phrase and then I don't think I'm viewing the situation in either fashion. I'm just playing with my kids. But when I play Go, I am definitely looking at the board in a system-centered fashion. When I program, I go back and forth between those and purely functional forms of abstraction, and occasionally step outside of all of those to ask questions like "What should my actual goal be right now?"

And I thought one of your questions was telling, "When you purchase a book, are you thinking of who is getting the money, the environment impact, the storage space, the time involved in reading it, the resale value?" I've thought about all of those, and more (who owns the copyright? When will it expire? What was the licensing agreement? How much of this can I legally quote? I happen to be in law school.), but at different times. Normally, I'm thinking of the content and how interesting it. Then when I think about buying it, I have a cost benefit and I have to think about if I will have time to read it, if its worth the purchase price, and if I have room for it on my shelf. So, those things always come up before I buy, but not all at once, its almost in a series. I normally don't think about environmental impact, resale, or the license, but I do in the right context. If its a textbook, I think about the resale. I pretty much never think about environmental impact or the licenses involved in any particular book I'm buying, but I might grab a handy book as an example when I am discussing those things with classmates or friends. I don't think of them as higher or lower modes of thought, just context dependent ones.

When I think about SQL, I also bounce between metaphors. For me, its most natural to see tables as sets of sets which are then connected by various logical relationships. With a background in set theory and formal logic (I came to the computer science discipline of relational theory later, but it is tightly related to set theory) this seems very natural to me. Seeing stored procedures as methods seems unnatural to me (especially on those occasions when I write a stored procedure which takes a table name as a parameter and can act on a number of tables with dynamic SQL...), but I use that metaphor sometimes especially when I working with SQL and an OOP language.

But I don't see either of those as a higher level or ever feel like I am regressing. It seems more like I am looking at the same thing from different angles. Sometimes one is more useful than the other. Neither fully captures reality, but both represent metaphors that are useful at times.