I know it was a bit off topic, that's why I labeled it as 'ignorant_comment', but... in how many types of problems do we really need an actual "shared state"? c

I know it was a bit off topic, that's why I labeled it as 'ignorant_comment', but... in how many types of problems do we really need an actual "shared state"? can't this shared state be something like the "sum of states of the system components that expose stateless APIs", like an "emergent property type of state"? Even for real problems like how many social networks centered around a person with property X have a network property Z we only need approximate answers... I was just expressing an intuition that as we go past "Level X" (put a large number in there), keeping the OP's metaphor, we may graduate out of this need for a clearly defined shared state for most of the problems we are trying to solve... we may think in terms of a "perceivable state" that gives as a probability for the system to be in a certain "'real' state"... (think of the human consciousness or self, we imagine that it really exists, that there actually is an "I" or "self", we consider "my mind in this second" as a "state"... but it can just as well be seen as an emergent property, a perceived state that has a certain probability to exist in a certain way based on the states of zillions of components more or less well connected)