/lit/ - Literature

norbert wiener has truth-bombs to spare.

>In other words, no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing. There is no Maginot Line of the brain.

>I repeat, to be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange. In anything like a normal situation, it is both far more difficult and far more important for us to ensure that we have such an adequate knowledge than to ensure that some possible enemy does not have it. The whole arrangement of a military research laboratory is along lines hostile to our own optimum use and development of information.

>We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated. Furthermore, as I have already said, no secret will ever be as safe when its protection is a matter of human integrity, as when it was dependent on the difficulties of scientific discovery itself.

>In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity. Up to this point we have been talking of a pessimism which is much more the intellectual pessimism of the professional scientist than an emotional pessimism which touches the layman. We have already seen that the theory of entropy, and the considerations of the I ultimate heat-death of the universe, need not have , such profoundly depressing moral consequences as they seem to have at first glance. However, even this limited consideration of the future is foreign to the emotional euphoria of the average man, and particularly that of the average American. The best we can hope for the role of progress in a universe running downhill as a whole is that the vision of our attempts to progress in the face of overwhelming necessity may have the purging terror of Greek tragedy. Yet we live in an age not over-receptive to tragedy.