Great Throughts Treasury

"The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state."

"The difficulties lie in the fact that for these people (deaf-mutes) the act of conversation has been broken into two entirely separate parts."

"The community extends only so far as there extends an effectual transmission of information."

"The deprivation of hearing is overwhelmingly the deprivation of one thing- free participation in human conversation."

"The fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties, and in particular, to the difficulty of keeping an organism in being during such a radical reconstruction."

"The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought and sold."

"The Greeks regarded the act of discovering fire with very split emotions."

"The human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be."

"The intrinsic limitations of the commodity nature of communication are hardly considered by the public at large."

"The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is neither, but is praying to his God that someone, preferably himself, will find the reconciliation between the two views."

"The matter of time is essential in all estimates of the value of information. A code or cipher, for example, which will cover any considerable amount of material at high-secrecy level is not only a lock which is hard to force, but one which takes considerable time to open legitimately."

"The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day."

"The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great Educator and the Bishop."

"The greatest opportunity of the criminal in the modern community lies in this position as a dishonest broker in the interstices of the law."

"The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language."

"The present time is the age of communication and control."

"The problem of the work of art as a commodity raises a large number of questions important in the theory of information."

"The second, cybernetic, industrial revolution is [bound] to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions [until] the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone?s money to buy."

"The scientist is always working to discover the order and organization of the universe, and is thus playing a game against the arch enemy, disorganization. Is this devil Manichean or Augustinian? Is it a contrary force opposed to order, or is it the very absence of order itself?"

"There is a second class of machines with which we have also been concerned... These machines may be used to make up for the losses of the maimed and of the sensorily deficient, as well as to give new and potentially dangerous powers to the already powerful."

"The simplest mechanical devises will make decisions between two alternatives, such as the closing or opening of a switch. In the nervous system, the individual nerve fiber also decides between carrying an impulse and or not."

"The terms "black box" and "white box" are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. On the other hand, a white box will be similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation."

"There are communities ruled by despots, in which every relation between two subjects becomes secondary to the relation between the subject and his king."

"The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked."

"This feedback tends to accomplish the purpose of either positive or negative photo-tropism. It is the analogue of a voluntary feedback, for in man we consider that a voluntary action is essentially a choice between tropisms."

"There is no Maginot Line of the brain."

"This machine has two principal modes of action, in one of which it is positively photo-tropic and searches for light, and in the other of which it is negatively photo-tropic and runs away from the light."

"This takes us very deeply into the question of human individuality. The problem of the nature of human individuality and of the barrier which separates one person from another is as old as human history."

"This view of the nervous system corresponds to the theory of those machines that consist in a sequence of switching devices in which the opening of a later switch depends on the action of precise combinations of earlier switches leading into it, which open at the same time. This all-or-none machine is called a digital machine. It has great advantages for the most varied problems of communication and control. In particular, the sharpness of the decision between 'yes' and 'no' permits it to accumulate information in such a way as to discriminate very small differences in very large numbers."

"Thus the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages."

"To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man."

"To see the greater importance of the transportation of information as compared with mere physical transportation, let us suppose that we have an architect in Europe supervising the construction of a building in the United States... Even at the present, there is no reason why the working copies of these plans and specifications must be transmitted to the construction site on the same paper on which they have been drawn up in the architect's drafting-room... Ultrafax gives a means by which a facsimile of all the documents concerned may be transmitted in a fraction of a second, and the received copies are quite as good working plans as the originals... In short, the bodily transmission of the architect and his documents may be replaced very effectively by the message-transmission of communications which do not entail the moving of a particle of matter from one end of the line to the other."

"To hold an organism stable while a part of it is being slowly destroyed, with the intention of re-creating it out of other material elsewhere, involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most cases would destroy the life in the tissue."

"Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or for the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime."

"To recapitulate: the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than as a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at the present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance."

"We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message."

"We are all steering."

"Variety and possibility are inherent in the human sensorium--and are indeed the key to man's most noble flights--because variety and possibility belong to the very structure of the human organism."

"We are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value."

"We are the slaves of our technical improvement and we can no more return a New Hampshire farm to the self-contained state in which it was maintained in 1800 than we can, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature or, what is more to the point, diminish it. We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions."

"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."

"We have thus established the basis in man for the simplest element in his communication: namely, the communication of man with man by the immediate use of language, when two men are face to face with one another. The inventions of the telephone, the telegraph, and other similar means of communication have shown that this capacity is not intrinsically restricted to the immediate presence of the individual, for we have many means to carry this tool of communication to the ends of the earth."

"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message."

"We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results."

"We mathematicians who operate with nothing more expensive than paper and possibly printers' ink are quite reconciled to the fact that, if we are working in an active field, our discoveries will commence to be obsolete at the moment that they are written down or even at the moment they are conceived. We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results. This is the meaning of the famous apothegm of Newton, when he said, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"."

"What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen."

"Welcome to the Machine."

"When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed."

"When there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of becoming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet."

"When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person."