"We are part of nature, and our mind is the only instrument we have, or can conceive of, for learning about nature or about ourselves." (Conrad H Waddington, "The Nature of Life", 1960)
"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)
"[…] numbers are free creations of the human mind; they serve as a means of apprehending more easily and more sharply the difference of things." (Richard Dedekind, "Essays on the Theory of Numbers", 1963)
"I shall not attempt to prove that mathematics is useful. I will admit it and so save myself the trouble that here is a great and respected discipline where all is impossible yet much is useful. The usefulness largely flows from the impossibility. Mathematical concepts have been simplified and generalized until they describe an imaginative world no part of which could possibly exist outside men’s minds." (Billy E Goetz, "The Usefulness of the Impossible", 1963)
"Mathematics is a creation of the mind. To begin with, there is a collection of things, which exist only in the mind, assumed to be distinguishable from one another; and there is a collection of statements about these things, which are taken for granted. Starting with the assumed statements concerning these invented or imagined things, the mathematician discovers other statements, called theorems, and proves them as necessary consequences. This, in brief, is the pattern of mathematics. The mathematician is an artist whose medium is the mind and whose creations are ideas." (Hubert S Wall, "Creative Mathematics", 1963)
"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)
"Engineering is the art of skillful approximation; the practice of gamesmanship in the highest form. In the end it is a method broad enough to tame the unknown, a means of combing disciplined judgment with intuition, courage with responsibility, and scientific competence within the practical aspects of time, of cost, and of talent. This is the exciting view of modern-day engineering that a vigorous profession can insist be the theme for education and training of its youth. It is an outlook that generates its strength and its grandeur not in the discovery of facts but in their application; not in receiving, but in giving. It is an outlook that requires many tools of science and the ability to manipulate them intelligently In the end, it is a welding of theory and practice to build an early, strong, and useful result. Except as a valuable discipline of the mind, a formal education in technology is sterile until it is applied." (Ronald B Smith, "Professional Responsibility of Engineering", Mechanical Engineering Vol. 86 (1), 1964)
"The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, ‘refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings’, and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to senses tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events." (Morris Kline, "Mathematics in Western Culture", 1964)
"Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. […] As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason." (Carl G Jung, "Man and His Symbols", 1964)
"Formulating and structuring a system provide methods for relating (1) what the system consists of in the mind of the persons or group desiring it; (2)what it means in terms of the persons or group designing and building it; and (3) in terms of the persons or groups operating, using and servicing it. They provide a set of 'reasonable"'parts and methods of relating them so that the many persons working on the system can understand the whole in sufficient detail for their purposes, and their particular parts in explicit detail so that they may contribute their best efforts to the extent required. A further purpose of system formulation is to recognize the magnitude of the job, including the possible pitfalls." (Harold Chestnut, "Systems Engineering Tools", 1965)
"When intelligent machines are constructed, we should not be surprised to find them as confused and as stubborn as men in their convictions about mind-matter, consciousness, free will, and the like." (Marvin Minsky, "Matter, Mind, and Models", Proceedings of the International Federation of Information Processing Congress Vol. 1 (49), 1965)
"Any theory starts off with an observer or experimenter. He has in mind a collection of abstract models with predictive capabilities. Using various criteria of relevance, he selects one of them. In order to actually make predictions, this model must be interpreted and identified with a real assembly to form a theory. The interpretation may be prescriptive or predictive, as when the model is used like a blueprint for designing a machine and predicting its states. On the other hand, it may be descriptive and predictive as it is when the model is used to explain and predict the behaviour of a given organism." (Gordon Pask, "The meaning of cybernetics in the behavioural sciences", 1969)
"Visual thinking calls, more broadly, for the ability to see visual shapes as images of the patterns of forces that underlie our existence - the functioning of minds, of bodies or machines, the structure of societies or ideas." (Rudolf Arnheim, "Visual Thinking", 1969)
No comments:
Post a Comment