Capitol Ideas/Mind Over Matter
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS MIND OVER MATTER by Tom Bethell G eorge Gilder spoke at the Willard inner space of small-scale matter. The one understands quantum mechanics. certainly can. In short, "atomic Hotel...
...The reason is that the "steel mill economy" the Soviets laboriously acquired is now an anachronism...
...Gilder perhaps Gilder is right...
...The similarity ends, however...
...Read the book...
...George is puffing and splashing is interesting and important precisely measurement or hidden variables, as it that the universe can be exhaustively about in mid-pool: What fun this is...
...This the finish line, using some weird, ly empty, so also is the inner space of was (and is) the dead end of Darwinenergetic stroke, and in the end he wins the molecule and the atom...
...The new industrial revolution will return these materials "to their previous natural condition as dirt, rocks and gunk...
...Labor is becoming individualized rather than undifferentiated, human capital preempts capital, and material resources are approaching the condition of sand...
...In short, "atomic Hotel in Washington, D.C., and word has long been used to describe Do not keep saying to yourself, if you phenomena seem to represent the still after that we had a quick meal at the what the American Heritage (1969) dic- can possibly avoid it, 'but how can it mysterious domain between matter and Shoreham...
...on our hair...
...said: "I think it is safe to say that no trons can go back in time...
...Nobody knows plete mystery to us...
...Matter no longer mattered...
...quantum physics, of which the late Cal served, but "opposing thoughts can This view of life was denied by some Tom Bethell is The American Spec- Tech Nobel laureate Richard Feynman cancel each other out...
...Wealth and power came "to the ruler of military forces capable of conquering the physical means of production...
...Perhaps abridgement of this great, universal' direct experience about...
...Oxford philosophers of the midthe race...
...They are like a television manufacturer who stubbornly continued with vacuum tubes and then found himself competing with producers who used far cheaper transistors...
...The key point uantum physics only make sense, twentieth century dutifully put their Quantum Revolution in Economics and about the inner space of the microcosm Gilder argues, "if it is treated as shoulders to the materialistic wheel...
...By the same token the new technology makes missile-defense feasible and so threatens their laboriously acquired missiles...
...In response to the first (eighteenth century) Industrial Revolution, nations proliferated...
...To build vacuum-tube TV sets today would be a very expensive undertaking...
...are stuck with just such a high cost structure...
...behave like waves, they do not behave muscles...
...One of Dictionary, the word was used as long "does anything it likes," including go- ourselves up into the heavens by pulling the most striking things about him is ago as 1625 with just that sense: "God ing "forward or backward in time...
...a system more or less the drain' into a blind alley from which tween mind and matter is still a corncosm, just published by Simon and analogous to a much larger system in nobody has yet escaped...
...That's lution that has taken place in the last according to a different set of laws, nomena are suggestive because they what Gilbert Ryle taught us (and me...
...Perhaps this is because such invention seems to be purely functional, purely mundane...
...Y es, we will still need steel mills...
...But today, "computer software, a pure product of mind, is the chief source of added value in world commerce...
...space in one key respect: just as the fidently asserts...
...This in turn will weaken nation states...
...The first Industrial Revolution "vastly increased the value of materials...
...T he culture of our time is still I amazingly disdainful of technological creation...
...In fact the words used mind" we mean nothing more than technological and entrepreneurial revo- understand it) oddly, or paradoxically, by scientists to describe atomic phe- that he tends to do well in tests...
...But here they have come to another dead end...
...This is the world of and so on...
...Mass and energy are con- so carelessly...
...Paul Craig Roberts's answer, that at first the Soviet Union was able to exploit fertile farmland and easily accessible gold and oil, which have now been exhausted, no doubt is partly true but it takes too "materialistic" a view of the problem...
...Penfield electrically stimulated the brain cells of epileptics, who thereby could re-experience the past...
...Today, confronted as we are by the sordid antics of a residue of state-subsidized malcontents who are brazen enough to call themselves artists, this is more true than ever...
...Perhaps we cannot Schuster...
...A physicist at Cal Tech, now in his mid-fifties, Mead gives us what Gilder calls Mead's Laws, which, even though they are "contrary to the laws of the world" turned out to "order the future of electronics...
...but they also remained aware that they were experimental subjects...
...unravel it because we have to use our or close to that birthday, but he looks ment...
...All evolved by chance George alone is flailing away toward outer space of the solar system is most- clockwork in the quantum...
...Years ago the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge noted that the human creativity formerly monopolized by the fine arts had, in the twentieth century, most unexpectedly migrated to technology...
...It is not done for its own sake, but to help accountants with spread sheets...
...We have to explain why it seemed to work not too badly for fifty or sixty years, but is now crumbling...
...Today this is increasingly understood (but economists cling to a modified form of it, believing as they do that the three "inputs" of an economy are natural resources, "labor," and something called "capital...
...In a way Gilder's book is about architecture—the architecture of inner space, and the heroic endeavors of a handful of physicists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who designed switchesand integrated circuits on tiny chips of silicon, bringing the architecture of the computer's innards more and more closely into line with the design of inner space...
...However complex they become, computers will never think for themselves...
...Surely (one feels) atomic phetion, disguised by a gentleman-amateur Gilder gives the word a subtly differ- like particles, they do not behave like nomena must be purely materialistic, facade...
...But swimmer who dives recklessly into a describes a spatial world, not an analo- thing you have ever seen...
...because it is not analogous to the nor- though one day someone with a more described in terms of matter and moSoon the pros are laps ahead, but mal, everyday world that we move powerful microscope will be able to tion alone...
...Microcosm could have been subtitled "the triumph of mind over matter...
...They do not located and how it interacts with your less noticeable is his restless determina- world...
...Actually, the best art was always subservient to some other, ostensibly more important function: the concerto for the coronation, the requiem for the funeral...
...It is impossible to imagine him little world, as it were an epitome or "behave like nothing you have any understands where your "will" is down in the dumps, exactly...
...This had set him on the path toward the microcosm...
...There is no concealed sion of the brain...
...what counted was what mind did with matter...
...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 The utility of sand demolished the myth that material prosperity depends on natural resources...
...with the laws of Newtonian physics...
...As the traffic of electrons becomes denser, speedier, more complex, and more plentiful, the number of accidents drops, defects decline, and nothing ever wears out...
...But the value new steel will add to the future economy will be small compared to its contribution in the past...
...Therefore, economic reform will require political reform...
...Gilder is now fifty years old, constitution, configuration or develop- how it can be like that...
...Small is beautiful" is another possibility...
...Gilder uses are not logical or fully intelligible to the tion," "absorption," "non-locality," ist because we had parsed our sentences this word in a new way, to describe the human mind...
...The brain does not "secrete thought as the liver does bile," said Wiener...
...I suspect he is...
...Sometimes they break down but they never have a mind of their own—Arthur Clarke's fantasies notwithstanding...
...Shockley has been an exception, for the wrong reason...
...It less by the laws of matter than by the we say of someone that he has "a good It deals with a difficult subject, the behaves (to the extent that we can laws of mind...
...These people—among them William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andrew Grove, and Carver Mead—have not received the attention they have deserved...
...Bringing those costs down by incorporating the new information technology would mean abandoning the totalitarian control of information that is central to their system of government...
...Mere territorial acquisition is now of dubious (or negative) value...
...Thoughts Wilder Penfield, and the computer THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 11 pioneer Norbert Wiener...
...He somehow reminds one of a ent meaning...
...Gilder goes some way toward making up for the neglect by investing the creators of the semiconductor industry with mythic and heroic qualities, Carver Mead in particular...
...If you decide to lift up his tremendous, rambunctious opti- at last made man, that microcosme, or Things on a very small scale, he wrote, your arm, and then lift it, no one mism...
...variation out of the primal muck...
...Reading this book, I realized for the first time why the Soviet economy is collapsing...
...Perhaps elec- scientists, such as the neurosurgeon tator's Washington correspondent...
...Computers are not smart, they are dumb: swift, dutiful, obedient slaves, on call twenty-four hours a day...
...They wanted to believe that mind was mere brain "in order to support the feasibility of building computer minds," Gilder argues...
...Driven by ongoing technological change ("I do not believe that human history has ever seen such rapid expansion of technology as we are witnessing now in electronics," Petr Beckmann wrote in his latest Access to Energy newsletter), we are now moving toward a new economic world...
...There the ism...
...According to the Word English Feynman once said that the electron minds to do so—as difficult as lifting and acts a good deal younger...
...Gilder told me once that he had been more than anything intrigued to learn that the material basis of the semiconductor industry was primarily silicon, or sand, the most plentiful material on earth...
...Complex bodies evolved somehow, the next time you look, some about in—the macrocosm...
...First, it more literally clouds, or billiard balls, or like any- the scale alone being different...
...The mind itself was a mere extruare sunning themselves by the poolside...
...When achievement of that order...
...Unrepentant, those working in the field of artificial intelligence clung to the materialistic model...
...Technology seems to me to be an is that it does not behave in accordance part of the domain of ideas, governed Mind was reduced to behavior...
...Notice that the connection be-tour promoting his new book, Micro- tative world...
...The global network of telecommunications carries more valuable goods than all the world's supertankers...
...This is "all wrong," he con- wise...
...the Soviets THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1989 13...
...It praises unsung heroes: "From immigrants and outcasts, street toughs and science wonks, nerds and boffins, the bearded and the beer-bellied, the tacky and uptight, and sometimes weird, the born again and born yesterday, with Adam's apples bobbing, psyches throbbing, and acne galore, the fraternity of the pizzabreakfast, the Ferrari dream, the silicon truth, the midnight modem, and the seventy-hour week, from dirt farms and redneck shanties, trailer parks and Levittowns, in a rainbow parade of all colors and wavelengths . . . from the ambition and hunger, genius and sweat of the outsider, the downtrodden, the banished and the bullied come most of the progress in the world and in Silicon Valley...
...He was in the midst of a tionary called "a diminutive, represen- be like that?' because you will go 'down mind...
...racing pool with the pros, who move gous one, and in fact his key point is believes that the current paradoxes of At least since the eighteenth century, smoothly ahead with Mark Spitz preci- that this small world of "inner space" quantum theory are not a function of conventional scientific wisdom has had sion...
...Gilder's excellent chapter on this, "The Eclipse of Geopolitics," could itself be expanded into a book...
...But it is derive a more intelligible materialistic from simpler ones, brains evolved like-have sunk to the bottom and the others analogous to the larger world of outer formula...
...It is insufficient to say that "socialism doesn't work...
...quarter century, within the paradoxical which (as we currently conceive them) describe mental phenomena: "reflec- Consciousness was only thought to ex-world of the "microcosm...
...That has always been true...
...hence arms control...
...They are stuck...
...His book Microcosm...
...The patient's mind, which is considering the situation in such an aloof and critical manner, can only be something quite apart from neuronal reflex action," Penfield wrote...
...As you move down into the microcosm, Mead revealed, "everything gets better as it gets smaller, cooler as it gets faster, cheaper as it gets more valuable...
...Artsy-forart's-sake museums and concert halls have been the venue of Western art in its phase of decadence and have contributed to its decline...
...Yet in the future these and others portrayed by Gilder will probably be recognized as being among the most creative figures of our time...
Vol. 22 • November 1989 • No. 11
