His Master's Voice Read Online Free PDF

no certainty that what I write is not similar to what already has been written. This is one hazard of an age of population explosion. If I have decided to present my reminiscences in connection with the work of the Project, it is because nothing I have read on the subject so far has satisfied me. I do not promise to "tell the truth and nothing but the truth." Had our labor been crowned with success, that might have been possible, but success at the same time would have made such an undertaking unnecessary, for then the concluding truth would have eclipsed the circumstances of its attainment; it would have become a material fact nailed in the center of our civilization. But the failure somehow has cast all our efforts back to their sources. Since we do not understand the mystery, nothing really remains to us but those circumstances that were to have been the scaffolding—and not the edifice itself—or the process of translating—and not the content of the work. And yet the former turned out to be all that we returned with from our quest for the Golden Fleece of the Stars. It is here that I part company as well with the versions that I called objective, beginning with the Baloyne Report , because the word "failure" does not appear in them. Did we not leave the Project incomparably richer than when we entered it? New chapters opened up in the physics of colloids, in the physics of strong interactions, in neutrino astronomy, in nucleonics, biology, and, above all, the new knowledge of the Universe—this represents but the first interest that has accrued to us from the informational principal, which, according to the experts, promises huge profits to come.
    No doubt. But there are benefits and there are benefits. Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him. If the example is shocking, I intend it to be. Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?
    I had not a little to say about the Project, but hesitated a long time before sitting down at my desk, aware that I would be adding to what already was a swollen sea of paper. I had assumed that someone more adept with words would perform the task for me; but after years passed I realized that I could not remain silent. The most important works dealing with His Master's Voice, the objective versions, with the Congressional at the head, admit that we did not learn everything; but the amount of space devoted to the achievements, with occasional footnote mentions of what remained unknown—those very proportions suggested that we had mastered the Labyrinth, with the exception of a few corridors—dead ends, no doubt, probably buried in rubble—
    I have no illusions. I fear that I will not be listened to, because no longer are there universal authorities. The distribution—or disintegration—of specialization has advanced so far that the experts declare me unqualified whenever I encroach upon their particular territory. It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded. My pessimism is based on personal experience.
    Nineteen years ago I published, with a young anthropologist named Maxwell Thorpe, who later died tragically in an automobile accident, a paper in which I proved the existence of a complexity threshold for finite automata with algedonic control, to which class belong all the animals as well as man. Algedonic control means an