Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Evolution is based on the passing on of genetic information.
Consciousness is nothing more than a body’s ability to
take in information from the environment and to adjust the
body’s actions as a result. Psychology is about information
and communication.
The same is true of technologies aimed at creating more
machines to be able to monitor themselves and modify what
they do as a result.
Wiener’s ideas in
computer pioneers who gave us the advances that led to the personal
computer and the Internet. The main center of this development
was in northern California, in the area now known as Silicon Valley.
There, the engineer Douglas Engelbart brought together a group of
by developments in technology and by the San Francisco Bay–area
culture of the late 1960s.
was a military-funded project, but many of those who worked on it
did so to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. Indeed, many of these
engineers and programmers were working on the development of
the personal computer to aid the movement to end the war.
In addition to Wiener’s , these computer pioneers read
Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. These
books are notable for Heinlein’s weaving together of stories that
portrayed a technologically advanced human future that still grappled
with social problems similar to those seen in the 1960s. Heinlein’s
work showed a future in which human abilities were augmented by
technology, and it appealed to the anti-authoritarianism that was a
246