Weaver D.R. Weinbaum

“Social systems can move mountains and eventually perhaps planets and stars. Still, no walking through walls.... And if they come to allow walking through walls eventually, just as a point, it will require a serious tweaking of constraints and degrees of freedom at the relevant substrate level (i.e., atoms, molecules, etc.) just as the very reality of your mobile phone requires.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Social Systems: Where is the Ground?

“There is no underlying principle or reproducible pattern associated with extraordinary intelligence exactly because it operates prior to principles and patterns. The only way to understand it is in historical perspective, when the naked New has already been enrobed/incorporated into a system of distinctions, labels, concepts and relations; when it has already become organised into a containing narrative. It is then, in retrospect, that we can reflect and see it for what it is or is not. Even so, this is not anymore the instance per se that we are talking about but its representation in relation to an already constructed narrative and where both representation and narrative emerge as secondary products after the fact. So paradoxically, instances of extraordinary intelligence are irretrievable as such; we can only follow the traces and after-effects they have left in our minds, much the same as we learn about elementary particles in physics only by following the traces they have left in a bubble chamber.”
― Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, The Practice of Thinking: Cultivating the Extraordinary