Dhamma K

“To people reared in the good liberal tradition, man is in principle infinitely wise;he pursues knowledge to its ultimate...To the cybernetician, man is part of a control system. His input is grossly inadequate to the task of perceiving the universe...there is no question of ‘ultimate’ understanding...[I]t is part of the cultural tradition that man’s language expresses his thoughts. To the cybernetician, language is a limiting code in which everything has to be expressed—more’s the pity, for the code is not nearly rich enough to cope (pp. 294–295)...Will you tell me that science is going to deal with this mystery [of existence] in due course? I reply that it cannot. The scientific reference frame is incompetent to provide an existence theorem for existence. The layman may believe that science will one day ‘explain everything away’; the scientist himself ought to know better (p. 298).”
― Stafford Beer

“Below the village the pastures and plowlands of the Vale slope downward level below level towards the sea, and other towns lie on the bends of the River Ar; above the village only forest rises ridge behind ridge to the stone and snow of the heights.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“This exquisite photograph of water in movement...has a very subtle message for us. It is that nature’s computers are that which they compute. If one were to take intricate details of wind and tide and so on, and use them...as ‘input’ to some computer simulating water—what computer would one use, and how express the ‘output’? Water itself: that answers both those questions.”
― Stafford Beer, Pebbles to Computers: The Thread