Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.
Interpretation
Progress brings both opportunities and limitations, highlighting the paradox of advancement.
This quote by Norbert Wiener reflects on the dual nature of progress, suggesting that while advancements open up new possibilities, they also impose constraints that can lead us back to challenges we seek to overcome. The fight against entropy—a natural tendency towards disorder—may ultimately result in a struggle that feels like a descent rather than an upward trajectory, underscoring the complexities and contradictions inherent in our pursuit of progress.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion on the implications of technological advancements.
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. _x000D_ A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.
Latter-day Saints are not obedient because they are compelled to be obedient. They are obedient because they know certain spiritual truths and have decided, as an expression of their own individual agency, to obey the commandments of God. . . . We are not obedient because we are blind, we are obedient because we can see
A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.
The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.
Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.
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