SLSL Intro "My Undergraduate Mood"

[Dave Monroe]

"Given my undergraduate mood, Adams's sense of power
out of control, coupled with Wiener's spectacle of
universal heat-death and mathematical stillness,
seemed just the ticket." (SL, "Intro," p. 13


Again, from Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams:
An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918
[1904]), Ch. XXXIII, "A Dynamic Theory of History" ...

This, then, or something like this, would be a dynamic
formula of history.... Whether the attractive energy
has been called God or Nature, the mechanism has been
always the same, and history is not obliged to decide
whether the Ultimate tends to a purpose or not, or
whether ultimate energy is one or many. Every one
admits that the will is a free force, habitually
decided by motives. No one denies that motives exist
adequate to decide the will; even though it may not
always be conscious of them. Science has proved that
forces, sensible and occult, physical and
metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse,
vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop; that
man's senses are conscious of few, and only in a
partial degree; but that, from the beginning of
organic existence, his consciousness has been induced,
expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness;
and that the rise of his faculties from a lower power
to a higher, or from a narrower to a wider field, may
be due to the function of assimilating and storing
outside force or forces.... beyond the lines of force
felt by the senses, the universe may be--as it has
always been--either a supersensuous chaos or a divine
unity, which irresistibly attracts, and is either life
or death to penetrate.... In the earlier stages of
progress, the forces to be assimilated were simple and
easy to absorb, but, as the mind of man enlarged its
range, it enlarged the field of complexity, and must
continue to do so, even into chaos, until the
reservoirs of sensuous or supersensuous energies are
exhausted, or cease to affect him, or until he
succumbs to their excess. 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hadams/eha33.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hadams/ha_home.html

>From Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1954 [1950]), Ch. II, "Progress and Entropy," pp.
28-47 ...

   "In a system which is not in equlibrium ... entropy
need not increase.  It may, in fact, decrease locally.
 Perhaps this non-equilibrium of the world about us is
merely a stage in a downhill course which will
ultimately lead to equilibrium.  Sooner or later we
shall die, and it is highly probable that the whole
universe around us will die the heat death, in which
the world shall be reduced to one vast temperature
equilibrium in which nothing really new ever happens."
(pp. 30-1)

"... it is quite conceivable that life belongs to a
limited stretch of time ....
   "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
...." (p. 40)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72941&sort=date

And from Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman:
Refelctions on Time (trans. Geoffrey Bennington and
Rachel Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), Ch. 1,
"Can Thought Go on without a Body?," pp. 8-24 ...

"While we talk, the sun is getting older.  It will
explode in 4.5 billion years.  It's just a little
beyond the halfway point of its expected lifetime.... 
With the sun's death your insoluble questions will be
done with too.  It's possible that they'll stay
unanswered right up to the end ....  You explain: it's
impossible to think an end, pure and simple, of
anything at all, since an end's a limit and to think
it you have to be on both sides of that limit....  But
after the sun's death there won't be a thought to know
that its death took place.
   "That, in my view, is the sole serious question to
face humanity today.  In comparison everything else
seems insignificant....
   "With the disappearance of earth, thought will have
stopped ...." (pp. 8-9)

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