Renaissance men confronted nature with awe, wonder, and childlike curiosity. They tried to unravel its mysteries much as…

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If there are such indivisible parts and we come to understand them and their behavior, then complete understanding of the world is possible, at least in principle. Therefore, the belief in elements is a fundamental underpinning of the Machine-Age view of the world. The doctrine that asserts this belief is called reductionism:…

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I believe we are leaving an age that can be called the Machine Age. In the Machine Age the universe was believed to be a machine that was created by God to do His work. Man, as part of that machine,…

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in this book considerable attention is given to learning and adaptation. However, because control of change is preferable to responsiveness to it,…

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to say we are experiencing a change of age is to assert that both our methods of trying to understand the world and our actual understanding of it are undergoing…

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as the rate of change increases, the complexity of the problems that face us also increases. The more complex these problems are, the more time it takes to solve them.

Another important consequence of the commitment to causal thinking derives from the acceptance of a cause as sufficient for its effect. Because of this a cause was taken to explain its effect completely. Nothing else was required to explain it, not even the environment. Therefore, Machine-Age thinking was, to a large extent, environment-free; it…

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According to the viewpoint of the Machine Age, in order to understand something it has to be taken apart conceptually or physically. Then how does one come to understand its parts? The answer to this question is obvious: by taking the parts apart. But this answer obviously leads to another question: Is…

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In every domain of inquiry men sought to gain understanding by looking for elements. In a sense, Machine-Age science was a crusade…

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