Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Progress and Entropy

As stated earlier, the statistical tendency of nature towards disorder, that is, the tendency of isolated systems to have entropy increases, is expressed through the second law of thermodynamics.We, people, are not isolated systems.We get our food from outside to generate energy, so we are all part of a larger world that includes the sources of our life force.But the more important fact is that we get information from our senses and act on the information we get. Physicists are now familiar with the meaning of this statement as it relates to our relationship to our environment. The role of information in this aspect has a genius expression, which was proposed by Maxwell in the form of the so-called "Maxwell's demon".We can describe this demon as follows.

A gas container is provided, and the gas in it has the same temperature in each part.Some molecules of the gas must move faster than others.Now let us suppose that there is a small door in the container, through which the gas enters a duct which operates a heat engine, and the exhaust of the heat engine is connected with another duct which returns to the container through another small door.Each door has a goblin, which has the ability to identify incoming gas molecules and open or close the door according to their speed. The demon on the first door only opens the door for high-speed molecules, and closes the door when it encounters low-speed molecules from the container.The sprite on the second door has the opposite task: it only opens the door for slow-speed molecules coming from the container, and closes the door when it encounters high-speed molecules.The effect of this is to increase the temperature at one end of the vessel and decrease the temperature at the other end, thereby creating a "second" water motive that does not violate the first law of thermodynamics (which tells us: Conservation of energy) perpetual motion machine, but it violates the second law of thermodynamics (this law tells us: energy automatically makes the temperature tend to balance).In other words, Maxwell's demon appears to overcome the tendency for entropy to increase.

Perhaps I can further illustrate this idea with the following example.Consider a group of people coming out of two turnstiles in an underpass, one of which only allows people walking at a certain speed, and the other door only allows people walking slowly.This occasional movement of the crowd in the underpass will manifest itself as a stream of people who come out of the first turnstile fast, and who go through the second turnstile slowly.If we connect the two turnstiles with a passage equipped with a treadmill, then the force of the fast-moving traffic turning the treadmill from one direction is greater than that of the slow-moving traffic coming from the other direction. Turn the power of this treadmill, so that we get a useful energy from the occasional movement of the crowd.

There is a very interesting difference here between the physics of our grandparents and the physics of today. In nineteenth-century physics, information seemed to be available for free.It turned out that, in Maxwell's physics, none of his demons had problems supplying their energy.However, modern physics admits that Maxwell's demon can only take information through something like a sense organ, which enables the demon to open or close the door, and for this purpose, the sense organ is the eyes.The light that stimulates the demon's eyes is not something without energy added to the mechanical movement, but also has various main attributes of the mechanical movement itself.Unless the light hits the instrument, no instrument can receive light; unless the light hits a particle, the light cannot indicate the position of any particle.This means, therefore, that, even from a purely mechanical point of view, we cannot think that the gas chamber contains only gas, but that it contains gas and light, both of which can be in equilibrium or can be out of balance.If gas and light are in equilibrium, then, as a corollary of modern physics, we can prove that Maxwell's demon will be as blind as if there were no light in the gas chamber.At best we have ambiguous light coming from all directions, which gives little indication of the position and momentum of the gas particles.Therefore, Maxwell's demon can only work in systems with imbalanced states.In such a system, however, it can be shown that constant collisions between light and gas particles tend to bring the two into equilibrium.Therefore, even if the demon can temporarily reverse the usual direction of entropy, it will eventually become exhausted.

Only when there is light added from outside the system, and its temperature is different from the mechanical temperature of the particle itself, Maxwell's demon can work continuously.This situation should be completely familiar to us, because we know that everything around us reflects the sun's light, and the sun's light and the mechanical system on the earth are far from being in equilibrium.Strictly speaking, the temperature of the particles we encounter is about 60°C or so, while the light with the particles is about several thousand degrees when it is emitted from the sun. In a system that is not in equilibrium, or, in local regions of the system, entropy does not necessarily increase.

In fact, entropy can be reduced locally.This disequilibrium in the world around us may be but one stage in a process of decay that will eventually lead to equilibrium.Sooner or later we are all going to die, and it is very likely that the entire universe around us will be destroyed by the heat death, when the world will revert to a vast state of temperature equilibrium, in which nothing really new will appear.There is nothing but monotonous uniformity, from which all we can expect are small and insignificant local fluctuations. However, we have not yet been witnesses to the final stages of destruction of the world.In fact, there can be no witnesses to these stages.In this world which concerns us directly, therefore, there are phases which, though occupying only an insignificant place in eternity, are of great importance to us, because in these phases entropy is not Increase, organization and its accompaniment (information) are increasing.

The increased organization of these localized regions I speak of is not limited to the kind of organization revealed by living organisms. Machines can also add information locally and temporarily, although their organization is crude and imperfect compared with ours. Here, I would like to insert the semantics of the next point: life, purpose, and soul are words that are extremely unsuitable for strict scientific thinking.These words all derive their meaning from our common knowledge of a certain class of phenomena, but they do not in fact provide any basis for characterizing exactly that commonality.Whenever we discover a new phenomenon, if it has some degree of commonality with the properties of those we have already named "life phenomenon" and the same as we use to define "life"

When all relevant aspects of the term do not correspond, we are faced with the question whether to expand the meaning of the term "life" to include this phenomenon, or to define the term in a more rigorous way so as to include Except for this phenomenon, which we have encountered in the past in the study of viruses, which exhibit several tendencies of life—survival, multiplication, and organization—but these tendencies are not in a fully developed form.Now, when we observe some similarities in behavior between machines and living organisms, the question of whether the machine is alive or dead is, from our point of view, a matter of semantics, that is, we can use answer in one way or another which is most convenient for us.It's like a famous quote from Humpty Dumpty: "I give them a perk and tell them to do what I want."

If we want to use the word "life" to generalize all phenomena that locally violate the direction of increasing entropy, we are free to do so.In doing so, however, we will include many phenomena in astronomy that we generally know have only slight resemblance to life.Therefore, in my opinion, it is best to avoid using code names such as "life", "soul", "vital force", etc., which have yet to be proved in themselves, and when speaking of machines, just point out: in general In the range where entropy tends to increase, we have no reason to say that machines cannot be similar to humans in terms of representing local areas of entropy reduction.

When I compare such machines with living organisms, I never mean that the special physical, chemical, and mental processes of life as we usually understand them are the same as those in life-imitating machines. Those processes are equivalent.I am simply saying that both of them can be seen as examples of local anti-entropic processes.Anti-entropic processes may also be exemplified in many other ways, which of course should be called neither biological nor mechanical. While it is impossible to make common statements about life-simulating automata in such a rapidly developing field as automation, I would like to emphasize that these actually existing machines share several common features.One characteristic is that they are all machines that perform a specific task or tasks, so they all must have effector organs (similar to human arms and legs) that enable these tasks to be completed.The second feature is that they all have to use sensory organs to communicate with the outside world (enrapport), for example, use photoelectric cells and thermometers. These instruments can not only tell the machine what the current environment is, but also enable the machine to complete its tasks or not. record it.The latter function, as mentioned earlier, is called feedback, the ability to use past performance to regulate future behaviour.Feedback can be as simple as an ordinary reflex, or more advanced, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific actions but also to regulate the overall strategy of behavior.Such strategic feedback can, and often does, manifest itself in what appears to be conditioning on the one hand and learning on the other.

For all these forms of behavior, especially the more complex forms, we must set up a central decision-making organ for the machine, which determines the next action of the machine based on the information fed to the machine. The information stored in this organ is the memory of the simulated living body capable.It is not difficult to make a simple machine which tends to or avoids light, and if such a machine contains a light source of its own, the combination of many of these machines will exhibit complex forms of social behaviour, as is the case with As Dr. G. Walter (Grey Waltor) described in the book "The Living Brain" (The Living Brain).At present, some of the more complex machines of this type are no more than scientific toys for exploring the possibilities of the machines themselves and their analogue, the nervous system.However, it is reasonable to suspect that technological developments in the near future will enable some of these potentialities to be exploited. Thus, nervous systems and automatic machines are fundamentally similar in that they are both devices for making decisions on the basis of decisions already made in the past.The simplest mechanical device makes an alternative decision, for example, opening or closing a switch.In the nervous system, individual nerve fibers also make decisions between transmitting impulses or not transmitting them.Both machines and nervous systems have specialized apparatus for making decisions about the future based on their past. In the nervous system, much of this work is done in extremely complex places called "synapses." There are multiple afferent nerve fibers connected to one efferent nerve fiber.In many cases, we can refer to the basis of these judgments as the threshold of synaptic activity. In other words, we use the excitation (fire) of several afferent fibers to make the efferent fibers fire for illustration. This is the basis for at least a partial resemblance between machines and living beings.A synapse in a living organism is comparable to a switchgear in a machine.For a further elaboration of the relation of machines and living beings in detail, the reader is referred to the extremely fascinating work of Dr. Walter and Dr. Ahibe. As stated earlier, a machine, like a living body, is a device which appears to resist the general tendency of increasing entropy locally and temporarily.Because the machine is capable of decision-making, it is able to create a locally organized zone around itself in a world whose general tendency is to decline. The scientist has always sought to discover order and organization in the universe, so he is playing a game against our arch enemy, disorganization.Is this demon the Manichean or the Augustinian, is it a force opposed to order or the absence of order itself? manifested in different tactics.The Manichaean demon was an adversary as well as any adversary who is destined to triumph and will use all cunning and hypocrisy to achieve victory.Specifically, he can keep his mischief tactics a secret; if we give any hint of awareness of his mischief tactics, he will change tactics and continue to keep us in the dark.Augustine's demon, on the other hand, is not a power in itself, but a measure of our weakness; it may take all our intellect to expose it, but by exposing it we are in a certain sense At the same time, it will not change its tactics on a problem we have already figured out, with the sole purpose of further destroying us.The Manichaeans taught us to play poker with deceit; this, as von Neumann explains in his Theory of Games, is not only designed to enable us to win by deceit , and designed to prevent the other party from winning on the basis of our honesty that we do not cheat. Compared with the good-looking and malicious demon of Manichaeism, Augustine's demon is a fool.It plays a complex game, but we can see that our ingenuity beats it like a sprinkle of holy water. As for the nature of the devil, we know that Einstein had a maxim, which has more content than a maxim, and it is actually a statement about various basis of the scientific method.Patriotic Stein said: "God is shrewd, but not malicious." The word "God" is used here to denote the forces of nature, including those of the most humble servants we ascribe to God, the demonic ones.What Einstein meant was that these forces do not deceive us.Perhaps, the meaning of this demon is not far from that of Mephistopheles.When Faust asks Mephistopheles what he is, Mephistopheles replies: "I am a part of that power which is always doing evil and at the same time always doing good." In other words, The devil's ability to deceive is not unlimited, and the scientist is wasting his time if he seeks in the universe he studies a positive force determined to play tricks on us.Nature resists deciphering, but it is not necessarily capable of finding new and undecipherable ways to jam communications between us and the outside world. The difference between the passive resistance of nature and the active resistance of an adversary is reminiscent of the difference between a scientific researcher and a soldier or a gambler.A scientific research worker can carry out his various experiments whenever and wherever he wants without worrying about when nature will discover the means and methods he uses and change its tactics.His business, therefore, is governed by his best opportunity; whereas a chess player cannot make a wrong move without encountering an astute opponent who intends to take advantage of the opportunity and beat him.A chess player is therefore at the mercy of his worst moments as much as he is dominated by his best moments.I may be biased on this argument, because I feel that I can do effective work in science, but I often fail at chess because of my indiscretions at critical moments. Scientists, therefore, tend to see their adversary as a decent adversary.This attitude, necessary to his effectiveness as a scientist, would leave him vulnerable to unscrupulous people in war and in politics.Another consequence of this attitude is that he is incomprehensible to the general public, who cares far more for one's enemy than for an adversary like nature. We have to live a life in which the world as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: chaos increases and order decreases.- However, as mentioned earlier, although the second law of thermodynamics is a valid statement for the closed system as a whole, it is certainly not valid for the non-isolated parts of it.In a world in which the total entropy tends to increase, there are local and temporary regions of entropy reduction which allow one to assert the existence of progress.What can we say about the general direction of the struggle between progress and entropy in the world directly concerned with us? As we all know, the Enlightenment period gave birth to the concept of progress. Although in the eighteenth century, some thinkers believed that this kind of progress obeyed the law of diminishing returns, and believed that the golden age of society was not much different than what they saw around them. s difference.In this building of the Enlightenment, the breach marked by the French Revolution casts doubt on any progress.Malthus, for example, noted that the agriculture of his day was mired in a mire of uncontrollable population growth, eating up the entire harvest that people were producing at the time. From Malthus to Darwin, the clues of thought transmutation are clear.Darwin's great innovation in the theory of evolution lies in his admission that evolution is not a Lamarck-style high and higher, good and good spontaneous ascent process, but a phenomenon in which living organisms show There are: (A) the spontaneous tendency of multi-directional development and (B) the tendency of maintaining one's own ancestral pattern (Pattern).The combination of these two effects eradicates chaotic development in nature, while at the same time weeding out organisms that cannot adapt to their surroundings through the process of "natural selection".The result of this eradication is how many residual patterns of life forms are able to adapt to their surroundings. According to Darwin, this residual pattern is the expression of the purposiveness of All. The concept of residual patterns was reintroduced in the work of Dr. Ahibe.He uses it to explain machine learning. He pointed out that a machine with a rather random and aimless structure always has some near-equilibrium states and several near-equilibrium states, and the near-equilibrium mode is by its nature to last for a long time. As for A near-equilibrium pattern emerges only temporarily.It turns out that in Ashby's machine, as in Darwin's nature, we see purpose in a system that is not purposefully constructed, for the simple reason that purposelessness by its very nature It is something that appears temporarily.In the final analysis, of course, the very general purpose of maximum entropy appears to be the most enduring of all purposes.But in its intervening stages the organism or society of organisms will remain for a relatively long time in a mode of activity in which the different parts of the organization act together according to a more or less meaningful pattern. I think that Ahibe's brilliant idea of ​​a purposeless stochastic agency seeking its own purpose through a learning process is not only one of the great contributions of contemporary philosophy, but will be highly useful in solving automated tasks. Technical achievements.Not only can we add purposes to machines, but, in most cases, a machine designed to avoid certain malfunctions will find as many purposes as it can. Even as early as the nineteenth century, Darwin's ideas of progress had an impact beyond the realm of biology. All philosophers and sociologists draw their scientific ideas from the valuable sources of their day.It is not surprising, then, to see Marx and his contemporary sociologists embrace Darwin's views on the issues of evolution and progress. In physics, the idea of ​​progress is opposed to that of entropy, although there is no absolute contradiction between the two.All theoretical physics directly concerned with Newton agrees that information that promotes progress and opposes entropy increases can be transmitted with little or no energy at all.In this century, this view has been changed by the innovation of quantum theory in physics. Quantum theory leads to exactly the new link we expect between energy and information.A crude form of this connection occurs in the theory of line noise on telephone lines or amplifiers.This noise floor appears to be something unavoidable, since it has to do with the discrete nature of the electrons carrying the current, which has some ability to corrupt information.Therefore, the communication capacity of the line must be of a certain size to prevent the message from being overwhelmed by its own energy.A more basic fact than this example is: light itself is also an atomic structure, and light of a certain frequency is radiated out one by one, called light quanta, which has definite energy, and its magnitude depends on its frequency.Therefore, the energy of radiation cannot be less than the energy of a single photon.Without a certain loss of energy, the transmission of information cannot occur, so there is no clear boundary between energy coupling and information coupling.But even so, for a large number of practical purposes, a photon is an extremely small thing, and the energy transfer required for an efficient information coupling is also extremely small.Thus, when we consider local processes such as the growth of a tree or the growth of a person that depend directly or indirectly on solar radiation, a large reduction in local entropy may be associated with a very economized transfer of energy.This is one of the fundamental facts of biology, especially of the theory of photosynthesis or the theory of chemical processes.Thanks to photosynthesis, or the chemical process, plants use sunlight to make starch and other complex compounds needed for life from water and carbon dioxide in the air. Whether we want a pessimistic interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, therefore, depends on the importance we assign to the universe as a whole and to the local entropy-reducing regions we find in it.Remember, we ourselves are such a zone of reduced entropy, and we live in other zones of reduced entropy.It turns out that the difference in normal vision due to the difference in distance allows us to assign far greater importance to regions of reduced entropy and increased order than to the entire universe.For example, life is likely to be a rare phenomenon in the universe. It may be limited to the solar system. If any kind of life we ​​are considering is developed at a level comparable to the life we ​​are mainly interested in, then life is limited to the earth. The phenomenon above.But even so, we live on this earth, and the matter of whether there is life or not in other parts of the universe has little to do with us, and this matter is of course different in size and proportion from the rest of the universe. Absolute dominance is irrelevant. Moreover, we can well conceive of life as a finite time phenomenon; before the earliest geological ages, life did not exist; coming. For those who understand the extreme rarity of the physical conditions in which the chemical reactions necessary for life can take place, the following conclusion is naturally inevitable; allowing any form of life on this earth, not even limited to elephant man For such a life to continue, this lucky chance must come to an entirely unfortunate ending.We may, however, conveniently value ourselves in estimating the temporary accident of life's existence, and the still more temporary accident of human existence, as being of the first importance, regardless of their instantaneity. the nature of passing away. In a very real sense, we are all passengers in this shipwreck on a doomed planet. But even on a shipwreck, human dignity and value do not necessarily disappear, we must try to make it flourish.We're going to sink, but we can look to the future with the attitudes that befit our identities. So far we have been speaking of pessimism, which is more the intellectual pessimism of the professional scientist than the pessimism which touches the sentiments of the laity.We have seen that the entropy theory and considerations of the final heat death of the universe do not necessarily have the very depressing consequences which at first glance appear to exist.But even if this consideration of the future is tempered, it is not something that the average person, especially the average American, can accept for his emotional well-being.The most we can hope for when it comes to the role of progress in the whole of a declining universe is that, in the face of overwhelming inevitability, the horrors of Greek tragedy can be swept away by our progressive gaze.However, we live in an era without much sense of tragedy. The education of the average child in the upper classes of the American middle class is designed to guard against his sense of death and ruin.He grew up in the atmosphere of Santa Claus, and when he understood that Santa Claus is a myth, he burst into tears.Indeed, he was determined not to fully agree to the removal of the god from his pantheon, and he would spend much of the rest of his life in search of some emotional substitute. His later life experiences forced him to acknowledge the fact of individual death, to acknowledge the imminence of this catastrophe.But even so, he still tried to attribute these unfortunate realities to the effect of accidents, and he still tried to build a paradise on earth without misfortune.For him, this earthly paradise was in eternal progress, in the constant process of ever greater and better things. Our worship of progress can be discussed from two points of view: one is the factual point of view, and the other is the moral point of view, which provides the standard of approval or disapproval.As a matter of fact, it is asserted that following the discovery of this early advance in America, the beginning of which corresponds to the beginning of modern civilization, we enter into a never-ending period of invention, into a never-ending period of discovery of new technologies and subsequent The period of control over the human environment.Progressive believers say: This period will go on endlessly, with no end in sight in the conceivable future of man.Those who insist on the idea of ​​progress as a moral principle see this unrestrained, almost spontaneous process of change as a "good thing," grounds for assuring future generations of a paradise on earth.One may believe in progress not as a moral principle, but as a fact; but, in the teaching of many Americans, the two are inseparable. The idea of ​​progress is familiar to most of us, either because we recognize the fact that this belief belongs to only a small portion of recorded history; or because we recognize another fact : Progress and our own religious education and traditions are markedly at odds.Neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jew sees the world as a good place to expect lasting happiness.The church's reward for virtue is not any coin that circulates among the emperors of the world, but a promissory note from the kingdom of heaven. In essence, Calvinists also admit this, but add a dark note: the number of God's chosen people who can pass the severe test in the last judgment is very small, and they are all chosen by God at will.In order to be elected, all the virtues of the world and the cultivation of morality are of no avail.Many good people will be punished.Calvinists do not even wish for heavenly happiness for themselves, much less earthly happiness. The Hebrew prophets were far from optimistic in their assessment of the future of mankind, even of their chosen people, Israel; the great virtues of Job, though they might have given him spiritual victories, By God's grace, the return of his flocks, servants, and wives, but virtue does not ensure this relative happiness, except at God's will. The communist, like the progressive believer, seeks his heaven on earth, but not for the reward of his personal existence in the underworld.But even so, he believed that this paradise on earth would never come by itself without a struggle.He doesn't believe in pies in the sky on your deathbed any more than he believes in mountains of rock sugar in the future.Nor is Islam more receptive to progressive ideals, the name Islam itself implying submission to the will of God. As to Buddhism and the Buddhist desire for Nirvana and liberation from samsara, I need not repeat; it is always opposed to the idea of ​​progress, and this is equally true of all similar religions in India. Besides the pleasant and passive progress in which many Americans believed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was a kind of progress which seemed to have a more potent and positive connotation.For the average American, progress meant victory for the West. It means the anarchy of the frontier economy in the era of American immigration, and it means 0.West (owen Wister) and T.Those energetic essays of Theodore Roosevelt.Historically, of course, the Borderlands was a wholly real phenomenon.For many years, the development of the United States has always been carried out against the background of the empty land in the far west.But even so, most of the people who write poetry about the Frontier are admirers of bygone days.The end of true frontier conditions was announced as early as 1890 when the census was held.Inexhaustible and inexhaustible huge domestic resources, the geographical boundaries of which have been clearly delineated. It is difficult for ordinary people to have a historical perspective to see that progress must be reduced to its inherent scale.The muskets with which most men fought in the American Civil War were mere minor improvements from those used at Waterloo, which in turn were almost equal to the open-blade muskets of the Marlborough Army in the Low Countries.But hand-held firearms have been around since the fifteenth century or earlier, and cannon a hundred years earlier.It is doubtful whether the range of the musket was much greater than that of the best longbow, though we know for sure that they were by no means equal in speed and accuracy; yet the longbow is an invention which has seen little improvement since the Stone Age. Also, although shipbuilding technology has never completely stagnated, the wooden warship until the eve of its obsolescence has remained the same basic structure since the beginning of the seventeenth century, and its prototypes can even be traced back many centuries. One of Columbus' sailors could have been the able seaman on Farragut's ship.Sailors who had been born on ships from São Paulo to Marta even had good reason to serve as fore-hands on Joseph Conrad's three-masted barque at home.A Roman cattleman from the Dacian frontier who drove horned bullocks from the Texas prairie to a railroad terminus seemed to be a very capable cattle dealer (Vaquero), although when he got there he would, due to his own Horrified by what he saw and heard.A Babylonian who managed temple property could run an early southern American ranch without learning either bookkeeping or the art of commanding slaves.In short, during that period, the main conditions of life of the vast majority of people were always repeated, while the revolutionary changes did not start even before the Renaissance and the Great Voyage, and people did not know it until they fully entered the nineteenth century. The accelerated pace of progress that we take for granted today was not envisioned. In these cases, find references in early history to the steam engine; It is futile to wait for a rival invention.Metallurgy predicted the beginning of the Bronze Age. However, the inventions in this area neither appeared at a certain time, nor did they have rich and varied content, so it cannot be used as a strong counter-evidence.古典经济学家会利用这种情况而温文尔雅地来说服我们，要我们相信这些变化纯粹是程度上的变化，而程度上的变化就不会破坏历史的类似性了。一剂番木鳖硷和一剂假毒药的差别也只是程度上的差别了。 科学的历史学和科学的社会学都是用下述概念为依据的：所讨论的各种特殊事例都有充分的类似性，因为不同时期的社会机制都是相关着的。但是，毫无疑问，自从现代史开端以来，现象的整个尺度产生了巨大的变化，因为我们很难把过去历史时期的政治观念、国家观念和经济观念转用于现代。几乎同样明显的是，只美洲发现开始的现代史本身就是一个截然不同的历史时期。 在美洲发现时期，欧洲第一次认识到了有一个地广人稀的地区，能够容纳比欧洲自身还多得多的人口；这块大陆充满了有待勘探的资源，不仅有金矿、银矿，还有其他商业物资。这些资源似乎取之不尽，用之不竭；的确，从1500年的社会发展的规模看来，耗尽这些资源并使这些新建的国家达到人口饱和的程度乃是非常遥远的事情。这四百五十年要比大多数人企图展望到的远得多了。 但是，新大陆的存在促使人们产生了一种并非不象《阿丽丝疯茶会》的态度。当一份茶点吃光了，对于疯帽匠和三月兔说来，最自然不过的事情就是跑去占有邻座的一份。 当阿丽丝问他们这样转了一圈重新回到他们原先座位时将会发生什么事情，三月兔就改变了话题。对于那些全部过去历史不到五千年却期望着千年至福和末日审判会在很短的时间内突然降临的人们说来，疯帽匠的这种策略似乎是最最通情达理的了。随着时间的推移，美国的茶桌已被证明不是吃不光的；而且，就事实而论，丢掉一份再抢另外一份的速度是增加了，可能还要以更快的步伐来增加。 许多人认识不到最近四百年乃是世界史上的一个非常特别的时期。这个时期所发生的变化，其步调之快，史无前例；就这些变化的本质而言，情况也是如此。它一部分是通讯加强的结果，但也是人们对自然界加强统治的结果，而在地球这样一个范围有限的行星上，这种统治归根到底是会加强我们作为自然界的奴隶的身份的。因为，我们从这个世界取出的愈多，给它留下的就愈少，到最后，我们就得还债，那时候，就非常不利于我们自己的生存了。我们是自己技术改进的奴隶，我们不能把新罕布什尔（New Hampshire）的一个农庄还原为1800年那种自足自给的经济状态，正如我们不能通过想象给自己的身高增加一腕尺（cubit），或者用更恰当的比喻来说，不能缩小一腕尺一样。我们是如此彻底地改造了我们的环境，以致我们现在必须改造自己，才能在这个新环境中生存下去。我们再也不能生活在旧环境中了。 进步不仅给未来带来了新的可能性，也给未来带来了新的限制。看来进步自身和我们反对增熵的斗争都似乎一定要见我们正在力图避免的毁灭道路为结局。然而，这种悲观主义的情绪仅仅是以我们的无知无能为前提的，因为我坚信，一旦我们认识到新环境所强加于我们的新要求认及我们掌握到的符合这些新要求的新手段时，那么，在人类文明毁灭和人种消灭之前，仍然还有一段很长的时间，虽则它们终将是要消灭的，就象我们生下来都要死去一样。但是，最后热寂的前景乃是远在生命彻底毁灭之后才会出现的东西，这对人类文明和人种说来同样是正确的，就跟对其中的个体说来同样是正确的一样。我们既要有勇气面对个人毁灭这样一桩确定无疑的事实，同样，我们也要有勇气面对我们文明的最后毁灭。进步的单纯信仰不是有力的信念，而是勉强接受下来的因而也是无力的信念。