[b]Neal Stephenson
If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?[/b]
A gruesome reminder perhaps that some don’t.
In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.
He’s talking about our own species of course.
BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements – this is how they convince themselves they didn’t get ripped off.
So, is this actually true?
Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You—Rudy—and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us—it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.
Now this might reflect real philosophy, right?
The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry’s computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn’t working were not as interesting to him.
Cue, among others, Maximillian Cohen.
They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
He wondered if that was a good thing.