The lines in the third para, ''This is the world ..... the circuits snap shut or open'' indicate that
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
I suppose their little bones have years ago been lost among the stones and winds of those high glacial pastures. I suppose their leathers blew eventually into the piles of tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle fences and rotted there in the mountain snows along with dead steers and all the other things that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not quite know why I should be thinking of birds over the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now that there are machines that can do these things in a small way, machines that can crawl about like animals, and that it may not be long now until do more things - maybe even make themselves – I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then they will, maybe – well, who knows - but you read about it more and more with no one raising any protest, and already they can add better than we and reach up and hear things through the dark and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the world that confronts me in my biological books and journals, until there are times when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring and dying as the messages go through them and the circuits snap shut or open. This is the great age, make no mistake about it: the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand, remembering those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight. There is another magazine article on my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit. And when man was in his simpler stages of machine building in the eighteenth century, he quickly saw the resemblances. “What.” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was inevitable in the end that men would see the world as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. Little automatons toured the country - dolls controlled by clockwork. Clocks described as little worlds were taken on tours by their designers. They were made up of moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man, whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or not, moved and jerked about like these tiny tippets. A human being thought of himself in terms of his own tools and implements. He had been fashioned like the puppets he produced and was only a more clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was discovered, and the single machine in its turn was found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal machines - the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves away into an abstract chemical machine and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels get smaller and smaller, and they torn more rapidly, but when you try to seize it the life is gone- and so, by popular definition, some would say that life was never there in the first place. The wheels and the cogs are the secret and we can make them better in time- machines that will run faster and more accurately than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated. I think, in his multiform activity, than a machine "mouse" running a maze. Also I like to think of the possible shape of the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once in a rather ordinary mousy insectivore who became a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got, because you know perfectly well that if the electronic brain changes, it will be because of something man has done to it. But what man will do to himself he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and a ghostly intangible thing called change are ticking in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it's impressive; and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll never forget those birds - yet before I measured their significance. I learned the lesson of time first of all. I was young then and left alone in a great desert – part of an expedition that had scattered its men over several hundred miles in order to carry on research more effectively. I learned there that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.