In days, hours, fractional seconds. Afterward he or she cannot entirely comprehend what happened. The high moment of love also lies outside of time; but we understand it better, when at peace, than the linker understands what the linker has known.
Joelle’s gaze roved. Hey, wasn’t that a handsome young man a dozen seats to her right! Why hadn’t she seen him earlier? Well, she wasn’t given to noticing people. War orphan, brought up from infancy in the pioneering holothetic program, lately released into academe as the Troubles faded out, a virgin who didn’t know what to do about the opposite sex and wasn’t sure she wanted to”-while linkage to macroscopic machinery has not proven cost-effective, the case has turned out to be otherwise for monitoring and controlling scientific instruments. For this it is inadequate to supply the operating brain with numbers such as voltmeter readings and nothing else. For example, a spectrum is best considered-rationally appreciated-when the operator sees it and, simultaneously, knows the exact wavelength and intensity of every line.
Through appropriate hardware and software, this can now be done. Subjectively, it is like sensing the data directly, as if the nervous system had grown complete new input organs of unprecedented power and sensitivity.
“Workers elsewhere have experimented with that. The principal thing Project Ithaca did was to take the next step. What is the meaning of those data, those sensations?
“In everyday life, we do not apprehend the world as a jumble of raw impressions, but as an orderly structure. Yonder we do not see a splash of green and brown; we see a tree, of such-and-such a kind, at such-and-such a distance.
Although it is done unconsciously, yes, instinctively, since animals do it too, nevertheless we may be said to build theories, models, of the world, within which our direct perceptions are made to make sense. Naturally, we modify these models when that seems reasonable. For instance, we may decide that we are not really seeing a tree but a piece of camouflage. We may realize that we have misjudged its distance because the air is more clear or murky than we knew at first. Basically, however, through our models we comprehend and can act in an objective universe. –
“Science has long been adding to our store of information and thus forcing us to change our model of the cosmos as a whole, until today it embraces billions of years and light-years in which are galaxies, subatomic particles, the evolution of life, and everything else that our ancestors never suspected.
To most of us, this part of the Weitbild has admittedly been rather abstract, no matter how immediate the impact of the technologies it makes possible.
“In order to enhance laboratory capability, Project Ithaca began work on means to supply a linkage operator directly with theory as well as data. This was more than learning a subject, permanently or temporarily. Any operator has to do that, in order to think about a given task. And indeed, outstanding accomplishments came out of the Turing Institute here, pioneering ways for the linked computer to give its human partner the necessary knowledge. Project Ithaca greatly improved such systems, and its civilian successors continue to progress. We call them holothetic.
“The work has had an unexpected result. Those operators whom Ithaca trained from childhood, linkers who today are adults advancing the art in their turn, are more and more getting into a mode that I must call intuitive. A baseball pitcher, an acrobat, or simply a person walking is constantly solving complex problems in physics with little or no conscious thought. The organism feels what is right to do. Analogously, we have for example reached the point of manipulating individual amino acids within protein molecules, using ions directed by force-fields which are directed by a holothete, in a manner that perhaps only the Others could plan out step by step. Likewise for any number of undertakings. Direct perception through holothetics is leading to comprehension on a nonverbal level.
“This is doubly true because our theoretical knowledge is far from perfect. Quite frequently these days, a holothete senses that things are not going as intended, that something is wrong with the model-and intuits what changes to make, what the real situation is, as we so often do in our ordinary lives. Later systematic study generally confirms the intuition.