Informatics Quotes

“Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism.

First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut.

The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too.

The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too.

I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.”
― Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet

“Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data - i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion. Of generalized interactivity abolishing particularized action. Of the interface which abolishes challenge, passion, and rivalry between peoples, ideas and individuals which was always the source of the finest energies.

It is difficult to find a remedy for our own sadness, because we are ourselves implicated in it. It is difficult to find a remedy for other people's sadness because we are prisoners of it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Leibniz wanted to combine physics, mathematics, logic, and philosophy, and he would no doubt have loved this joke:

An engineer, a mathematician, a logician, and a philosopher were traveling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.
"Aha", says the engineer, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."
"Hmm", says the mathematician, "You mean that some Scottish sheep are black."
"No", says the logician, "All we know is that there is at least one black sheep in Scotland."
"And even", the philosopher continued, "The only thing we can be really sure of is that the side facing us is black.”
― Luc de Brabandere, Homo Informatix