Astounding British Edition, May 1953 — page 25: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Fe lng ig oe a ca Nt Age agen ON eg, SSO ac i . = . es “Why? Is my logic wrong in regard to noise and information?” “Gad, I don’t know. It sounds good. It’s right, of course, but exactly what does that have to do with the operation of the human mind and Project Levitation?”’ “From a structural standpoint, I can't answer that question—yet. Functionally, it appears that there must be in the human mind a mechanism which is nothing but a pure noise generator, a producer of random impulses, pure omniscient noise. “Somewhere else there must be another mechanism which is set to either filter the production of random noise or control its production so that only semantically mean- ingful forms are allowed to come through. Evidently, the filter is capable of being set at any level to filter out anything we choose to define as noise. “So we go through the rough process of growing up, we go to school, and get educated, we get a red line setting on the noise filter which rejects all but a bare minimum of data presented by the external universe, and our internal creativeness as well. “Facts in the world about us are rejected from then on when they don’t fit. Creative imagination is whittled down. The filter takes care of it automatically once we give it a setting.” a “And your project here,” said Mart, “the stuff on Babylonian mysticism, astrology, and the rest of that crud—” “The whole pattern was set to be as noisy as possible,” said Berk. “We didn’t know how to produce antigravity, so we gave you a picture of a man who did, and made it as noisy as possible to loosen up your own noise filters on the subject. I offered you a dose of omniscient noise on the subject of antigravity, and the one inescapable con- clusion that it had been done. “Everyone of you had previously set your filters to reject the idea of antigravity. Nonsense! No use looking for that. Work on something useful. “So I suggested to Keyes we assemble a bunch of you double-domes and slap you solidly with the fact that it ain’t nonsense, it can be done, Bud. Give you some omniscient noise to listen to, loosen up your filters, and let the answer come through out of your own mental productiveness. “It worked. It always will work. All you’ve got to do is get the lead out of your pants and the rocks out of your head, and the _— ——_ “ “~~ Pt ete = Ye = ae \~ = sad NOISE LEVEL arbitrary noise filter settings corrected on a few of the other things you’ve always wanted om) phe = em a uf SS ~~ ro i’ +. Se SD 4 >. to do—and you can find a proper answer to any problem you care to investigate!” Mart glanced up at the moon spreading silver across the sky. “Yeah—there’s the stars,” he said. “I’ve always wanted the stars. Now we’ve got antigravity—” “And so you can go to the stars—if you want to.” Mart shook his head. “You and Dunning —first we’ve got it, then we haven't. “You get us to produce antigravity. And ~ it becomes a mere gimmick! Sure we could see the planets, maybe even go beyond the solar system before we lie. But I guess I’m going to stay here and work with you. A paltry planet or two isn’t so much, after all. If we could learn to utilize the maximum noise level of the human mind we could master the whole Universe!” THE END. <> SCIENCE FICTION at its very best... j Original Stories by both American } 1 and British masters of Science Fic- | tion, plus articles of lasting interest } to the Science Fiction enthusiast. | ...can be found in each issue of | NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY 2/- Order it from your newsagent or | send 8/- for a year’s subscription to | CROWNPOINT PUBLICATIONS LTD. | 159 CROWNPOINT ROAD GLASGOW, S.E. (E(@) lebook (C©) im