Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

EMOTIONAL SENSES able future course of events, and react ‘not to actual collision, as the stone- boulder system would, but to the future-probable collision. The spar- row, in other words, would rebound from a collision that hadn’t happened yet. So, of course, would you! Once the concept of the feedback loop from the future is assumed, a number of items begin to fall into line. Evidently, the function of the brain is to provide a sensory link to the future, as the eye provides a sensory link to the present. Since the actual future can’t be sensed, a mech- anism for setting up a future-analogue is necessary. Then this analogue must be studied, and actions-now so ad- justed as to cause the situation-then to be compatible with the desires of the organism. The cat must predict the cat-mouse system’s dynamic future, and act-now in such fashion that the cat-mouse situation-then will match her desires. Then the mind is not pruely com- puting mechanism, but must include as a part of it, a highly organized com- puting arrangement. Now let’s add another concept. The human being must be a self- regulating system; the mind, also is a self-regulating system. There are certain basic laws of self- regulating systems that the cyber- netics engineers have worked out; one of them is that any self-regulating system—whatever its nature—must involve feedback. If the mind is capable of self-regula- tion, then it follows that the mind must have feedback systems. The sensory systems in the physical organism of Man are very poorly recognized in ordinary understanding —and therefore, since the language doesn’t adequately express the ideas, you are unable to think adequately about the sensory systems you actually 125 live with. As a quite simple example, suppose you reach around behind some inaccessible apparatus, and feel a certain unit that you can’t see. “It’s a gear about one and a quarter inches in diameter, on a quarter inch shaft carried on a forty-five degree angle bracket,” you say. How do you know? “Why... I felt it!” Tsk tsk. The classic sense of touch is a sense of contact, no more. A sense residing in the nerve-endings of the skin. How did you determine that gear was about one and a quarter inches in diameter? Not with your skin nerves, you didn’t! You didn’t “feel” it in that sense; you gonio- metered it, by using your goniometric sensory system. Every joint in the human skeleton is equipped with a fine set of specialized nerve-endings that measure the angular position of the two bones involved. You wouldn’t have been able to determine the spatial relationship of those metal parts without it; the contact-sense served only to let you know when your calipering fingers were properly positioned. The goniometric sense gave you the information you re- ported. But no primitive people, developing a language, would have developed the concepts of a goniometer, or recog- nized the need for a term to describe something they couldn’t point to. Consider the “‘sense of thirst,”’ too. We use the phrase, and consider it as a metaphor, an idiom. It isn’t; it’s a correct and exact statement of a fact. The human body has a specialized sense-organ that measures the ion- concentration in the bloodstream. When the ion concentration rises, the blood needs dilution. Normally, there is considerable water stored in various ways in the body, and this water can be released into the bloodstream on signal from that specialized sensory connicloooks.c© in