On Handling the Data

E-text prepared by Greg Weeks, Bruce Albrecht, L. N. Yaddanapudi, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Sometimes a story is best told by omission—!
September 16, 1957
Dr. Robert Von Engen, Editor Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, Constitution Avenue, N. W., Washington, D. C.
Dear Sir:
I am taking the liberty of writing you this letter since I read your published volume, “Logical Control: The Computer vs. Brain” (Silliman Memorial Lecture Series, 1957), with the hope that you can perhaps offer me some advice and also publish this letter in the editorial section. Your mathematical viewpoint on the analysis between computing machines and the living human brain, especially the conclusion that the brain operates in part digitally and in part analogically, using its own statistical language involving selection, conditional transfer orders, branching, and control sequence points, et cetera, makes me feel that only you can offer me some information with logical arithmetic depth .
The questions raised in this letter are designed principally to reach the embryonic and juvenile scientists … the scientists-elect , so to speak. (I think the “mature scientists” are irretrievably lost.) For many reasons, some of which will be explained in the following paragraphs, I think that it is of the greatest importance that some stimulatable audience be reached. As yet, the beginners have no rigid scientific biases and thus may have sufficient curiosity and flexibility about the world in which they live to approach experimentation with a mind devoid of “the hierarchy of memory registers which have programmed in erroneous data.”
What I have to say will not surprise nor shock you , or those who are at present engaged in scientific investigation. In fact, I have read many science-fiction stories that deal with the same problem. Perhaps that is the only way that it can be approached, through the medium of a story? Yet why not present it for what it may be? Let me tell it my own way, and then, please, let me have your coldly logical opinion.