"And the soul of Man is nothing but a feedback impulse!"
Barker sighed heavily. "What else, Paul?"
Morgan's Caravan appeared that evening and camped at the ten-mile limit imposed by the military police guards. They posted their signs of protest and began their picket lines. Oglethorpe sent out his sound trucks to try to scare them away, but they wouldn't scare.
Paul watched at home the broadcast of the scene, but the fate of the Base and the Wheel had almost ceased to concern him. He told Betty of the discovery Holt had made on Superman.
"It leaves nothing to account for the most valued acts of Man," he said. "It can't account for creativeness, because a cybernetic device cannot create; it can only follow a pattern. So where is the poetry, the art, the scientific invention if this is the essence of Man? It can't be, yet there's no way of getting around this thing."
"Where does the pattern come from?" asked Betty. "Isn't that the created thing which the cybernetic system tries to follow?"
Paul shook his head. "The pattern we're talking about is no more than a response to stimuli, a purely mechanical thing also. Holt claims this is all there ever is, that what we call art, poetry, music inspiration, and intuition are nothing more than the results of badly functioning cybernetic systems. The more or less irrational results of errors in accommodating to the real world. We find pleasure in them because they tend to excuse our badly malfunctioning circuits.
"The ideal race of Man would be devoid of all this, a smoothly operating group of individuals unperturbed by emotional or artistic responses, completely capable of solving any problem in a purely cybernetic manner."
"And do you agree with it?" Betty asked.