Noise Level полностью

'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 meaningful 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.'

'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 anti-gravity, 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 anti-gravity, and the one inescapable conclusion that it had been done.

'Everyone of you had previously set your filters to reject the idea of anti-gravity. 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 arbitrary noise filter settings corrected on a few of the other things you've always wanted 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 anti-gravity-'

'And so you can go to the stars — if you want to.⁵

Mart shook his head. 'You and Dunning — first we've got it, then we haven't.

'You get us to produce anti-gravity. And it becomes a mere gimmick! Sure we could see the planets, maybe even go beyond the solar system before we die. 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!'