## Metadata - Author: [[Jacob Bronowski]] - Full Title: The Identity of Man - Category: #books ## Highlights - The central theme of these essays is the crisis of confidence which springs from each man’s wish to be a mind and a person, in the face of the nagging fear that he is a mechanism. The central question that I ask is: Can man be both a machine and a self? ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=217)) - That is, roughly all animals with a backbone scan the chemical signals of the invader and use them to evoke a chemical defense—they make antibodies to neutralize the invading proteins. Animals without a backbone do not. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=250)) - Like a chessplayer, he fears and plans many moves that are not played, and they make the footnotes to the game; though not seen, they belong to the game as much as those that are. In recall, in fantasy, in speculation, and in foresight, man has experiences which do not happen—that is, which are not outward events. And the self is the process in which all his experiences, of the body and of the mind, are fixed as knowledge. ([Location 340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=340)) - The essence of the computer, and of all machines, is that the input and the output are also mechanized. If the instructions (including those that may flow from the output) can be put on a tape, we have a machine. If what we have inside us is not to be a machine, it must be because we cannot put and store some of our own instructions to it unequivocally on a tape. ([Location 390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=390)) - When we reason with pencil and paper, say in the mathematical parts of science, we use a logic of strict certainty. The brain does not use this logic of the large world in its minute inner workings. We do not know what logic it uses, but it cannot be this. Indeed, in trying to wish this logic on to the brain, we are as inverted as those physicists of the past who tried to govern the atom by the principles of engineering. Engines are built up from atoms, not the other way about; and classical logic is built up from the logic of the brain, not the other way about. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=527)) - the brain constructs a picture of the world which is less than certain yet highly interlocked in its parts. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=533)) - Imagination takes advantage of ambiguity, in the language of science as well as in the language of poetry. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=722)) - This is the paradox of imagination in science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. By that outrageous phrase, I mean that the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is a miserly view, and a rich model of the universe is one which is as poor as possible in hypotheses. ([Location 749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=749)) - The Greeks peopled nature with a rowdy, happy-go-lucky train of gods and spirits. Science arrived like an Old Testament prophet, with a puritan and obsessed vision of single-minded coherence, to sweep that pagan plenty out of the window and put in its place the Jehovah who orders all things under laws. ([Location 752](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=752)) - Machines do not act in plays, and animals do not pretend to be other animals; they do not know how. This is what cannot be mechanized, even in principle, by any procedure that we can yet foresee: that we can identify ourselves with the inner environment of others. ([Location 1111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=1111)) - So science and literature are different, but they are vastly more alike than they are different. For what makes them different is their expression in action, but what makes them alike is their origin in imagination. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=1126)) - The fact is that we are no longer a simple culture that can be instructed by sermons. We are not bound by commandments but by loyalties, and we have more loyalties than can be covered by fiat. ([Location 1365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=1365)) - Nothing. erodes the public morality so much as the acquiescence in what is expedient when what is true is unpalatable. ([Location 1450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UD7RO6&location=1450))