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1 " Science,’ he informed me, ‘might not yet have all the answers, but it is the only verifiable—and hence meaningful—way of asking the right questions.’‘But those questions are nearly always asked through the voices of materialism, mechanism, and reduction. Has it occurred to you that the only aspects of the universe that such an approach will reveal are those that are materialistic, mechanistic, and reductionist?’‘Has it occurred to you,’ he countered, ‘that the universe really is nothing more than matter and energy, which we can understand through, and only through, analysis?’I suddenly felt like launching myself out of the pool and landing on top of him. Instead I said, ‘And analyzing as you scientists do, every year you understand more and more about less and less until someday you will know everything about nothing. "
― David Zindell , The Idiot Gods
2 " From my readings, I had learned of a vast pool of human knowledge that both included books and went far beyond them in content and reach. The humans, of course, having only the faintest of intimations of quenging, use a different though related metaphor for the noosphere in which they like to dip their feet. Instead of seeing the truth of all things as a single, superluminal substance that everywhere flows like water, they conceive of it as a collection of things, and they content themselves with fashioning nets with their minds in the hope of casting them out in order to capture here a prettier pebble and there a smoother shell. Hence their name for the Oceanic wisdom that should flow among all beings: the worldwide Net. "
