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those ideas has anything to do with free will,’ said Thomas.
    ‘Personally I find the idea of the nuclear bomb attractive,’ said Harry. ‘Get rid of all that messy accumulated past, all those old ideas and things, shake up the collective psyche. Don’t you think, Thomas?’
    ‘I want to know what Stuart’s after,’ said Ursula. ‘You’re scared, there’s something you hate, and which is making you act in this funny way.’
    ‘Stuart thinks the world is the work of Satan,’ said Harry.
    ‘Help him, Thomas,’ said Midge. ‘Don’t just sit mum, you’re as bad as Edward.’
    Thomas said, ‘The devil made everything except one thing which he continually looks for but cannot find.’
    ‘Helpful old Jewish saying,’ said Ursula. ‘Well, the Greeks said God was always doing geometry, modern physicists say he’s playing roulette, everything depends on the observer, the universe is a totality of observations, it’s a work of art created by us — ’
    ‘Quantum physics is the language of nature,’ said Midge.
    ‘Who says so?’ said Thomas.
    ‘I do. I heard it on TV. And the subatomic world needs us to rescue it from chaos. It all sounds perfectly mad. No wonder there are terrorists. No wonder we need religion.’
    ‘If Newton hadn’t believed in God he would have discovered relativity,’ said Ursula.
    ‘There you are!’ said Harry.
    ‘A machine can be cleverer than a man now,’ said Midge.
    ‘And wiser and better,’ said Harry. ‘It stands to reason. The computer age is just beginning. Even now a machine can see infinitely more than we can, see it faster, discern more details, make more connections, correct itself, teach itself, learn new skills which we can’t even conceive of. A machine is objective It’s a matter of flesh and blood, it’s a matter of nerve cells, we are puny, we are imperfect, these things are gods. A computer could run a state better than a human being — ’
    ‘Aren’t we already run by computers,’ said Midge. ‘Isn’t there one at Downing Street which does the budget?’
    ‘They could help us to redesign ourselves, and we certainly need redesigning! They offer us a vision of the human mind, glorified, clarified and fortified, we can learn about ourselves by watching them, improve ourselves by imitating them — ’
    ‘Come on, Stuart,’ said Thomas.
    ‘A machine doesn’t think — ’ said Stuart. ‘A machine can’t even simulate the human mind.’
    ‘Why not?’ said Harry.
    ‘You mean it’s syntactical not semantical?’ said Ursula. ‘Isn’t that what they say now? Or that it has mind but not consciousness?’
    ‘Because we are always involved in distinguishing between good and evil.’
    ‘Surely not always,’ said Ursula, ‘not even often.’
    ‘Who is to judge the wisdom of a machine, another machine? Human minds are possessed by individual persons, they are soaked in values, even perception is evaluation.’
    ‘But isn’t serious thinking supposed to be neutral?’ said Ursula. ‘We get away from all that personal stuff.’
    ‘Serious thinking depends on the justice and truthfulness of the thinker, it depends on the continuous pressure of his mind upon — ’
    ‘That’s a different point,’ said Ursula, ‘the chap’s got to be OK, and of course discoveries can be used rightly or wrongly, but the thinking itself can be pure, without values, like genuine science, like maths, like — at any rate that’s the ideal and — ’
    ‘You can’t just switch it on,’ said Stuart, ‘as you say it’s an ideal, science is an ideal, and partly an illusion. Our trust in science as reason is something frail. Wittgenstein thought that the idea of a man on the moon was not only unreasonable, but forbidden by our whole system of physics!’
    ‘Stuart just despises empiricism,’ said Harry, ‘he’s opting for the life of the emotions.’
    ‘You mean there are wicked scientists?’ said Midge. ‘Or computers could go mad?’
    ‘Not just