This image emphasizes the fact that mind is a strange loop. "Information" about the material world can get into our minds by routes that do not pass through our sense organs. If somebody hits you on the head with a hammer and kills you, soe rather nasty information about the material world has had a direct and major effect on your mind, by destroying it. Hallucinogenic drugs affect the mind through its chemistry but create images that seem to have come from sense organs. The drugs affect those parts of the brain machine that process sensory data. The have the same kind of "unexpected" effect as the "wrong" coin in the ticket machine, mentioned in chapter 1, which persuaded the machine to disgorge an entire roll of tickets. This possibility was implicit in the mechanics of the ticket machine but was not intended to be part of its function. The same goes for drugs and brains.
The is no hourglass symmetry between mind and matter. To repeat an image from chapter 1, reality may perhaps be a figment of our imagination, as some philosophers argue, but our imagination is definitely a figment of reality.
"Muddling Through is a book about the sciences in the late twentieth century and about the kind of sciences we need for the twenty-first. It is a book about how the sciences make sense of the world and provide sense to the world. Think of Muddling Through as the basic text for a different kind of science literacy project, a project to reimagine and then enact the sciences as operations of language and thought and as attempts, trials, limited experiments involving things, ideas, and just about everything in between.
"This is also a book about politics (not policy) and culture - that is, about how the sciences are made through arduous and diverse political processes. This book is about how the sciences affect politics not only through technological inventions but by generating the images and metaphors that we apply to every situation and phenomenon we encounter, and by providing the blueprints we use to make and legitimate crucial social decisions. The connnections between the sciences and democratic pluralism need to be revitalized, through both new concepts and innovative social forms."
Science now appears to be dictating the intellectual fashions of the day. If a plan is not prepared according to the scientific method, it is considered unreliable. If a question cannot be tested by science, it is considered meaningless. If traditional institutions are slow to adopt the scientific way, they are considered backward. If a mode of life is not comprehendible by science, it is considered old-fashioned. As a result of these intrusions, the certitude of purpose in the scheme of things begins to waver. Means are being homogenized with ends.
Many scientists are on the threshold of emulating theologians of the sixteenth century. Some are beginning to develop a pugnacity that bespeaks a deep uncertainty of brittle pride. Others are transgressing beyond their limited compass of competence. Still others seem not to care a doit that the unitary purpose of culture is being blunted and that the wholeness of meaning and the very tradition of a cooperative society are being disintegrated. If encouraged along the current trends, science may soon reach the point of diminishing usefulness to humanity. To retain her contributing relevancy is an important problem of the twentieth century.