西南交通大学考博英语2009英语应试策略.docVIP

一、阅读 Passage 1（索玉柱） We do a lot of collective thinking, probably more than any other social species, although it goes on in something like secrecy. We don’t acknowledge the gift publicly, and we are not as celebrated as the insects, but we do it. Effortlessly without giving it a moment’s thought, we are capable of changing our language, music, manners, morals, entertainment, even the way we dress, all around the earth in a year’s turning. We seem to do this by general agreement, without voting or even polling. We simply think our way along, pass information around, exchange codes disguised as art, change our minds, and transform ourselves. Computers cannot deal with such levels of improbability, and it is just as well. Otherwise, we might be tempted to take over the control of ourselves in order to make long-range plans, and that would surely be the end of us. It would mean that some group or other, marvelously intelligent and superbly informed, undoubtedly guided by a computer, would begin deciding what human society ought to be like, say, over the next five hundred years or so, and the rest of us would be persuaded one way or another, to go along. The process of social evolution would then grind to a standstill, and we’d be stuck in today’s rut for a millennium. Much better we work our way out of it on our own without governance. The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past. It would be nice to have better ways of monitoring what we’re up to so that we could recognize change while it is occurring, instead of waking up as we do now to the astonished realization that the whole century just past wasn’t what we thought it was at all. Maybe computers can be used to help in this, although I rather doubt it