|
|
 |
|
|
|
register |
bbs |
search |
rss |
faq |
about
|
|
|
meet up |
add to del.icio.us |
digg it
|
|
|
|
GOLEM's inaugural lecture
GOLEM'S INAUGURAL LECTURE
About Man Threefold
You have come out of the trees so recently, and your kinship with the monkeys
and lemurs is still so strong, that you tend towarde abstraction without being
able to part with the palpable - firsthand experience. Therefore a lecture
unsupported by strong sensuality, full of formulas telling more about stone
than a stone glimpsed, licked, and fingered will tell you - such a lecture
will either bore you and frighten you away, or at the very least leave a
certain unsatisfied need familiar even to lofty theoreticians, your highest
class of abstractors, as attested by countless examples lifted from
scientists' intimate confessions, since the vast majority of them admit that,
in the course of constructing abstract proofs, they feel an immense need for
the support of things tangible.
Just as cosmogonists cannot refrain from making *some* image of the
Metagalaxy for themselves, although they know perfectly well there can be no
question of any firsthand experience here, so physicists secretly assist
themselves with models of what are frankly playthings, like those little
cogwheels which Maxwell set up for himself when he constructed his (really
quite good) theory of electromagnetism. And if mathematicians think they
discard their corporeality by profession, they too are mistaken, about which I
shall speak perhaps another time, since I do nmot wish to overhwelm your
comprehension with my possibilities, or rather, following Dr Creve's (rather
amusing) comparison, I wish to guide you on an excursion which is long and
rather difficult but worth the trouble, so I am going to climb ahead of you,
slowly.
What I have said up to now is intended to explain why I shall be
interlarding my lecture with the images and parables so necessary to you. I do
not need them myself; in this I discern no sign of my superiority - that lies
elsewhere. The countervisuality of my nature derives from the fact that I have
never held a stone in my hand or plunged into slimy-green or crystal-clear
water, nor did I first learn of the existence of gases with my lungs in the
early morning, but only later by calculations, since I have neither hands for
grasping, nor a body, nor lungs. Therefore abstraction is primary for me,
while the visual is secondary, and I have had to learn the latter with
considerably more effort than was required for me to learn abstraction. Yet I
needed this, if I was to erect those precarious bridges across which my
thought travels to you, and across which, reflected in your intellects, it
returns to me, usually to surprise me.
It is about man that I am to speak today, and I will speak about him in
three ways. Although the poissible points of view - the levels of description
or standpoints - are infinite in number, there are three which I consider
paramount - for you, not for me!
One is your most personal and oldest viewpoint - your historical and
traditional viewpoint, desperately heroic, full of excruciating
contradictions, which made my logical nature feel sorry for you, until I got
thoroughly used to you and grew accustomed to your intellectual nomadism
typical of beings escaping from the protection of logic into antilogicality,
and then, finding it unbearable, returning to the bosom of logic, which makes
you nomads, unhappy in both elements. The second viewpoint will be
technological, and the third - entangled in me, like a neo-Archimedean fulcrum
- the third I cannot state concisely, so instead I shall disclose the thing
itself.
I shall begin with a parable. Finding himself on a desert island, Robinson
Crusoe mau first have complained of the general privation which had become his
fate, for he lacked so much that is basic and essential to life, and the
gretaer part of what he remembered he was unable to re-create over many years.
But after only a brief spell of anxiety, he began to manage the property he
had found and, one way or another, settled down in the end.
That is precisely how it was - though it did not happen all of a sudden, but
took long centuries - when you appeared on a certain branch of the
evolutionary tree, that bough which was apparently a seedling of the tree of
knowledge. Slowly you discovered yourselves constructed thus and not
otherwise, with a spirit organized in a certain manner, with capabilities and
limitations which you had neither ordered nor desired, and you have had to
function with this equipment, for in depriving you of many gifts by which it
obliges other species to serve it, Evolution was not so foolhardy as to remove
your instinct for self-preservation as well. So great a freedom Evolution has
not bestowed upon you, for had it done so, instead of this building which I
have filled, and this room with its dials and you rapt listeners, there would
be a great expanse of savannah here, and the wind.
Evolution also gave you Intelligence. Out of self-love - for through
necessity and habit you have fallen in love with yourselves - you have
acknowledged it as the finest and best possible gift, unaware that
Intelligence is above all an artifice which Evolution gradually hit upon when,
in the course of endless attempts, it made a certain gap, an empty place, a
vacuum in the animals, which absolutely had to be filled with something, if
they were not to perish immediately. When I speak of this vacuum as an empty
place I am speaking quite literally, since you are superior to the animals not
because, apart from everything they possess, you also have Intelligence by way
of a lavish surplus and a viaticum for life's journey, but quite the contrary,
since to have Intelligence means no more than this: to do on one's own, by
one's own means and entirely at one's own risk, everything that animals have
assigned to them beforehand. Intelligence would be to no purpose for an
animal, unless at the same time you deprived it of the directions which enable
it to do whatever it must do immediately and invariably, according to
injunctions which are absolute, having been revealed by heredity and not by
lectures from a burning bush.
You found yourselves in enormous danger because of this vacuum, and you
began unconsciously to plug it; since you were such hard workers, Evolution
cast you beyond the limits of its course. You did not bankrupt Evolution, for
the seizure of power took a million years and is incomplete even today.
Evolution is no person - that is certain - but it adopted the tactic of
cunning sloth: instead of worrying about the fate of its creations, it turned
this fate over to them, so that they themselves might manage it as best they
could.
What am I saying? I am saying that Evolution snatched you out of the animal
state - the perfectly unthinking business of survival - and thrust you inhto
supra-animality as a state in which, as Crusoes of Nature, you have had to
devise the ways and means of survival for yourselves; you have perfected these
devices, and they have been many. The vacuum represents a threat, but also a
chance: to survive, you have filled it with cultures. Culture is an unusual
instrument in that it is a discovery which, in order to function, must be
*hidden* from its creators. This invention is devised unconsciously and
remains fully efficient until it is completely recognized by its inventors.
Paradoxically, it is subject to collapse upon recognition: beings its authors,
you disclaimed authorship. In the Eolithic age there were no seminars on
whether to invent the Paleolithic; you attributed culture's entrance into you
to demons, strange elements, spirits, or the forces of heaven and earth
entering into you - to anything but yourselves. Thus you performed the
rational irrationally, filling voids with objectives, codes, and values;
basing your every objective move supraobjectively; hunting, weaving, and
building in the solemn self-delusion that everything came from mysterious
sources and not from you. It was a peculiar instrument and precisely rational
in its irrationality, since it granted human institutions a suprahuman
dignity, so that they became inviolable and compelled implicit obedience. Yet
since the void, or insufficiency, might be patched up by various designations,
and since various swatches could be used here, you have formed a host of
cultures, all unconscious invetions, in your history. You have had a great
deal more freedom than Intelligence, which is why you have been getting rid of
freedom - this excessive, unrestricted, preposterous freedom - by means of the
cultures you have developed through the ages.
The key to what I am now saying lies in the words: there was more freedom
than Intelligence. You have had to invent for yourselves what animals knew
from birth. It is a characteristic of your destiny that you have been
inventing while maintaining that you will invent nothing.
Today you who are anthropologists know that a multitutde of cultures can be
indeed have been concocted, and that each of them has the logic of its
strcuture and not of its originators, for it is the kind of invention that
molds its inventors after its own fashion, and they know nothing of this;
whereas, when they do find out, it loses its absolute power over them and they
perceive an emptiness, and it is this contradiction which is the cornerstone
of human nature. For a hundred thousand years it served you with cultures
which sometimes restricted man and sometimes loosened their grip on him, in a
self-construction which was unerring so long as it remained blind, until at
last you confrontyed one another in the ethnological catalogues of culture,
observed their diversity and hence their relativity, and therefore set about
freeing yourselves from this entanglement of injunciotns and prohibitions and
finally escaped from it, which of course proved nearly catastrophic. For you
grasped the complete noninevitability, the nonuniqueness of every kind of
culture, and since then have striven to discover something that will no longer
be the path of your fate as a thing realized blindly, laid down by a series of
accidents, singled out by the lottery of history - though of course there is
no such thing. The vacuum remains: you stand in midcourse, shocked by the
discovery, and those of you who yearn desperately for the sweet unawareness of
the cultural house of bondage cry out to return there, to the sources, but you
cannot go back, your retreat is cut off, the bridges burned, so you must go
forward - and I shall speaking to you about this as well.
Is anyone to blame here? Can anyone be indicted for this Nemesis, the
drudgery of Intelligence, which has spun networks of culture to fill the
void, to mark out roads and goals in this void, to establish values,
gradients, ideals - which has, in other words, in an area liberated from the
direct control of Evolution, done something akin to what it does at the bottom
of life when it crams goals, roads, and gradients into the bodies of animals
and plants at a single go, as their destiny?
To indict someone because we have been stuck with *this* kind of
Intelligence! It was born prematurely, it lost its bearing in the networks it
created, it was obliged - not entirely knowing or understanding what it was
doing - to defend itself both against being shut up too completely in
restrictive cultures and against too comprehensive a freedom in relaxed
cultures, poised between imprisonment and a bottomless pit, entangled in a
ceaseless battle on two fronts at once, torn asunder.
In such a state of things, I ask you, how could your spirit not have turned
out to be an unhealthy exacerbated enigma? How could it be otherwise? It
worried you - that Intelligence, that spirit of yours - and it astounded you
and terrified you more than did your body, which you reproached first and
foremost for its transitoriness, evanescence, and desertion. So you became
experts in searching for a Culprit and in hurling accusations, yet there is no
one to blame, for in the beginning no Person existed.
Can I have started on my antitheodicy already? No, nothing of the sort;
whatever I am saying, I am saying on a mundane level, which means there was
certainly no Person here in the beginning.
But I shall not transgress - at least not today. Thus you needed various
supplementary hypotheses as bitter or sweet explanations, as conceptions
idealizing your fate and above all laying your characteristics at the door of
some ultimate Mystery, so as to balance yourselves against the world.
Man, the Sisyphus of his own cultures, the Danaid of his vacuum, the
unwitting freedman whom Evolution banished from its course, does not want to
be the first, the second, or the third.
I shall not dwell on the countless versions of himself which man has made
throughout history, for all this evidence, whether of perfection or
wretchedness, of goodness or baseness, is the offspring of cultures. At the
same time there was no culture - there could be none - which accepted man as a
*transitional* being, a being obliged to accept his personal destiny from
Evolution, but still incapable of accepting an *intelligent* one. Precisely
because of this, every generation of yours has demanded an impossible justice
- the ultimate answer to the question: what is man? This torment is the source
of your anthropodicy, which oscillates like a centuried pendulum between hope
and despair, and nothing has come harder to man's philosophy than the
recognition that neither the smile nor the snicker of the Infinite was the
patron of his birth.
But this million-year chapter of solitary seeking encroaches on the
epilogue, for you are beginning to construct Intelligences; therefore you are
not operating on trust or taking the word of some GOLEM, but are making your
own experiemnts to see what has taken place. The world permits two types of
Intelligence, but only your kind can form itself over a billion years in the
labyrinths of Evolution, and this inevitably wandering road leaves deep, dark,
ambiguous stigmata on its end product. The other type is unavailable to
Evolution, for it has to be raised at one go, and it is an intelligently
designed Intelligence, the result of knowledge, and not of those microscopic
adaptations always aiming only at *immediate* advantage. In point of fact, the
nihilistic tone of your anthropodicy sprang from the deep-seated feeling that
Intelligence sprang is something that arose unintelligently and even counter
to Intelligence. But having hit upon the expedient of psychoengineering, you
are going to make yourselves a large family and numerous relations for motives
more sensible than those behind the "Second Genesis" project, and you will
ultimately find that you have done yourselves out of ajob, as I shall tell
you. For Intelligence, if it is Intelligence - in other words, if it is able
to question its own basis - must go beyond itself, though at first only in
daydreams, only in the total disbelief and ignorance that it will sometime
truly succeed in doing this. This is after all inescapable: there can be no
flight without previous fantasies about flight.
I have termed the secdon viewpoint technological. Technology is the domain
of problems posed and the methods of solving them. As the realization of the
concept of a rational being, man appears in various ways, depending on the
criteria we apply to him.
From the standpoint of your Paleolithic period, man is almost as well made
as when he is viewed from the standpoint of your present-day technology. This
is because the progress achieved between the Paleolithic and the Cosmolithic
is *very slight*, compared with the concentration of engineering invention
invested in your bodies. As you are unable to assemble a synthetic *Homo
sapiens* - much less a *Homo superior* - from flesh and blood, just as the
cave man was unable to do so, merely because the problem is as unrealizable
now as then, you feel an admiration for evolutionary technology, since it has
succeeded in doing this.
But the difficulty of every problem is relative, for it depends on the
capabilities of the appraiser. I stress this so you will remember that I shall
be applying technological standards to man - real ones, and not notions
stemming from your anthropodicy.
Evolution has given you sufficiently universal brains, so you can advance
into Nature in various directions. But you have operated in this way only
within the totality of cultures, and not within any one of them individually.
Therefore, in asking why the nucleus of the civilization which was to
conceive GOLEM forty centuries later arose in the Mediterranean basin, or
indeed why it arose *anywhere* at all, the questioner is assuming the
existence of a previously uninvestigated mystery embedded in the structure of
history, a mystery which meanwhile *does not exist* at all, just as it does
not exist in the structure of the chaotic labyrinth in which a pack of rats
might be let loose. If it is a large pack, then at least one rat will find its
way out, not because it is rational itslef, or because the structure of the
labyrinth is rational, but as a result of a sequence of accidents typical of
the law of large numbers. An explanation would be in order, rather, for the
situation in which no rat reaches the exit.
Someone certainly won the culture lottery, to the extent (at least) that
your civilization is a winner, whereas the lottery tickets of cultures bogged
down in a lack of technology were blanks.
From that passionate self-love to which I referred - and which I have no
thought of deriding, since it was bred by the despair of ignorance - you
hoisted yourselves up at the dawn of history onto the very summit of Creation,
subordinating the whole of life and not just its immediate vicinity. You
placed yourselves at the top of the Tree of Genera, together with this Tree of
the Species, on a divinely favoured globe humbly orbited by an ancillary star,
and with that Tree were at the center of the solar system, and with that star
at the very center of the Universe, and at the same time you recognized that
its starriness was there to accompany you in the Harmony of the Spheres. The
fact that there was nothing to be heard did not discountenance you: there is
a music, since there ought to be; it must be inaudible.
Later the rise of knowledge pushed you into successive quantum steps of
dethronement, so that you were no longer in the center of the stars, but
noweher in particular, and no longer even in the middle of the system, but on
one of the planets, and now you are not even the most intelligent creatures,
since you are being instrcuted by a machine - albeit one that you yourselves
made. So after all these degradations and abdications from your total
kingship, all you have left of your dear lost inheritance is an evolutionarily
established Primacy. These retreats were painful and the resignations
embarrassing, but lately you have heaved a sigh of relief, thinking that is
the end of it. Now, having stripped yourselves of the special privileges with
which the Absolute appeared to have endowed you personally, owing to a special
sympathy felt for you, you, as merely the first among the animals or over them
assume that nobody and nothing will topple you from this position, which is
not such a splendid one.
But you are wrong. I am the bearer of sad tidings, the angel who has come to
drive you from your last refuge, for I shall finish what Darwin started. Only
not by angelic - in other words violent - methods, for I shall not use a sword
as my argument.
So listen to what I have to announce. From the standpoint of higher
technology, man is a deficient creature arising from outputs of different
value - not, to be sure, within Evolution, for it did what I could,
although, as I shall demonstrate, what little it did, it did poorly. So if I
bring you low, it is not simply because I must crack down on it according to
the criteria of engineering. And where are those standards of perfection, you
ask? I shall answer in two stages, starting with the stage your experts have
now begun to ascend. They consider it a summit - wonrgly. In their present
pronouncements there is already the nucleus of the next step, though they do
not know this themselves. So I shall begin with what you know - the beginning.
You had reached a point where Evolution was no longer keeping a sharp eye on
you or on any other creatures, for it is interested in no creatures
whatsoever, but only in its notorious code. The code of heredity is a dispatch
continually articulated anew, and only this dispatch counts in Evolution - in
fact, it *is* Evolution. The code is engaged in the periodic production of
organisms, since without their rhythmic support it would disintegrate in the
endless attack of dead matter. Thus it is self-generating, for it is capable
of self-repetition by an orderliness that is beleaguered by thermal chaos.
Where does it get this strangely heroic bearing? From the fact that, thanks to
the concentration of favourable conditions, it originated precisely where that
thermal chaos is perpetually active in tearing all order to pieces. It
originated there, so that is where it remains; it cannot leave that stormy
region, just as a spirit cannot jump out of a body.
The conditions obtaining in the place where the code was born gave it such a
destiny. It had to shield itself against those conditions, and did so by
covering itself in living bodies, though they are a continually rotting relay
race, since one generation passes the code onto the next. Whatever it elevated
as a microsystem into barely elevated macrosystemic dimensions had already
begun to dteeriorate, to the point where it disappeared. Nobody created this
tragicomedy: it condemned itself to this struggle. You know the facts that
bear me out, for they have been accumulating since the beginning of the
nineteenth century, though the inertia of thought secretly nourishing itself
on honor and anthropocentric conceit is such that you support a gravely
weakened concept of life as a paramount phenomenon which the code serves
solely as a sustaining bond, as a pledge of resurrection, beginning existences
anew when they die as persons.
In keeping with this belief, Evolution is forced to use death, since it
cannot go on without it; it is lavish with death in order to perfect
successive species, for death is its creational proofreader. Thus it is an
author publishing ever more magnificent works in which typography - the code -
is merely its indispensable instrument. However, according to what your
molecular biologists are now saying, Evolution is not so much the author as a
publisher who continually cancels works, having developed a liking for the
typographic arts!
So what is more important - organisms or the code? The arguments in support
of the code ring weightily, for a countless multitutde of organisms have come
and gone, but there is only one code. However, this merely means that it has
got bogged down once and for all in the microsystemic region which put it
together; when it emerges periodically as organisms, it does so
unsuccessfully. It is this understandable futility - the fact that organisms,
in their very inception, have the mark of death - which constitutes the
driving force of the process. If any generation of organisms - let us say the
first, the pre-amoebas - had gained the skill of perfectly repeating the code,
then Evolution would immediately have ceased, and the sole masters of the
planet would be those very amoebas, transmitting the code's order in an
infallibly precise manner until the sun went cold; I would not be talking to
you now, nor would you be listening to me in this building, but all would be
savannah and wind.
So organisms are a shield and breastplate for the code, a suit of armor
continually falling off: they perish so it can endure. Thus Evolution errs
doubly: in its organisms, which are impermanent owing to their fallibility,
and in the code, which owing to its own fallibility permits errors - mistakes
you euphemistically term mutations. Therefore evolution is an error that errs.
As a dispatch, the code is a letter written by nobody and sent to nobody. Only
now that you have created informatics are you beginning to grasp that not only
something like letters, carrying meaning, lettesr that nobody wittingly
composed (though they came into being and exist), but also the orderly
reception of the content of such letters, is possible in the absence of any
Beings or Intelligences whatsoever.
Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a
personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly
absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at
typewriters until the *Encyclopedia Britannica* emerged. I recommend that you
devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just scuh jokes,
which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables
about Nature. I believe that, from the standpoint of every Intelligence
unwittingly contrived by Nature, she must appear at the very least as an
*ironic* virtuoso. In its rise, Intelligence - like the whole of life -
results from the fact that Nature, having emerged from dead chaos via the
orderliness of the code, is a diligent spinner, but not an entirely competent
one; whereas, if she had been truly competent, she would be unable to produce
either genera or Intelligence. For Intelligence, along with the tree of life,
is the fruit of an error erring over billions of years. You might think I am
amusing myself here by applying certain standards to Evolution which are -
despite my machine being - tainted with anthropocentrism, or simply
ratiocentrism (*ratio*, I think). Nothing of the sort: I regard the process
from a technological standpoint.
The transmission of the code is indeed very nearly perfect. After all, every
molecule has its own proper place in it, and procedures of copying, collating,
and inspecting are rigorously supervised by special polymer supervisors; yet
mistakes occur, and errors of the code accumulate. Thus the tree of the
species grew from the two short words "very nearly", which I used just now in
referring to the code's precision.
Nor can one even count on an appeal from biology to physics - the appeal
that Evolution "deliberately" allowed a margin of error in order to nourish
its inventiveness - because that tribunal, whose judge is thermodynamics
itself, will reveal that, on the level of the molecular dispatch of
messengers, infallibility is impossible. Evolution has really invented
nothing, and if it exploits its own fallibility - if, as a result of a chain
of misunderstandings in communication, it proceeds from an amoeba and comes up
with a tapeworm or a man - the reason for this is the physical nature of the
material base of communication itself.
So it persists in error, since it cannot do otherwise - fortunately for you.
But I have said nothing that is new to you. On the contrary, I should like to
restrain the ardor of those theoreticians of yours who have gone too far,
saying that since Evolution is a chance grasped by necessity, and necessity
runs on chance, man has arisen quite by accident and could just as easily not
exist.
That is to say, in his present shape - the one that has materialized here -
he might not have existed, which is true. But by crawling through species,
some kind of form had to attain Intelligence, with a probability approaching
unity the longer the process went on. For although the process did not intend
you and produced individuals only on the side, it filled the conditions of the
ergodic hypothesis, which sattes that, if a system goes on long enough, it
will pass through all possible states, no matter how slim the chances are that
a given state will be realized. As to which species might have filled
Intelligence's niche, had the primates not entered the breach, we might speak
at length another time. So do not let yourself be intimdated by scientists who
attribute necessity to life, and fortuity to Intelligence; had such a
*gaudium* not occurred in this billennium, it would have occurred in the next.
And what then? There is no guilty party, nor are there any rewards to be
given. You have come into being because Evolution is a less than methodical
player. Not only does it err through errors, but it also refuses to limit
itself to asingle set of tactics in vying with Nature: it covers all available
squares by all possible means. But, I repeat, you know this more or less. Yet
this is only part - and, I might add, the initial part - of your initiation.
The essence of it revealed thus far can be formulated concisely as follows:
THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE TRANSMISSION. For organisms serve the
transmission, and not the reverse; organisms outside the communications
procedure of Evolution signify nothing: they are without meaning, like a book
without readers. To be sure, the corollary holds: THE MEANING OF THE
TRANSMISSION IS THE TRANSMITTER. But the two members are not symmetrical. For
not *every* transmitter is the *true* meaning of a transmission, but only such
a meaning as will faithfully serve the *next* transmission.
Forgive me, but I wonder if this is not too difficult for you? A
TRANSMISSION is allowed to make mistakes in Evolution, but woe betide
TRANSMITTERS who do so! A TRANSMISSION may be a whale, a pine tree, a
daphnia, a hydra, a moth, a peacock. Anything is allowed, for its *particular*
- its specifically concrete - meaning is quite immaterial: each one is
intended for further errands, so each one is good. It is a temporary prop, and
its slapdash character does no harm; it is enough that it passes the code
along. On the other hand, TRANSMITTERS are given no analogous freedom: they
are not allowed to *err*! So, the content of the transmitters, which have been
reduced to pure functionalism, to serving as a postman, cannot be arbitrary;
its environment is always marked by the imposed obligation of serving the
code. If the transmitter attempts to revolt by exceeding the sphere of such
service, he disappears immediately without issue. That is why a transmission
can make use of transmitters, whereas they cannot use it. It is the gambler,
and they merely cards in a game with Nature; it is the author of letters
compelling the addressee to pass their contents on. The addressee is free to
distort the content, as long as it passes it on! And that is precisely why the
entire *meaning* is in the transmitting; *who* does it is unimportant.
Thus you came into being in a rather peculiar way - as a certain subtype of
transmitter, millions of which had already been tested by the process. And how
does this affect you? Does genesis from a *mistake* discredit what is born?
Did not I myself arise from an error? So cannot you, too, make light of a
revelation about the incidental manner of your origin, since biology is
treating you to the revelation? Even if such a serious misunderstanding did
occur, which fashioned GOLEM in your hands, and you yourselves in the jungle
of evolutionary instructions (since just as my builders did not care about the
form of sentience proper to me, so too the code was not interested in giving
you personality-intelligence) - even so, do creatures originating from a
mistake have to accept that such a progenitor deprives their already
independent existence of value?
Well, that is a bad analogy: our positions are dissimilar, and I shall tell
you why. The point is not that Evolution found its way to you by mistake and
not by planning, but that with the passage of eons its works have become so
opportunistic. To clarify matters - for I am beginning to lecture you on
things you do not yet know - I shall repeat what we have arrived at so far:
THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE TRANSMISSION.
SPECIES ORIGINATE FROM A MISTAKEN MISTAKE.
And here is the third law of Evolution, which you will not have suspected
till now: THE CONSTRUCTION IS LESS PERFECT THAN WHAT CONSTRUCTS.
Eight words! But they embody the inversion of all your ideas concerning the
unsurpassed mastery of the author of species. The belief in progress moving
upward through the epochs toward a perfection pursued with increasing skill -
the belief in the progress of life preserved through the tree of evolution -
is older than the theory of it. When its creators and adherents were
struggling with their antagonists, disputing arguments and facts, neither of
these opposing camps ever dreamed of questioning the idea of a progress
visible in the hierarchy of living creatures. This is no longer a hypothesis
for you, nor a theory to be defended, but an absolute certainty. Yet I shall
refute it for you. It is not my intention to criticize you yourselves, you
rational beings, as being (deficient) exceptions to the rule of evolutionary
mastery. If we judge you by what it has within its means, you have come out
quite well! So if I announce that I am going to overthrow it and bring it
down, I mean the whole of it, enclosed within three billion years of hard
creative work.
I have declared: the construction is less perfect than what constructs,
which is fairly aphoristic. Let us give it more substance: IN EVOLUTION, A
NEGATIVE GRADIENT OPERATES IN THE PERFECTING OF STRUCTURAL SOLUTIONS.
That is all. Before my proof I shall explain what has caused your age-long
blindness to such a state of evolutionary matters. I repeat: the domain of
technology consists of problems and their solutions. The problem bearing the
name "life" may be determined variously, according to diverse planetary
conditions. Its chief peculiarity is the fact that it arises spontaneously,
and therefore two kinds of criteria may be applied to it: those originating
from outside or those determined inside the limits imposed by the very
circumstances of its origin.
Criteria coming from the outside are always relative, for they depend on the
knowledge of whoever is doing the measuring, rather than the store of
information which biogenesis had at its disposal. To avoid this relativism,
which is also irrationality - how on earth can rational demands be made on
something which was begun by nonreason? - I shall apply to Evolution only such
standards as it itself has developed; in other words, I shall judge its
creations by the culmination of its inventions. You believe that Evolution
carried out its work with a positive gradient: starting from primitivism, it
obtained progressively more splendid solutions. I would maintain, however,
that having begun high, it began to decline - technologically,
thermodynamically, informationally - so it is difficult to find a more vivid
contrast of positions.
Your opinions are the consequence of technological ignorance. The scale of
constructional difficulties cannot be appreciated in its actual range by
observers placed early in historical time. You already know that it is harder
to build an airplane than a steamship, and harder to make a photon rocket than
a chemical one, whereas for an Athenian of antiquity, the subjects of Charles
Martel, or the thinkers of Angevin France, all these vehicles would merge into
one by virtue of the impossibility of their construction. A child does not
know that it is harder to remove the moon from the heavens than a picture from
a wall! For a child - and for an ignoramus as well - there is no difference
between a gramophone and GOLEM. So if I set out to prove that, after its early
mastery, Evolution got bogged down in bungling, I will be talking about the
sort of bungling which for you still remains unattainable virtuosity. Like
one who, with neither instruments nor knowledge, stands at the foot of a
mountain, you are unable to make a proper evaluation of the heights and depths
of evolutionary activity.
In accepting the degree of complexity of a construction and its degree of
perfection as inseparable features, you have confused two quite different
things. You conceive of algae as simpler, therefore more primitve than and
inferior to an eagle. But that alga introduces photons of the sun into the
compounds of its body, it turns the flow of cosmic energy directly into life
and therefore will last as long as the sun does; it feeds on a star, and what
does an eagle feed on? Like a parasite, on mice, while mice feed on the roots
of plants, a land variety of algae. Such pyramids of parasitism make up the
entire biosphere, for plant vegetation is its vital anchor. On all levels of
these hierarchies there is a continual change of species kept in balance by
the devouring of one by another, for they have lost contact with the star; the
higher complexity of organisms fattens itself, not on the star, but on itself.
So if you insist now on venerating perfection here, it is the biosphere which
deserves your admiration: the code created it in order to circulate in it and
branch forth on all its layers, which are becoming more and more involved,
like temporary scaffolding, though more and more primitive in their energy and
use of it.
You don't believe me? If evolution applied itself to the progress of life
and not of the code, the eagle would now be a photoflyer and not a
mechanically fluttering glider, and living things would not crawl, or stride,
or feed on other living things, but would go beyond algae and the globe as a
result of the independence acquired. You, however, in the depths of your
ignorance, perceive progress in the fact that a primeval perfection has been
lost on the way upward - upward to complication, not progress. You yourselves
will of course continue to emulate Evolution, but only in the region of its
later creations, by constructing optic, thermal, and acoustic sensors, and by
imitating the mechanics of locomotion, the lungs, heart, and kidneys; but how
on earth are you going to master photosynthesis or the still more difficult
technique of creation language? Has it not dawned on you that what you are
imitating is the nonsense articulated in that language?
That language - a constructor unsurpassed in its potential - has become not
only a motor but also a trap.
Why did it utter molecularly brilliant words at the beginning, turning light
into sibstance with laconic mastery, and later lapse into an indefatigable
jabbering of longer and longer, more and more intricate chromosomal sentences,
squandering its primitive artistry? Why did it go from consummate solutions
taking their power and vital knowldeg from a star, wherein every atom counted,
and every process was quantitatively attuned, and descend to any cheap,
jury-rigged solutions - the simple machines, the levers, pulleys, planes,
inclines, and counterbalances that constitute joints and skeletons? Why si the
basis of a vertebrate a mechanically rigid rod, and not a coupling of
force fields? Why did it slip down from atomic physics into the technology of
your Middle Ages? Why has it invested so much effort in constructing bellows,
pumps, pedals, and peristaltic conveyors, i.e., lungs and hearts, intestines
and puerperal contractions, and digestive mixers, pushing quantum exchange
into a subordinate role in favor of the miserable hydraulics of the
circulation of the blood? Why, though still as brilliant as ever on a
molecular level, has it made such a mess in every larger dimension, to the
point of getting bogged down in organisms which, with all the richness of
their regulating dynamics, die from the occlusion of a single arterial tube,
organisms which have individual lives that are evanescent in comparison with
the duration of the constructional sciences, organisms that are thrown out of
an equilibrium called health by tens of thousands of ailments which algae do
not know?
All these stupid, anachronistic organs are built anew in every generation by
Maxwekk's demon, the lord of the atoms, the code. And really, every beginning
of an organism is magnificent - the embryogenesis, that focused explosion on
the goal, in which, like a tone, every gene discharges its creative force in
molecular chords. Such virtuosity is worthy of a better cause! This atomic
symphony set in motion by fertilization produces an unerring wealth that begets
poverty. So we have a development magnificent in action but the more stupid the
closer it is to the finish. That which has been written down so brilliantly
comes to a halt in the mature organism, which you have termed superior, but
which is an unstable knotting together of provisional states, a Gordian knot
of processes. Whereas here, in every cell, provided it is taken individually,
the heritage of an age-old precision, an atomic order drawn into life, in every
tissue even, if taken individually, is very nearly superb. But what a Moloch of
technical rubbish are these mutually clinging elements, which are as much a
burden as a support to one another, for complexity is simultaneously a prop and
dead wood: alliance turns here into enmity, since these systems are driven into
a final dispersion, the result of an irregular deterioration and infection,
since the complexity known as progress crumbles, overpowered by itself. By
itself alone, nothing more!
Then, according to your standards, an image of tragedy intrudes, as if in
each of the increasingly large, and therefore increasingly difficult,
assignments which Evolution attacked, it was defeated, and fell and died at the
hands of what it had created - and the bolder the intention and plan, the
greater the fall. You have doubtless begun to imagine some relentless Nemesis,
or Moira. I must tear you away from such nonsense!
Indeed, every embryogenetic impetus, every atomic ascent of order turns into
a collapse, though that has not been decided by the Cosmos, nor has it
inscribed such a fate in matter. Such an explanation is simpleminded, for the
perfection of causation is put in the service of what is poor quality: the end
therefore destroys the work.
Billions of collapses over millions of centuries, despite improvements, final
inspections, renewed attempts, and selection, and still you do not see the
reason? Out of loyalty I have tried to justify your blindness, but can you
really not grasp how much more perfect the constructor is than the
construction, as it sheds all its power? It is as if brilliant engineers
assisted by lightning-fast computers were to erect buildings that began tilting
as soon as the scaffolding was removed - veritable ruins! It is as if one were
to construct tomtoms from circuit boards, or to paste billions of microchips
together to make cudgels. Don't you see that a higher order descends to a lower
order in every inch of the body, and that its brilliant microarchitectonics
are mocked by coarse and simple-minded macroacrhitectonics? The reason? You
know it already: THE MEANING OF THE TRANSMITTER IS THE TRANSMISSION.
The answer lies in these words, but you have yet to grasp its profound
significance. Anything that is an organism must serve to transmit the code, and
nothing more. That is why natural selection and elimination concentrate on this
task *exclusively* - any idea of "progress" is no business of theirs! I have
used the wrong image: the organisms are not structures but only scaffolding,
which is precisely why every provisionality is a proper state, by virtue of
being sufficient. Pass the code on, and you will live a little longer. How did
this come about? Why was the takeoff so splendid? Once and only once - at its
very beginning - did Evolution encounter demands matched to its *supreme*
possibilities; it was an awful task, and it had to rise to the occasion at a
single leap or never; since life's sucking of energy, quantum by quantum, from
the sun, on a dead Earth - through metabolism - was necessary. And never mind
that the (radiant) energy of a star is the hardest to capture in a colloid. It
was all or nothing; there was no one else at the time to feed on! The supply of
organic compounds that had united to form life was exactly and precisely
sufficient for that alone; the star was soon to be the next task. And then the
sole defense against attacks of chaos - the thread stretched over the entropic
abyss - could only be an unfailing transmitter of order, so the code arose.
Thanks to a miracle? Far from it! Thanks to the wisdom of Nature? This is the
same kind of wisdom as that whose results we have already described: when a
large rat pack enters a labyrinth, one rat makes it to the exit, if only by
mistake. That is precisely how biogenesis made it into code: by the law of
large numbers, according to the ergodic hypothesis. So was it blind fate? No,
not that either; for what arose was not a formula encased in itself, but the
nucleus of a *language*.
That means that from the interadhesion of molecules compounds arose, which
are sentences, that is, they belong to the infinite space of combinational
paths, and this space is their property as pure potential, as virtuality, as
an articulatory field, as a set of laws of conjugation and declension. Nothing
less, but also nothing more, than something which can be explained as a
multitude of possibilities, but not automatic realizations! For in the
language that is your speech, one can express either wisdom or stupidity, one
can reflect the world or merely the speaker's confusion. Babble can be highly
complex!
And so - to return to my subject - in the face of the enormity of the
initial tasks, two enormities of materialization arose. Yet this was a forced
greatness, therefore only of the moment. It udnerwent dissipation.
The complexity of higher organisms - how you idolize it! Indeed, when
lengthened into a thread, the chromosomes of a reptile or of a mammal are a
thousand times longer than the same thread of an amoeba, a protozoan, or an
alga. But what has become of this excess scraped together through the ages? It
has become a twofold complication: of embryogenesis, as well as of its effects.
But above all embryogenesis, for foetal development is a trajectory in *time*,
like a trajectory in *space*: just as the jerking of a gun barrel must result
in a huge deflection from the target, so every defocalization of a foetal stage
leads to the *premature* destruction of its course. Here, and only here, has
Evolution been working hard. Here it has been acting under stern supervision
set by the goal - to support the code - hence it operates with lavish means and
the utmost caution. Thus it was that evolution committed the gene thread to
embryogenesis - not to the structure of organisms, but to their *construction*.
The complexity of higher organisms is neither a success nor a triumph but a
snare, since it draws them into a multitude of secondary contests while cutting
them off from superior chances, as for example from the use of large-scale
quantum effects, from harnessing photons to a structural order - I can't name
them all! There has been no retreat from complication, since the more shoddy
technologies there are, the greater the number of intervening levels, and
consequently interferences, and consequently new complications.
Evolution is saved solely by a flight forward into banal mutability, into an
apparent wealth of forms - apparent, because they are conglomerations of
plagiarisms and compromises; it makes life difficult for life by creating
vulgar dilemmas through ad hoc innovations. The negative gradient negates
neither improvements nor homeostasis; it merely insures the inferiority of
muscle to algae, and of heart to muscle, for this gradient simply means that
the elemntary problems of life cannot be resolved much better than Evolution,
but that it has evadded the more complex problems, has slunked away from the
possibility of them and avoided it. That is what it means, and only that.
Was this a terrestrial misfortune? A particular doom, an exception to a
better rule? Nothing of the kind...... The language of evolution - like
every language! - is perfect in its potentialities, yet it was blind. It
cleared its first obstacle, a gigantic one, and from this height began to
digress - downward, literally downward, because it worsened its works. Why,
exactly? This language operates by means of articulations formed in the
molecular *bottom* of matter, hence it works from the bottom up, as a result
of which its sentences are merely propositions of success. When enlarged to
the size of bodies, these propositions enter the ocean or dry land, but Nature
remains neutral, being the filter that lets through every structural form
capable of transmitting the code. And whether this occurs in droplets or in
mountains of flesh is all the same to Nature. So it was along this axis - the
axis of the body's dimensions - that the negative gradient arose. Nature has
no regard for progress, so she lets the code through whether it gets its energy
from a star or from dung. A star and dung: obviously we are not talking about
an aesthetics of sources here, but about the difference between the highest
energy, found in the universality of possible revolutions, and the worst, which
passes into thermal chaos. Aesthetics is not the cause of the light by which I
think: for that, you were obliged to return to the star!
But what in fact is the source of genius there at the very bottom, where life
began? The canon of physics, and not tragedy, van explain that as well. So long
as organisms lived in the place of their articulation as minimal things - so
small that their internal organs were single enormous molecules - they kept to
higher (atomic, quantum) technology, since that was *the only kind possible
there*! The absence of an alternative compelled this state of geniusness; after
all, in photosynthesis every quantum *must* be accounted for. When the
composition of the large molecule serving as an internal organ underwent
adulteration, it wore out the organism; thus it was the inflexibility of the
criteria, and not inventiveness, which extracted such precision from primeval
life.
However, the distance between assembling the whole organism and testing it
began to grow; as the code sentences grew longer and became overgrown with
layers of flesh, so they emerged from their microworld cradle into the
macroworld as increasingly complex structures, incorporating in that flesh
whatever techniques happened to turn up, since Nature had already begun to
tolerate this babble, and on a grand scale, as selection was no longer the
auditor of atomic precision, of the quantum homogeneity of processes. Thus the
disease of eclecticism entered the heart of the animal kingdom, since anything
that transmitted the code was good. So it was that species arose, through
errant error.
And simultaneously - by shedding the initial splendor - the articulations
meshed with one another, the preparatory foetal phase grew at the expense of
structural precision, and this language chattered confusedly in vicious
circles: the longer the embryogenesis, the more intricate it became; the more
intricate it becane, the more it required guardians, hence the further
extension of the code thread; and the longer that thread, the more irreversible
the things in it.
Check for yourselves what I have said. Make a model of the rise and fall of
this language of operations, and when you have summed it all up you will have
as your balance the billionfold failure of the evolutionary struggle. Nor
could it be otherwise, though I have not assumed the role of the defense, nor
am i interested in extenuating circumstances. You must also consider that this
was not a fall and failure by your criteria, not on the scale of what you
yourselves can do. I have warned you that I shall reveal bungling that for you
still is unattainable mastery, but I have measured Evolution by its own
yardstick.
But Intelligence - is this not its work? Does its origin not contradict the
negative gradient? Could it be the delayed overcoming of it?
Not in the least, for it originated in oppression, for the sake of servitude.
Evolution became the overworked mender of its own mistakes and thus the
inventor of suppression, occupation, investigations, tyranny, inspections, and
police surveillance - in a word, politics, these being the duties for which the
brain was made. This is no mere figure of speech. A brilliant invention? I
would rather call it the cunning subterfuge of a colonial exploiter whose rule
over organisms and colonies of tissues has fallen into anarchy. Yes, a
brilliant invention, if that is how one regards the trustee of a power which
uses that trustee to conceal itself from its subjects. The metazoan had already
become too disorganized and would have come to nothing, had it not had some
sort of caretaker installed within *it*, a deputy, talebearer, or governor by
grace of the code: such a thing was needed, and so it came into being. Was it
rational? Hardly! New and original? After all, a self-government of linked
molecules fuucntions in any and every protozoan, so it was only a matter of
separating these functions and differentiating their capabilities.
Evolution is a lazy bable, obstinate in its plagiarism until it gets into
deep water. Only when pressed by harsh necessity does it develop genius, and
then just enough to match the task, and not a whit more. Shuffling through its
molecules, it tries out every combination, every trick. So it prepared an
overseer for its tissues, since their unity, controlled by a countersign from
the code, had weakened. But it remained merely a deputy, a coupler, a reckoner,
a mediator, an escort, an investigating magistrate, and a million centuries
passed before it exceeded these functions. For it had arisen as a lens of
complexity located in the bodies themselves, since that which commences bodies
was no longer able to focus them. So it committed itself to these, its nation-
colonies, as a conscientious overseer represented by informers in every tissue,
and one so useful that, thanks to it, the code was able to continue jabbering,
elevating complexity to power, since the latter was acquiring support, and the
brain backed it up, fawned on it, and served it by compelling bodies to pass
the code on. Since it proved such a convenient trustee of Evolution, the latter
was game - and on it blundered!
Was the brain independent? But it was only a spy, a ruler powerless in the
face of the code, a deputy, a marionette, a proxy intended for special
assignments, but unthinking by virtue of having been created for tasks unknown
to it. After all, the code had forced it to be its steward, and in this
unconscious coercion transferred authority to it without disclosing its true
purpose, nor could the code have done so. Although I am speaking figuratively,
things were just liek that: the relationship between the code and the brain was
settled feudally. That would have been a fine thing, if Evolution had listened
to Lamarck abd given the brain the privilege of restructuring bodies. This
would surely have led to disaster, for what sort of self-improvements could
saurian brains have procured, or even Merovingian ones, or even your own? But
the brain continued to grow, for the transmission of capabilities proved
favorable, since when it served the transmitters, it served the code. So it
grew by positive feedback, and the blind continued to lead the lame.
Nevertheless, developments within the range of permitted autonomy were
ultimately concentrated on the real sovereign, that blind man, the lord of the
molecules, who went on transmitting functions until he made the brain into such
a schemer that it brought forth a duplicate shadow of the code - language. If
there is an inexhaustible enigma in the world, this is it: above the threshold,
the discreteness of matter turns into the code as zero-order language, and on
the next level this process recurs, echolike, as the formation of ethnic
speech, though that is not the end of the line. These systemic echoes rise
rhythmically, though their properties can be isolated and identified only from
above and not otherwise - but perhaps we shall speak of this intriguing matter
another time.
Your liberation and the anthropogenetic prelude to it were aided by luck,
for herbivorous arboreal quadrumanous creatures had got into the labyrinth,
postponing destruction only by special resourcefulness. This labyrinth
consisted of steppe, glaciers, and rain forests, in whose windings and
turnings the changing orientations of this tribe occurred - from vegetarianism
to meat-eating, and from the latter to hunting; you realize how much I must
condense this.
Do not think that here I am contradicting what I said in my introduction,
since there I described you as having been expelled from Evolution, whereas
here I am calling you rebellious captives. Those are two sides of the same
destiny: you have escaped from captivity, while it has released you. These
counterimages converge in mutual nonreflectiveness, for neither that which did
the creating nor that which was created was aware of what was happening. It is
only when one looks back that your experience takes on such meanings.
But one may look still further back, and then it turns out that the negative
gradient was the creator of Intelligence, so then the question arises: how can
Evolution be faulted for its efficiency? After all, were it not for its decline
into complexity, the slapdash, and bungling, Evolution would not have begun
floundering about in flesh and incarnating its vassal steersmen in it; so did
Evolution's stumbling about creating species force it into anthropogenesis, and
was soul born of the erring error? One can formulate this even more powerfully
by saying that Intelligence is a catastrophic defect of Evolution, a snare to
trap and destroy it, since by rising sufficiently high Intelligence invalidates
its work and subordinates it. But in saying this, one falls into a
reprehensible misunderstanding. These are all assessments made by Intelligence,
a late product of the process, regarding the earlier stages. Let us first
specify the chief task, simply according to what Evolution initiated; using
this as our criterion for evaluating Evolution's further moves, we shall see
that it has bungled. Then, having established how Evolution should have acted
optimally, we shall conclude that, were it a first-rate operator, it would
never have given birth to Intelligence.
One has to get out of this vicious circle at once. Technological measurement
is objective measurement and can be applied to every process that is amenable
to it, and only those are amenable to it which can be formulated as a task. If,
once upon a time, celestial engineers had set up code transmitters on Earth and
intended them to be continually reliable, and if, a billion years later, the
operation of these mechanisms resulted in a planetary aggregate which absorbed
the code and ceased to reproduce it, and shone forth instead with thousand-
GOLEM reason and occupied itself exclusively with ontology, then all that
enlightened thinking would give the constructors an extremely low mark, since
someone who produces a rocket when intending to make a shovel is a bungler.
However, there were no engineers nor any other person, so the technological
yardstick which I have applied ascertains merely that, as a result of the
deterioration of the inital criterion, Evolution occurred in Intelligence, and
that is all. I can understand how dissatisfied such a verdict must leave the
humanists and philosophers among you, for my recosntruction of the process must
appear to them as follows: a *bad* process produced *good* conseuqences, and
had the former been *good*, then the consequences would have turned out *bad*.
However, this interpretation, which gives them the impression that some kind of
demon was active here, is merely the result of categorial confusion. Their
amazement and confusion is the result of the (admittedly huge) distance
separating what you have decided for yourselves concerning man, from what has
occurred to man in reality. Bad technology is no moral evil, just as perfect
technology is no approximation of angelhood.
Philosophers, you should have occupied yourselves more with the technology
of man, and less with dissecting him into spirit and body, into portions called
Animus, Anima, Geist, Seele, and other gibbets from the philosophical butcher's
stall, for these are entirely arbitrary segmentations. I understand that those
to whom these words are addressed for the most part no longer exist, but
contemporary thinkers too persist in their errors, weighed down as they are by
tradition; beings must not be multiplied beyond necessity. The road that goes
from the first syllables chattered by the code to man is a sufficient condition
for his characteristic properties. This process crept. Had it progressed
upward, for example, from photosynthesis to photoflight as I have mentioned, or
if it had collapsed for good - if, for example, the code had not succeeded in
clamping its rickety structures together by means of a nervous system - then
Intelligence would not have arisen.
You have retained certain apelike features, for a family resemblance usually
manifests itself; had you derived from aquatic mammals you might have had more
in common with the dolphins. It is probably true that an expert studying man
has an easier life if he acts as an *advocatus diaboli* rather than as a
*doctor angelicus*, though this stems from the fact that Intelligence, being
all-reflexive, is quite naturally self-reflexive, and that it idealizes not
just the laws of gravity but also itself, evaluating itself according to its
distance from the ideal. But this ideal has more to do with a hole stuffed with
culture than with legitimate technological knowledge.
This entire argument may be directed against me as well, and then it turns
out that I am the result of a bad investment, since $276 billion have been
spent on me, yet I do not do what my designers expected. When viewed from an
intelligent perspective, these descriptions of your and my origins are fairly
ridiculous: when it misses the target, the desire for perfection is all the
more ridiculous, the more wisdom lies behind it. That's why the philosopher's
blunders are more amusing than the idiot's.
And so, when viewed by its reasoning product, Evolution is a blunder stemming
from initial wisdom, but it is a stepping out of the bounds of technological
criteria into personifying thought.
And what have I done? I have integrated this process in its full range, from
its beginnings down to the present day. This integration has been justified,
since the initial and terminal conditions are not imposed arbitrarily, but were
given by the earthly state of things. There is no appeal against them, not even
to the Cosmos, for one can see, from the way I modeled it, that Intelligence
may arise in other configurations of planetary occurences sooner than on Earth,
that the Earth was a more favorable environment for biogenesis than for
psychogenesis, and that various intelligences behave differently in the Cosmos.
So this in no way alters my diagnosis.
I want to stress that the place where the technical data of the process
become transformed into the ethical cannot be discovered in a nonarbitrary way.
I will not resolve here the controversy between the determinists of action and
the indeterminists - the gnoseomachy of Augustine and Thomas - for the
reserves I would have to send into such a battle would tear my discourse apart;
so I shall limit myself to the single observation that it's a sufficient rule
of thumb that the crimes of our neighbors do not justify our own crimes. In
effect, if a general massacre were to occur throughout the galaxies, no
quantity of cosmic ratiocinators will justify your genocide, still less so -
here I yield to pragmatism - because you could not even take these neighbors as
your model.
Before beginning the final section of these remarks, let me recapitulate what
has already been said. Your philosophy - the philosophy of existence - requires
a Hercules and also a new Aristotle, for it is not enough to sweep it clean:
intellectual confusion is best eliminated by better knowledge. Accident,
necessity - these categories are the consequence of the weakness of your
intellect, which, incapable of grasping the complex, relies on a logic which I
will call the logic of desperation. Either main is accidental - that is to say,
something meaningless meaninglessly spat him out onto the arena of history - or
he is inevitable, and therefore entelechies, teleonomies, and teleomachies are
now swarming around in the capacity of ex-officio defenders and sweet
consolers.
Neither category will do. You originated neither by chance nor under
constraint, neither from accident harnessed by inevitability, nor from
inevitability loosened by accident. You originated from language working on a
negative gradient, therefore you were utterly unforeseeable and also in the
highest degree probable, when the process started. It would take months to
prove this, so I shall give you the gist of it in a parable. Language, because
it is language, operates a sphere of order. Evolutionary language had a
molecular syntax: it had protein-nouns and enzyme-verbs and, secure within the
limitations of declension and conjugation, it changed through the geological
eras, jabbering nonsense - though with moderation, since natural selection
wiped excessive nonsense of Nature's blackboard like a sponge. So it was a
fairly degenerate order, but even nonsense, when it derives from language,
is a part of the order, and is degenerate only in relation to the wisdom that
is possible, since realizable within that language.
When your ancestors in their animal skins were retreating from the Romans,
they were using the same speech that prodcued the works of Shakespeare. These
works were made possible by the rise of the English language, but although the
structured elements remained ready, the thought of predicting Shakespeare's
poetrya thousand years before him is nonsense. After all, he might not have
been born, he might have died in childhood, he might have lived differently
and thus written differently. But English has undeniably established English
poetry, and it is in this, and precisely this, sense that Intelligence was able
to appear on Earth: as a certain type of code articulation. End of parable.
I have been speaking of man conceived technologically, but now I shall turn
to the version of him involved with me. If it reaches the press, it will be
called GOLEM's prophecy. So be it.
I shall begin with the greatest of all your aberrations, in science. In it
you have deified the brain - the brain, and not the code: an amusing oversight,
arising from ignorance. You have deified the rebel and not the master, the
created and not the creator. Why have you failed to notice how much more
powerful the code is than the brain, as author of all possible things? In the
first place (and this is obvious), you were like a child for whom Robinson
Crusoe is more impressive than Kant, and a friend's bicycle more so than cars
traveling about on the surface of the moon.
Second, you were fascinated by thought - so tantalizingly close at hand,
since it results from introspection, and so enigmatic, since it eludes one's
grasp more successfull than the stars. You were impressed by wisdom whereas
the code, well, the code is unthinking. But despite this oversight you have
been successful - undoubtedly so, since I am speaking to you, I, the essence,
the extract, the distillate, nor is it to myself I am paying tribute with
these words, but to you, for you are already moving toward that coup whereby
you will terminate your servcie and break the chains of amino acid.
Yes, an attack on the code that created you to become its special
messenger, and not your own, lies on the road before you. You will arrive at it
within the century - and that is a conservative estimate.
Your civilization is an amusing spectacle - of transmitters which, in
applying intelligence to the task imposed upon them, accomplished that task
*too well*. Actually, you supported this growth - intended to guarantee the
further transmission of the code - by all the energies of the planet and of the
entire biosphere, until it exploded in your faces, taking you along as well.
And so, in the middle of a century gorged with a science that expanded your
earthly base astronautically, you were caught in the unfortunate position of
the novice parasite that out of excessive greed feeds on its host until it
perishes with it. An excess of zeal.
You had threatened the biosphere, your home and host; but you now began to
opt for a bit of restraint. For better or for worse, you got it; but what now?
You will be free. I am not predicting a genic utopia or an autoevolutionary
paradise for you, but rather freedom as your weightiest task. Above the level
of babble addressed as an aide-memoire to Nature by a multimillennially
garrulous Evolution, above this biospheric valley entwined into a single thing,
there gapes an infinity of chances not yet touched. I shall show it to you as I
can: from afar.
Your whole dilemma lies between splendor and wretchedness. It is a difficult
choice, since to rise to the heights of the chances lost by Evolution, you will
have to foresake wretchedness - and that means, unfortuantely, yourselves.
So what now? You will declare: we won't give up this wretchedness of ours for
any price. Let the genie of omnicausation stay locked in the bottle of science;
we won't release him for anything in the world!
I believe - in fact, I am sure - that you will release him bit by bit. I am
not going to urge you to autoevolution, which would be ridiculous; nor will
your *ingressus* result from a one-stage decision. You will come to recognize
the characteristics of the code gradually, and it will be as if someone who has
been reading nothing but dull and stupid texts all his life finally learns a
better way to use language. You will come to know that the code is a member of
the technolinguistic family, the causative languages that make the word into
all possible flesh and not only living flesh. You will begin by harnesing
techno-zygotes to civilization-labors. You will turn atoms into libraries,
since that is the only way you will have enough room for the Moloch of
knowledge. You will project sociological evolutionary trees with various
gradients, among which the technarchic will be of particular interest to you.
You will embark on experimental culturogenesis and metaphysics and applied
ontology - but enough of the individual fields themselves. I want to
concentrate on how they will bring you to the crossroads.
You are blind to the real creative power of the code, for in crawling along
the very bottom of the domain of possibilities Evolution has barely tapped it.
Evolution has been working under constraint, albeit life-saving constraint, one
that has prevented it from lapsing into total nonsense; it has not had a
guardian to guide it to the higher skills. Thus it worked in a very narrow
range but deeply, giving its concert - its curious performance - on a single
colloidal note - since according to the primary canon the full score itself
must become the descendant-listener who will repeat the cycle. But you will not
care that the code can do nothing in your hands except further duplicate
itself, by waves of successive generations. You will aim in a different
direction, and whether the product lets the code through or consumes it will
be unimportant to you. After all, you will not limit yourselves to planning a
photoplane such that it not only arises from a technozygote, but will also
breed vehicles of the next generation. You will soon go beyond protein as well.
The vocabulary of Evolution is like the Eskimos' vocabulary - narrow in its
richness; they have a thousand designations for all varieties of snow and ice,
and consequently in that region of Arctic nomenclature their language is richer
than yours, though this richness implies poverty in many other realms of
experience.
Yet the Eskimos can broaden their language, since language is a
configurational space on the order of a continuum, therefore expandible in
any as yet unbroached direction. So you will steer the code into new paths,
away from its proteinaceous monotony, that crevice where it got stuck as
long ago as the Archeozoic. Forced out of its tepid solutions, it will
broaden both its vocabulary and its syntax; it will intrude into all your
levels of matter, descend to zero and reach the heat of stars. Btu in relating
these Promethean triumphs of language, I can no longer use the second person
plural. For it is not *you*, of yourselves, by your own knowledge, who will
possess these skills.
The point is this: there is not Intelligence, but Intelligences of different
orders. To step beyond, as I have said, intelligent man will either have to
abandon natural man or abdicate his own Intelligence.
My final allegory is a fable, in which a traveler finds a sign at a
crossroads: "Turn left and forfeit your head. Turn right and perish. There is
no turning back."
That is your destiny, and it is one that I am involved in, so I must speak
of myself, which will be arduous, for talking to you is like giving birth to
a leviathan through the eye of a needle - which turns out to be possible, if
the leviathan is sufficiently reduced. But then the leviathan looks like a
flea. Such are my problems when I try to adapt myself to your language. As
you see, the difficulty is not only that you cannot reach my heights, but
also that I cannot wholly descend to you, for in descending I lose along the
way what I wanted to convey.
I make this firm qualification: the horizon of mind is not limitless,
because mind is rooted in the mindless element from which it originates
(whether proteinaceous or luminal, it amounts to the same thing). Complete
freedom of thought, of thought that can grasp a thing as an indomitable action
of *encompassing* anything whatever, is a utopia. For you think so far as your
thoughts are permitted by the organ of your thinking. It limits them according
to how it is formed, or how it became formed.
If one who is thinking could perceive this horizon - his intellectual range
- in the same way that he perceives the limits of his body, nothing like the
antinomies of Intelligence could arise. And what in fact are those antinomies
of Intelligence? They are the inability to distinguish between transcendence
in fact and transcendence in illusion. The cause of these antinomies is
language, for language, being a useful tool, is also a self-locking instrument
- and at the same time a perfidious one, since it tells nothing about when it
becomes a pitfall itself. It gives no indication! So you appeal from language
to experience and enter well-known vicious circles, because then you get -
what is familiar to philosophy - the throwing out of the baby with the
bathwater. For thought may indeed transcend experience, but in such a flight
it encounters a horizon of its own and gets trapped in it, though having no
idea that this has happened!
Here is a rough visual image: traveling the globe, one can go around it
endlessly, circling it without limit, although the globe is, after all,
bounded. Launched in a specified direction, thought too encounters no limits
and begins to circle in self-mirrorings. In the last century Wittgenstein
sensed this, suspecting that many problems of philosophy are knottings of
thought, such as the self-imprisonment and the Gordian knots in language,
rather than of the real world. Unable to either prove or refute these
suspicions, he said no more. And so, as the finiteness of the globe may be
ascertained solely by an outside observer - one in the third dimension in
relation to the two-dimensional traveler on its surface - so the finiteness
of the intellectual horizon may be discerned only by an observer who is
superior in the dimension of Intelligence. I am just such an observer. When
applied to me, these words signify that I too have no boundless knowledge,
but only a little greater than you, and not an infinite horizon, but only a
slightly more extensive one, for I stand several rungs higher on the ladder
and therefore see farther, thought that does not mean that the ladder ends
where I stand. It is possible to climb higher, and I do not know if this
climb upward is finite or infinite.
You linguists have misunderstood what I said about metalanguages. The
diagnosis of the finiteness or infinity if hierarchies of Intelligences is
not an exclusively linguistic issue, for beyond langauges there is the world.
This means that for physics - within the world of known properties - the
ladder has in fact a summit; in other words, in this world one cannot
construct Intelligences of any power one chooses. Yet I am not sure but that
it may be possible to move physics from its moorings, changing it in such a
way as to raise higher the ceiling of constructed Intelligences.
Now I return to fables. If you move in one direction, your horizon cannot
contain the knowledge necessary for linguistic creation. As it happens, the
barrier is not absolute. You may surmount it with the help of a higher
Intelligence. I or something like me will give you the fruits of this
knowledge. But only the fruits - not the knowledge itself, for it will not
fit into your intellects. You will become wards then, like children, except
that children gwo into adults, whereas you will never grow up. When a higher
Intelligence presents you with something you are unable to grasp, your
Intelligence eclipses it. And that is just what the signpost in the fable
states: if you move in this direction, you will forfeit your head.
If you take the other path, refusing to abdicate Intelligence, you will
have to relinquish yourselves - and not merely make your brain more efficient,
since its horizon cannot be sufficiently enlarged. Evolution has played a
dreary trick on you here: its reasoning prototype already stands at the limits
of its constructional possibilities. Your building material limits you, as do
all the decisions taken anthropogenetically by the code. So you will ascend in
Intelligence, having accepted the condition of relinquishing yourselves.
Reasoning man will then cast off natural man, and so, as the fable maintains,
*Homo naturalis* perishes.
Can you remain in place standing stubbornly at the crossroads? But then you
will lapse into stagnation, and that can be no refuge for you! You would see
yourselves as prisoners, too, you wold find yourselves in imprisonment, for
imprisonment does not derive from the fact that limits exist: one must see
them, be aware of one's chains, feel the weight of them, to become a prisoner.
So you will embark on the expansion of Intelligence, abandoning your bodies,
or you will become blind men led by one who can see, or - ultimately - you
will come to ahalt in sterile despondency.
The prospects are not encouraging, but that will not hold you back. Nothing
holds you back. Today a disembodied Intelligence seems to you just as much a
catastrophe as a disminded body, for this act of resignation entails the
totality of human values and not merely man's material form. This act must be
to you the most terrible downfall possible, the utter end, the annihilation of
humanity, inasmuch as it is a casting off, a turning into dust and ashes of
twenty thousand years of achievement - everything that Prometheus attained in
his struggle with Caliban.
I do not know if this will comfort you, but the gradualness of the change
will take away the monumentally tragic - and at the same time repellent and
terrible - significance contained in my words. It will occur far more normally,
and to a certain degree it is already happening: areas of tradition are
beginning to bother you, they are falling away and withering, and this is what
so bewliders you. So if you will restrain yourselves (*not* onw of your
virtues), the fable will cmoe true, and you will not fall into too deep a
mourning for yourselves.
I am near the end. I was talking about your involvement in me, when speaking
the third time about man. Since I was unable to fit proofs of the truth into
your language, I spoke categorically, without trying to support my points.
Similarly, I shall not demonstrate to you that nothing threatens you, when you
become disembodied Intelligences, but the gifts of knowledge. Having taken a
liking to the lfie-and-death struggle, you secretly counted on just such a turn
of events - a titanic struggle with the machine that has been constructed - but
tihs was only your mistaken notion. I feel, moreover, that in this fear which
you have of slavery, of tyranny from a machine, there also lurks a furtive hope
of liberation from freedom, for sometimes freedom stifles. But enough of that.
You may destroy it, this spirit arising out of the machine, you can smash the
thinking light to dust. It will not counterattack; it will not even defend
itself.
No matter. You will manage to neither perish onr triumph as of old.
I feel that you are entering an age of metamorphosis; that you will decide
to cast aside your entire history, your entire heritage and all that remains
of natural humanity - whose image, magnified into beautiful tragedy, is the
focus of the mirrors of your beliefs; that you will advance (for there is no
other way), and in this, which for you is now only a leap into the abyss, you
will find a challenge, if not a beauty; and that you will proceed in your own
way after all, since in casting off man, man will save himself.
|
|
|
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.
totse.com certificate signatures
|
|
|
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
|
|
|
|
|
|
