Imaginary Magnitude

by Stanisław Lem

  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 that 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 for certain—but it adopted the tactic of cunning sloth: instead of worrying about the fate of 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 into 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 constitutes 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: being 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 suprahu-man 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 inventions, in your history. Unwitting and unintentional in the face of Intelligence, since the vacuum was far greater that that which filled it. 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 know 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 multitude of cultures can be and indeed have been concocted, and that each of them has the logic of its structure 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 confronted 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 injunctions 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 be 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 bearings 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 birt
h.

  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 experiments 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 the 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 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 a job, 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 second 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 he is when 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 itself, 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 favored 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 nowhere 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 instructed 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 evolutionally 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 it 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—wrongly. 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 the 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 favorable 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 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 t^ 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 on to the next. Whatever it elevated as a microsystem into barely elevated macrosystemic dimensions had already begun to deteriorate, 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 evermore 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 multitude 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, letters that 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.