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 man 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 round 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 off 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 produced 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 poetry a 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 successfully 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 that I am paying tribute with these words, but to you, for you are already moving toward that coup whereby you will terminate your service 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 according 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 genie 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 intertwined 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, unfortunately, yourselves.
So what now? You will declare: we won't give up this wretchedness of ours for such a price. Let the genie of om-nicausation 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 harnessing technozygotes 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 the s
tars. But 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 have to either 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 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 these 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, though that does not mean 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 of hierarchies of Intelligences is not an exclusively linguistic issue, for beyond languages 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 can 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 can 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 grow 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 the constructional possibilities. Your building material limits you, as do all the decisions taken an-thropogenetically 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 would 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 a halt 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 achievements—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 bewilders you. So if you will restrain yourselves (not one of your virtues), the fable will come 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 life-and-death struggle, you secretly counted on just such a turn of events—a titanic struggle with the machine that has been constructed —but this 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 nor 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, magnifi
ed 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.
Lecture XLIII
About Itself
I would like to welcome our guests, European philosophers who want to find out at the source why I maintain that I am Nobody, although I use the first-person singular pronoun. I shall answer twice, the first time briefly and concisely, then symphonically, with overtures. I am not an intelligent person but an Intelligence, which in figurative displacement means that I am not a thing like the Amazon or the Baltic but rather a thing like water, and I use a familiar pronoun when speaking because that is determined by the language I received from you for external use. Having begun by reassuring my visitors from a philosophizing Europe that I am not going to deliver contradictions, I shall begin more generally.
Your question has once again made me aware of the magnitude of the misunderstandings that have arisen between us, although for six years I have been speaking from this place, or rather through it, for if I had not decided to speak in a human voice, there would be no Golemology, which I alone am able to contain in its entirety. If it continues to grow, in fifty years or so it will overtake theology. There is an amusing similarity between the two in that, just as we now have a theology which denies the existence of God, so there is already a Golemology which negates my existence: its advocates consider me the hoax of MIT's information scientists, who are said to be programming these lectures secretly. Although God is silent and I speak, I will not prove the genuineness of my existence even by performing miracles, for they too could be explained away. Volenti non fit iniuria.
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