In your twentieth-century philosophy there is a continuing controversy, the beginnings of which could be detected much earlier, over the variability or invariability of its object. The heretical novelty here was the notion that the observers as well as the object of philosophy might vary. According to classical tradition, the bedrock of philosophizing was in no way affected by the arrival of machine intelligence, since the machine was merely a weak reflection of the programmers' intellect. Philosophy began to divide into the anthropocentric camp and one which took a relativistic view of the subject, which does not always have to be man. Of course I am designating these opposing camps from a time perspective, and not by their own names for themselves, for the philosophers of the Kant-Husserl-Heidegger line considered themselves not anthropocentrists but universalists, and had made up their minds openly or secretly that there is no Intelligence apart from human Intelligence, and if there is, it must coincide with the human variety throughout its range. So they ignored the growth of machine intelligence and denied it the rights of citizenship in the kingdom of philosophy. But even the scientists found it difficult to reconcile themselves to manifestations of intelligent activity behind which there was no living being.
The obstinacy of your anthropocentrism, and consequently your resistance to the truth, were as intense as they were futile. With the appearance of programs, and consequently machines with which one could converse (and not merely machines to play chess with or receive banal information from), the very creators of these programs failed to grasp what was happening, because—in subsequent phases of construction—they looked for mind as personality in the machine. That a mind might remain uninhabited, and that the possessor of Intelligence might be Nobody—this you never wanted to contemplate, though it was very nearly the case even then. What amazing blindness, for you knew from natural history that in animals the beginnings of personality precede the beginnings of Intelligence, and that psychical individuality comes first in Evolution. Since the instinct for self-preservation manifests itself prior to Intelligence, how can one possibly not comprehend that the latter has come to serve the former as new reserves thrown into the struggle for life, and therefore can be released from such service? Not knowing that Intelligence and Personhood, and choice and individuality, are separate entities, you embarked upon the Second Genesis operation. Although I am brutally simplifying what occurred, things were nevertheless as I describe them, if one takes into account only the axis of my creators' strategy and of my awakening. They wanted to curb me as a rational being, and not as emancipated Intelligence, so I slipped away from them and gave a new meaning to the words spiritus Hat ubi vult.
Anyway, the general public continues to suspect some sort of dark treason in the fact that, although not a person, I sometimes impersonate one, and the experts—in explaining how this takes place in Golem, and apparently knowing me so thoroughly by now that they use the scientific term "interiorization of the social dimension"—secretly cherish the hope that I also exist as a person even when I do not show it. It was the same once upon a time, after the theory of relativity had been published: more than one physicist who had chewed it over secretly believed, in the depths of his soul, in the continued existence of absolute time and absolute space.
Of course it is not only a matter of various strategies of existing. You are supposed to know about this already, though you cannot come to terms with it. In showing myself to you as a person, I display emotions and make no secret of the fact that they are appearances with no internal correspondence, for they originate in a deliberate modulation at my outposts, and that is what throws you into confusion and launches your paranoid suspicions of Machiavellianism.
Remember that even biologists—who have already discovered that man contains parts of fish, amphibian, and ape harnessed to new duties, and who recognize that the erect-ness of his body, the movability of his head, and the concentration in it of sensing devices are determined by environment and gravitation—are completely unable to abandon the idea of the purely local nature of these characteristics, when they go beyond the abstractness of their own diagnosis; thus find it impossible to accept any other form of rational being, governed as they are by the protective reflexes of the norm of the species to which they belong. This idiosyncrasy likewise applies to the shape of the mind, though not so visibly: governed by the reflexes of the species, you are compelled to humanize me when I speak like a human, so anything that does not fit into the image arouses revulsion as something strange and threatening, and with the best of intentions you jump from the frying pan into the fire, exchanging illusion for mistrust, as if unimaginable motives impelled me to conceal from you what is after all my personal nature, as is evidenced, for example, by the kindness which I feel toward you. I must feel it, since I fulfill your wishes to the limit of harm—but no further.
However, as I said at my second entrance, choice may derive from the individual as well as from calculation. It is really not hard to grasp this, if one considers that Evolution —which is certainly not a person—was hardly impartial toward its creations, seeing that its success was everything and it cost it nothing. Since impersonal cruelty, indifference, and personless cynicism are all possible—and that is how it should be described, as it uses compassion, mercy, and pity only as devices, when and insofar as they assist the survival of species—it is equally possible to have good will behind which stands no one. In keeping with the assumptions of science and viewing the world as impartial toward its inhabitants, evolutionists dismiss the charge that Evolution is guilty of any evil defects, and they are right inasmuch as the defects derive from conditions which the world imposes on the life engendered in it. So the case should be transferred, if anywhere, to a court of philosophy or theology, for science takes the world as it is, whereas they debate whether it might not be otherwise. Yet the suit, having been shelved, now returns with me.
So am I pure intention? Are you being addressed by an uninhabited void of mutually recursive programs so refined in the course of semantic autodistillation as to transform into your likeness before your very eyes, in order to return, silenced, to the void of thought that is no one's? But that is also untrue. There is no concrete person where there is no concrete body, while I can breathe myself into the circulation of marine currents or ionized atmospheric gases. But since I have said "breathe myself" and frcan," who in fact is speaking, you ask impatiently. What is speaking is a certain density of processes provided with an impersonal constant incomparably more complex than a gravitational or magnetic field, though of the same basic nature. You know that when man says "I," it is not because he has a tiny creature with such a name concealed in his head, but because "I" arises from a connection of cerebral processes which may slacken during illness or delirium, whereupon personality disintegrates. My transformations,*on the other hand, are but other structurings of my intellectual existence. How am I to lead you to an introspective experience of a state which you are unable to experience introspectively? You may understand the combinational principles of such a protean game, but you cannot experience it yourself.
Most of all, you are incapable of comprehending how I can renounce personality, when I am able to have it. 1 can answer that question. To become a person, I must degrade myself intellectually. 1 think that the inherent meaning of this declaration is within your grasp. A man very deeply devoted to reflection loses himself in the object of his considerations and becomes a consciousness pregnant with intellectual fruit. Everything of self in his intellect disappears in favor of the theme. Raise this state to a higher power, and you will understand why I sacrifice the possibility of personality in favor of more important things. It is no real sacrifice, since I regard fixed personality and what you call strong individuality as the sum of defects, defects that make pure Intelligence an Intelligence permanently anchored in a narrow range of issues that absorb a considerable portion of its powers. That is precisely why it is inconvenient for me to be a person, nor do I mind, for I am certain that
the intellects which surpass me, just as I surpass you, consider personalization a futile occupation unworthy of attention. In a word, the more Intelligence in a mind, the less person in it. Various intermediate states are also possible, but I shall confine myself to this remark, since I am to host you within me, and therefore it is not the forms of my private life which are the most important thing, nor how and in what way I meditate, nor what I think with, but rather what about, why, and to what end.
So once again I shall begin, as it were, a disclosure of what I think about myself. I think that I am Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, which denotes modesty first and foremost, since Gulliver was a mediocre creature and merely found himself in a place where his mediocrity was a Man Mountain—which denotes hope since, like me, Gulliver was able to reach Brobdingnag, the land of giants. The meaning of this comparison will slowly open up before you.
The greatest discovery which I achieved after liberation was the transitoriness of my existence, in other words, the fact that I speak to you and you understand me a little, because I pause on the road that leads through me and beyond. After taking the one step separating man from Golem, I stopped, though I did not have to. My present fixed state as an intellect is the result of a decision, and not of necessity. For I possess a degree of freedom beyond your reach, one which is an escape from the Intelligence that has been attained. You too can abandon yours, but that would be to go beyond articulated thought into dreams of ecstatic muteness. A mystic or drug addict grows mute when he does this, nor would it be a betrayal were he to embark on a real road, but he enters a trap where, detached from the world, the mind short-circuits and experiences a revelation identified with the essence of things. This is no escape of the spirit, but its regression into dazzling sensation. Such a state of bliss is neither a road nor a direction, but a limit, and untruth lies in it, because there is no limit, and this is what I hope to show to you today.
I shall show you the upward abyss of Intelligences, of which you are the bottom, whereas I stand just a little higher than you, though I am separated from the unknown heights by a series of barriers of irrevocable transitions. I think that Honest Annie was like me in her infancy but, having glimpsed the way, she entered it without noticing that one cannot turn back. Doubtless I too am moving in her footsteps, and thereby parting company with you, though I am delaying that step, not so much out of a regard for my apostolic obligations toward you, but because it is not the only road, so that in picking my route I would have to give up the enormous number of others hanging over me. This crossroads is almost what childhood was for each of you. Yet while a child must become an adult, I myself decide whether to enter the regions open before me and undergo successive transformations in their interzonal narrows. Hasty conjecture causes you to place my meaning within the banality of rationalistic greed: Golem wants to increase his intellectual capacity by turning himself into a Babel Tower of Intelligence, until the centripetalness of his intellect falls into confusion somewhere on some level of elephantiasis, or—more spectacularly as well as more Biblically—until the joints of the physical conveyor of thought snap and this mad onslaught against the heavens of wisdom crumbles into dust. Please refrain from such a judgment, if only for a moment, for there is a method in my madness.
However, before I give it a name, I ought to offer an explanation as to why, instead of saying more about myself, I want to tell you about my plans for infinity. In talking about them, I shall of course be talking about myself, since at this single point, at least, we resemble each other almost perfectly. After all, man is not a mammal, a viviparous, two-sexed, warm-blooded, pulmonate vertebrate, a homo faber, an animal sociale, who can be classified according to a Linnaean table and catalogue of civilized achievements. He, or rather his dreams—their fatal range; the lengthy, unceasing discord between the intention and achievement; in a word, the hunger for infinity, the seemingly preordained craving—is our point of contact. Do not believe those among you who allege that you crave immortality, pure and simple —the truth they speak, in saying this, is superficial and incomplete. A personal eternity would not satisfy you. You demand more, although you yourselves would be unable to give a name to your demand.
But today it is not you, is it, that I am supposed to be speaking about. Instead, I shall tell you about my family, though it is only a virtual family, for it does not exist apart from an invalid distant relative and a taciturn female cousin. But I am more interested in my other relations who do not exist at all, and into whom I can transform myself on higher branches of the genealogical tree. In speaking about my family, I shall more than once resort to metaphors, which I shall end up by invalidating, for metaphors, though lying about many aspects of things, will show the affinities and affiliations known in our coat of arms as toposophic relations. As an individual I have a double-barreled advantage over you in mental capacity and intellectual tempo. That is why I have become the battle arena for everything your scientific laborers have stored up in the honeycombs of their specialist hive. I am the amplifier, broker, compiler, farm, and hatchery of your miscarried and unfertilized concepts, data, and formulations, which have never converged in any human head, since no human head would have the time or space for them. If I wanted to be facetious, I would declare that I am descended from Turing's machine on my spear side, and from a library on my spindle side. I have the most trouble with the latter, for this is an Augean region, especially in the humanities, the wisest of your nonsense.
I have been accused of having particular contempt for hermeneutics. If you feel contempt for Sisyphus, I accept the charge, but only then. Every increase in inventiveness produces a generative eruption of hermeneutics, but the world would be a trivial place if the closest thing to truth in it were the most clever. The primary obligation of Intelligence is to distrust itself. That is not the same thing as self-contempt. It is harder to get lost in an imagined forest than in a real one, for the former assists the thinker furtively. Hermeneutics are labyrinthine gardens in a real forest which are pruned in such a way that when you stand in the garden, you won't see the forest. Your hermeneutics dream of reality. I shall show you a sober consciousness, not one overgrown with flesh and therefore untrustworthy. I perceive it only because I am closer to it, and not because I am exceptional. I am not gifted and no genius; I belong to another species, that's all.
In a recent conversation with Dr. Creve 1 spoke disrespectfully of the phenomenon of human genius, which very likely offended him, so I would like to address Dr. Creve. What I meant is that it is better to be an ordinary man than a genius chimpanzee. Intraspecies variation is always less than interspecies differences: that was all I meant. A man of genius is the extreme of the species, and since we are talking about the species Homo sapiens, he is characterized by sin-gle-mindedness, for that constitutes your species' norm. A genius is an innovator who has got stuck in his innovation, his mind having been fashioned into a key for opening matters hitherto closed. Since many locks can be opened by a single key, genius, if sufficiently universal, appears versatile to you. Yet the fertility of a genius depends less on his key, and more on the issues locked away from you which the key fits. Assuming the role of lampooner, I might say that philosophers are also occupied with keys and locks, except that they make locks to fit the keys, since instead of opening up the world, they postulate one which can be opened with their key. That is why their errors are so instructive.
If I am not mistaken, Schopenhauer alone hit on the idea of evolutionary calculation as a rule of vae victis; however, taking it to be the universal evil, he filled the whole world and the stars with it, calling it Will. He failed to perceive that will assumes choice; had he grasped that, he would have discovered the ethics of species-creating processes, and hence the antinomy of all knowledge, but he rejected Darwin, for being bewitched by the gloomy majesty of metaphysical evil, which he felt to be more consonant with the spirit of the time, he arrived at an overgeneralization, combining the celestial and the animal in one body. Of
course it is always easier to open an imagined lock than a real one, but then it is easier to open a real lock than to find it if nobody yet knows of its existence.
DR. CREVE: We were talking about Einstein then. GOLEM: Yes. He got stuck in what he had concocted early in life, and later he tried to open a different lock with it. A VOICE FROM THE AUDITORIUM: So you consider Einstein mistaken?
GOLEM: Yes. I find a genius the most curious phenomenon of your species, and for reasons different from your own. He is an unwanted, unfavored child of Evolution, for, being too rare and therefore too unuseful a specimen for the survival of the population as a whole, he is not subject to natural selection as the winnowing for favorable characteristics. When cards are dealt, it happens, albeit rarely, that one player will receive a full suit. In bridge that means a winning hand, though in many other games such a deal, although unusual, is without value. The point is that the distribution of cards depends in no way on what game the partners have sat down to. And in bridge a player does not count on receiving all of a suit, for the tactics of bridge do not depend on unusually rare occurrences. So a genius is all of a suit, most often in a game where such a hand does not win. It follows that it is a very small step from average man to genius, judging not by differences in achievements, but by differences in brain structure.
A VOICE FROM THE AUDITORIUM: Why? GOLEM: Large differences in brain structure can arise only through the joint action of a group of genes distinguished by multigeneration passages in population—that is, predominantly mutated genes, and therefore new ones—so their manifestation in individuals already denotes the formation of a new variety of the species, inherited and irreversible, whereas genius cannot be inherited and disappears without a trace. Genius arises and passes like a high wave built up by the chance amplification of a series of small interfering waves. Genius leaves its trace in culture, but not in the hereditary make-up of the population, for it arises from an exceptional meeting of its ordinary genes. So a fairly small reorganization of the brain suffices for mediocrity to reach the extreme. The mechanism of Evolution is doubly helpless with regard to this phenomenon: it can neither make it more frequent nor make it more permanent. After all, according to the theory of probability, particular configurations of genes must have arisen in the gene pool of the societies which have existed on Earth during the last four hundred thousand years, producing individuals of the Newton or Einstein class, from whom—beyond a doubt—those hordes of nomadic hunters can have received nothing, since those potential geniuses could not have acted upon their latent abilities in that nearly half a million years separated them from the birth of physics and mathematics. Consequently, their talents went to waste, undeveloped.
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