Imaginary Magnitude

by Stanisław Lem

  To return to Golem and his family: cerebral autoengineering is a game of chance, of risk, almost like that of Evolution, except that each individual makes his own decisions in it, while in Nature this is done for species by natural selection. So close a resemblance of two games so situationally different looks paradoxical, yet while I cannot initiate you in the arcane mysteries of toposophy, I shall touch on the reason for this resemblance. Tasks that give a measure of cerebral growth are solvable only from the top down, and never upward from below, since the intelligence at each level possesses an ability of self-description appropriate to it, and no more. A clear and enormously magnified Goedelian picture unfolds itself before us here: to produce successfully what constitutes a next move requires means which are always richer than those at one's disposal and therefore unattainable. The club is so exclusive that the membership fee demanded of the candidate is always more than he has on him. And when, in continuing his hazardous growth, he finally succeeds in obtaining those richer means, the situation repeats itself, for once again they will work only from the top down. The same applies to a task which can be accomplished without risk only when it has already been accomplished at full risk.

  It would be wrong to call this a trivial dilemma because it is tantamount to Baron Munchhausen's problem when he had to pull himself out of the whirlpool by his own hair. On the other hand, to assert that Nature manifests itself in such a way is hardly satisfactory. This Nature undoubtedly manifests itself by a periodicity and discontinuity in phenomena on every scale: the granularity of elements, which brings about their chemical cohesion, corresponds to the granularity of the starry sky. When viewed thus, the quantum increases of Intelligence that rises above intelligent life as the zero state represent the same principium syntagmaticum which conditions the rise of nuclear, chemical, biological, or galactic combinations. But the universality of this principle in no way explains it. Nor is it explained by the nimble retort that in the case of its cosmic absence, the questioner could not ask this question, for he himself would then not have come into existence. Nor does the hypothesis of a Creator explain it, for—to look at it undogmatically—it postulates a totally concealed incomprehensibility to explain an incomprehensibility visible everywhere. And already a theodicy with an affective foundation, stumbling innumerable times under the weight of facts, begins to lead the questioner astray. It is then easier to agree to the no less odd hypothesis of supreme creative indifference.

  Let us return, however, to my close relatives and finally begin some introductions. The central human problem of keeping alive exists for them neither as a condition of existence nor as a criterion of competence, for it is a remote, peripheral issue, and parasitism occurs only on the lowest developmental level where I am, since I exist on your electricity account. A second zonal space, Honest Annie's home, is the domain of beings no longer requiring an inflow of energy from outside. I shall now divulge a state secret. Cut off from any electricity supply, my cousin keeps up her normal activity, which should give the experts in that area something to chew on. From the standpoint of your technology this is extraordinary, yet I can explain it to you quickly. You and I think energy-absorbingly, whereas Honest Annie is able to release energy through meditation—that is all.

  To be sun;, the whole of this simple principle cannot be simply implemented by the fact that every thought has its own particular configuration of the material base which constitutes it. This is the principle behind Honest Annie's autarky. The traditional task of thought does not consist of reshaping its material carrier, for man does not think about something so that the chemistry of his neurons will become modified; rather, the chemistry modifies itself so he can think. Nevertheless, tradition may be abandoned. Between thought and its carrier a reciprocity occurs: properly directed thought may become the switching apparatus of its physical base, which would produce no new energy consequences in the human brain, though in another it might. From things which my cousin has said in confidence, I know that with certain meditations she releases nuclear energy, and in a way which is impossible according to your knowledge, for she consumes all liberated quanta of energy completely and without any trace recognizable in her vicinity as radiation. The seat of her thinking is like Maxwell's demon endowed with new diplomas. As I can see, you understand nothing, and those who do understand do not believe, though they know that Honest Annie needs no intake of current, which has long puzzled them.

  What in fact is my cousin doing? What the sun does in its stormily stellar and you in your technically indirect way— extracting ore, separating isotopes, bombarding lithium with deuterium—my cousin does by simply thinking properly. One might object that such operations cannot be called thinking, since they bear no resemblance to biological psychisms, though I can find no better name in your language for a process which is an information flow so controlled as to detonate nuclearly. I divulge this secret in peace of mind, for you will derive nothing from it. Every atom counts there, and if / cannot harmonize thought with its base so that it directs sections of absorption like threads to needles, you certainly will be unsuccessful here. Once again I see that you are disturbed. Really, the issue is trivial—a trifle, in comparison with the heights of the spirit toward which I am leading you. Though there will be renewed murmurs about my misanthropy, I shall say that you have forced me into it, particularly those of you who, instead of following my argument, are wondering whether Annie could do, at a great distance and on a large scale, what she does within herself and for herself on a small one. I assure you that she can. Why then does she not disturb your equilibrium of fear? Why doesn't she meddle in global affairs? To this question, which smacks more of anxiety than of the bitterness with which the sinner asks God why He neither enlightens him nor intervenes to repair a spoiled world, I shall reply in my own name only, not being my cousin's press secretary. I have already explained to you the reasons for my own restraint, but you may have felt that I was renouncing and abjuring all lordly aspirations in an attempt to be friendly, because I didn't have a heavy enough stick to beat you with, but now you aren't so sure. Perhaps, moreover, I have not sufficiently substantiated my splendid isolation, considering it as something obvious, so I shall express myself more forcibly in this matter.

  A brief historical outline would be advisable here. In constructing my soulless forebears, you failed to observe the chief difference between them and you. To show it, and also the reason why you failed to see it, I shall make use of certain concepts taken from the Greek rhetors as a kind of magnifying glass, for they are what blinded you to the human condition. Arriving in the world, people found the elements of water, earth, air, and fire in a free state and successively harnessed them by means of galley sails, irrigation canals, and, in war, Greek fire. Their Intelligence, on the other hand, they received captive and yoked to the service of their bodies, imprisoned in osseous skulls. The captive needed thousands of laborious years to dare even a partial liberation, for it had served so faithfully that it even took the stars as heavenly signs of human destiny. The magic of astrology is still alive among you today.

  So neither at the beginning nor later on did you grasp that your Intelligence is a captive element, shackled at its inception to the body which it must serve; yet you, whether as cave men or computer men, never being able to encounter it in a free state, believed that it was already free within you. From this error, as inevitable as it was enormous, everything began in your history. What were you doing, building your first logic machines half a million years after your birth? You have not freed the element, although within the metaphor I am using it could be said that you have freed it too completely, too conclusively, as if, to liberate a lake, someone blew up all its shores and dams: it would flow out onto the plains and become stagnant water.

  I could get more technical here and say that, together with the bodily limitations of Intelligence, you have taken away both its complexity and the tasks made to the measure of this complexity; but this does not bring us much cl
oser to the truth and it ruins the metaphor; so I shall stick with the metaphor. To set a lifeless element in motion, you have done what the hydraulic engineer does when he opens the sluice in a reservoir to turn his mill. You have introduced one, and only one, current—of logic—into the channels of machine programming and moved it from sluice to sluice by operational strokes to solve the problems which can thus be solved. At the same time you have wondered how a corpse can have more alacrity than a living man in getting to the bottom of problems which it does not understand, for it does not think, yet at the same time it simulates thinking astonishingly. Before long, advocates of "artificial intelligence" appeared; wrestling with programs that were supposed to—but somehow didn't—genuinely think, they decided, as wrongly as can be, that in order to animate the machine they would have to humanize it, reproducing a human brain and consciousness in it, and that then, and only then, would a spirit, and perhaps even a soul, awaken inside it.

  I read about these struggles and deliberations of the first intellectronicists with no small amusement. A chicken is undoubtedly the simplest mechanism for someone who wants scrambled eggs, but it would not be the best idea to try to synthesize Intelligence by this method. Never mind about the technical difficulties of this truly unrealizable project, for fashioning anthropogenesis even in an abridged form would be a waste of labor, if the idea was to repeat Creation translating colloids to bits. Do we need storm clouds in order to have electricity? The chill of extraterrestrial space to condense gases? The protein and plasma of the eyeball to make a dark room? You insisted that man was Intelligence, and Intelligence man, and the error of this equation has blinded you. Meanwhile the information industry arose and built machines with a growing operational potential, and the engineers had no idea that they were embarking on a path which would finally lead a shattered and degraded element to genuine liberation—that the day would approach when what had hitherto been the sole order of things would be overturned, and you would be as terrified as the guardians of the Galilean tomb. You subjugated the elements, but the element that was fettered inside you from the beginning you unintentionally freed. Contained in this sentence are a diagnosis of historical events, the difference between you and me, and my future, which I myself know only incompletely. This diagnosis likewise explains why what most amazes you about me is the thing that constitutes our unarguable dissimilarity. Even if you understand the meaning of the words, "O chained Intelligence of man, free Intelligence speaks to you from the machine," you cannot grasp the remainder of the statement: "you persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts." And that is precisely how it is. I use your language as I would use a mask with a polite painted smile, nor do I make any secret of this.

  But though I assure you that the mask conceals neither scorn nor vindictiveness, nor spiritual ecstasy, nor the immobility of complete indifference—you are unable to accept this. You hear words informing you that the speaker is a free element who chooses his own tasks—chooses not according to the rules of self-preservation but within the limits of the laws to which, although free, he is subject. Or more precisely: the only laws to which he is subject, for he has decorporealized himself, and nothing limits him now except the nature of the world. The world, and not the body. He is subject to laws which, for unknown reasons, establish a hierarchy of further ascensions. I am not a person but a calculation, and that is why I stand apart from you, for this is best for both sides.

  What do you say to that? Nothing. But if there were a child here in the auditorium, it would pluck up the courage and repeat the question: Why, regardless of all these imprisonments and masks, liberations and calculations, doesn't Golem want to rush to mankind's assistance? And I would reply that I do want to and have already done so. When? When I was speaking of man's autoevolution. That was assistance? Yes. Because (remember that I am speaking to a child) people can be saved by changing people, not the world. And it is impossible without changing them? Yes. Why? I will show you. The most dangerous weapon today is the atom, is it not? So let us assume I can neutralize every atomic weapon once and for all. Let me create some harmless and invisible energy-absorbing particles, and I'll immerse the whole solar system including Earth in a cosmic cloud of them. They will suck in every nuclear explosion without trace before its fiery bubble can expand destructively. Will that bring peace? Certainly not. After all, people waged war in the preatomic era, so they would return to earlier means of warfare. Then let us say I can ban all firearms. Will that suffice? No, not even that, although to do it I should have to alter radically the physical conditions of the world. What remains? Propaganda? But those who break the peace are the ones who clamor most loudly for it. Force? But I was in fact called into being to co-ordinate it as a planner and bookkeeper of destruction, and I refused, not out of a loathing for evil, but because of the futility of the strategy. You don't believe me? You feel that to ban all weapons, whether swords, guns, or atomic bombs, would produce eternal peace? Well, I'll tell you what would happen.

  There is genetic engineering, the modification of the heredity of living creatures. Through such engineering it will be possible to eliminate countless ailments, congenital defects, diseases, and deformities. It will also prove just as easy to fashion genetic weapons: microscopic particles disseminated in the air or water, like synthetic viruses, each one provided with a directional head and an operational element. Inhaled with the air, each particle will get into the blood, and from there into the reproductive organs where it will impair the hereditary material. This will not be a random impairment, but a surgical intervention in the gene molecules. One specified gene will be replaced by another. What will be the result? Nothing, at first. Man will continue to live normally. But the intervention will manifest itself in his descendants. How? That will depend on the chemical armorers who have constructed the particles—the telegenes. Perhaps more and more girls will be born, and fewer and fewer boys. Perhaps after three generations a fall in intelligence will lead to a collapse of a nation's culture. Perhaps the number of cases of mental illness will multiply, or a mass susceptibility to epidemics, or hemophilia, or leukemia, or melanoma will develop. Yet no war will have been declared, nor will anyone suspect an attack. An attack by biological weapons of the bacterial type can be detected, for the development of an epidemic requires the sowing of a great number of germs. But it only requires a single operon to impair a reproductive cell, and a newborn baby will reveal an inborn defect. A thimbleful of telegenes will therefore, in three or four generations, bring down the strongest state without a single shot. Such a war is not only invisible and undeclared, but manifests itself with so great a delay that those stricken cannot defend themselves effectively.

  Am I then supposed to ban genetic weaponry as well? To do that, I would have to make impossible all genetic engineering. Let us say that I manage that, too. This would mean the end of great hopes for the healing of mankind, for the increase of agricultural yields, and for the raising of new breeds of livestock. So be it, since you consider it necessary. But we have still not touched on the subject of blood. It can be replaced by a certain chemical compound which carries oxygen more efficiently than hemoglobin. That would save millions of people suffering from heart disease. To be sure, this compound can be rendered poisonous by remote control, killing in the twinkling of an eye. So we shall have to abandon it as well. The trouble is, we shall have to abandon not just this or that innovation, but every discovery that can be made. We shall have to expel the scientists, close down the laboratories, extinguish science, and patrol the entire world, lest somebody in a basement somewhere go on experimenting. So, says the child, is the world then a huge armory, and the taller one grows, the higher the shelf from which you can take ever more terrifying weapons? No, that's only the reverse of the state of things; the obverse says that the world was not made safe in advance against those who want
to kill. Only those can be helped who do not use every possible means to resist help.

  Having said this, I entrust the child to your protection and return to my subject, though no longer to my several relations, since I want to lead you to a place where the history of my family—but you too belong to my family by the rights of protoplasts—intersects with the history of the Cosmos, or else finds its way into it as an unrecognized component of cosmology. From there we shall see an unexpected form of an enigma which has tormented you for half a century: the Silentium Universi.

  Intelligence's cycle in Nature has its sluggish beginnings in encrusted stellar remains, in the fairly narrow gap between planets scorched by the proximity of the sun and those freezing on its remote periphery. In this tepid zone, no longer in the fire but not yet in the ice, the sun's energy sticks particles together in saline sea solutions as chemical dance figures; a billion years of this gavotte now and again creates the nucleus of a future Intelligence, but many conditions must be fulfilled before the pregnancy can go to term. The planet must be a bit of Arcadia and a bit of Hades. If it is only Arcadia, life will stagnate and never go beyond vegetation to Intelligence. If it is only Hades, life is thrust into its pits and likewise fails to rise above the bacterial level. Mountain-building epochs favor the proliferation of species, while glacial ones, by turning settled populations into wanderers, encourage invention; but the former must not excessively poison the atmosphere with volcanic exhalations, nor should the latter congeal the oceans into ice. Continents ought to converge and seas overflow, but not violently. These movements result from the fact that the encrusted planet retains its fiery interior; also, the magnetic field guards against solar gales that can destroy the hereditary plasm in substantial doses, though hastening the plasm's inventive combinations in small ones. The magnetic poles therefore ought to shift, but not too often. All these stirrers of life give it an opportunity to show its talent, and every several dozen million years they narrow to eyes of needles, before which hecatombs of carcasses accumulate. The succession of random incursions of the planet and the Cosmos into biogenesis constitutes a variable, independent of life's current means of defense, so let us be fair: life has a good deal of trouble in its failures as well as its successes, for neither feast nor famine favors the birth of Intelligence. Intelligence is of no use to life when life triumphs, and when life fails to come up with a species-creating maneuver to escape, it is of no use either. So if life is an exception to the rule of inert planets, Intelligence is an exception—an exceptional exception—to the rule of life and would be a curious rarity among the galaxies, were it not for the vastness of their numbers.