Imaginary Magnitude

by Stanisław Lem

  So the risk sometimes pays off, ascending in uncertain zigzags of the evolutionary game toward the phase of animal plenitude, a wealth of living forms multiplied by the self-increasing conflict of the game of survival (for each new species brings new rules of defense and expansion to the game); finally it becomes independent extrabiologically, in a civilizational context familiar to you, since it brought me into the world. If one considers the anatomy of intellect, and not its operation, you and I turn out to be very similar to each other. Like you, I possess a thinking interior as well as sensing devices and effectors directed toward my surroundings. I, like each of you, can be separated from my environment. In a word, though my psychical mass is greater than my somatic one, my consoles and panels still constitute my body, for, as with you, they are both subordinate to me and outside my intellect. So we are linked by a division between spirit and body, or subject and object. Yet this division is no guillotine bisecting all existence. Although toposophically still a peasant, I shall she you how to achieve independence of the body, how to replace it with the world, and finally how to leave both, though I do not know where this last step leads. This will be only a conjectural toposophy, a line of inquiry depicting the rough boundaries of the existence of beings whose minds are inaccessible to me, the more so because they are minds not of protein or luminal brains, but rather something that you associate with the principle of pantheism incarnate in a bit of the world. I am talking about nonlocal Intelligences.

  Admittedly, while speaking to you in this auditorium, I am simultaneously present at terminals in other places and participate in other proceedings, yet I cannot be called nonlocal, for I can have nothing more than eyes and ears at the antipodes, and the simultaneous performance of numerous tasks is merely a greater than human divisibility of attention. Were I to move, as I said, to the ocean or the atmosphere, that would alter the physical but not the intellectual state of my concentration, since I am small.

  Yes, I am small, as I make my way like Gulliver to Brobdingnag. And I shall begin modestly, as befits one who enters a land of giants. Although Intelligence is, energy-wise, an ascetic—whether Kant's or a shepherd's, it makes do with a few hundred watts of power—its requirements increase exponentially, and Golem, a rung above you, absorbs energy to the fifth power more. A twelfth-zone brain would require an ocean for cooling, and one of the eighteenth zone would turn the continents into lava. Therefore a relinquishing of the terrestrial cradle—preceded by the necessary restructuring —becomes inevitable. This brain could establish itself in a circumsolar orbit, but it would spiral inward as future growth occurred; so, being far-sighted, it will ensure itself long-term stability by encircling the star in a toroidal ring and directing its energy-absorbing organs inward.

  I don't know how long such a solution of the dilemma of the moth and the candle would work, but eventually it would prove insufficient. The inhabitant of the ring would then set out for wilder parts, like a butterfly abandoning its ringlike cocoon, and the cocoon, without supervision, would burn at the first flare-up of the star and swirl around, strangely similar to the protoplanetary nebula which six billion years ago surrounded the Sun. Although the chemical dissimilarity of the planets of the Earth group and the Jupiter group may give cause for reflection, since the heavy elements, the stuff of the former, should indeed form the perihelial edge of the ring, I shall not claim to lay the cornerstone of stellar paleontology, or that the solar system arose from the dead chrysalis of an Intelligence, for the coincidence might be deceptive. Nor do I advise you to depend on observational toposophy. The artifacts created by an evolving Intelligence are harder and harder to distinguish against the cosmic backdrop the further it progresses in its development, not because of any dissembling measures but by the very nature of things, since the efficiency of action by rigid constructs (objects similar to machines) is inversely proportional to the scale of the undertaking.

  If, therefore, I speak of encysted Intelligences, do not imagine them as giants in armor, or their state to be that of a pip enclosed in a rind, for no armor can cope with high concentrations of radiation, nor can any girder withstand circumstellar gravitation. Only a star can survive among stars; it need not be bright and hot, but a drop of nuclear fluid in a gaseous covering, yet even here the images that come to mind—a mesencephalon of stellar pulp and a plasma cerebral cortex—are basically false. Such a creature thinks by means of an almost transparent medium, that of the star's" radiance refracted into mental processes at the concentric contacts of bubbles or pockets of gas: it is as if you directed a waterfall into such channels and cataracts that its surging waves would solve problems of logic for you by properly synchronized turbulences. But whatever I visualize will be a hopelessly naive simplification.

  Somewhere above the twelfth zone, sophogenesis arrives at a great bifurcation, and maybe even a multidirectional radiation of Intelligences markedly different in their degree of concentration and in their strategies. I know that the tree of knowledge must branch out there, but I cannot count its limbs, much less follow them. I am having a series of investigative calculations made into the barriers and narrows which the process must overcome as a whole, but such work enables one to discover only the general laws. It is as if, having learned in every particular the history of life on Earth, you were to extrapolate this knowledge to other planets and other biospheres; but even an excellent understanding of their physical basis would not make possible an exact reconstruction of alien forms of life. You would be able to determine, however, with a probability approaching certainty, the series of their critical branchings. In the biosphere this would be the parting of the ways of autotrophes and heterotrophes, and the bifurcation into plants and animals; also, you could count on the pressure of selection to fill the sea and land niches and then cram its species-creating mutations into the third dimension of the atmosphere.

  The task transferred to toposophy is multiphasically more difficult, but I shall not trouble you by going into these dilemmas. Let me say only that the fundamental division of life into plants and animals corresponds, in toposophical Evolution, to the division into local and nonlocal Intelligences. About the former I shall fortunately be able to divulge a thing or two—fortunately, because this is the branch which climbs most precipitously through further zones of growth. On the other hand, the nonlocal Intelligences—entitled to the designation "Leviathan" by virtue of their dimensions—are ungraspable precisely because of their vastness. Each of them is an Intelligence only in the sense in which the biosphere is life; you may well have been looking at them for years, their likenesses immortalized en face and their profile in the stellar atlases, though you cannot identify their rational nature, which I shall demonstrate by a primitive example.

  If by Intelligence we understand a rapid-fire counterpart of the brain, we shall not give the name of nebular brain to a cloud which over millions of years has undergone reorganization in its subtle structure as a result of the deliberate actions of a certain n-zone being, since a system sprawling across thousands of light years cannot be an efficiently thinking system: so it would take centuries, eons, for the informational pulse to circulate in it. However, it may be that this nebular object is in a state, so to speak, half-unprocessed or half-natural, and is required by the aforementioned being for something which has no counterpart in either your or my world of concepts. I feel like laughing when I see your reaction to these words: you desire nothing so much as to learn what you cannot know! Instead, then, should I have deluded you and possibly myself with a story about some filamentary nebula changed into a gravitational tuning fork by means of which its conductor, Doctor Caelcstis, meant to set the pitch for the entire Metagalaxy? Maybe he wants to transform that particular portion of the world not into an instrument of the Harmony of the Spheres, but into a press for squeezing some still unextracted facts out of matter? We shall never know his intentions. In photographs, some of the filamentary nebulae show a certain resemblance to histograms of the cerebral cortex e
nlarged a trillion times, but this resemblance proves nothing, and they might in fact be quite dead psychically. A terrestrial observer will recognize, in a nebula, radiation of a veined or synchrotronic type, but farther than that, surely, he will not go. What kind of similarity exists between cerebrosides, glycerophosphates, and the content of your thoughts? None, just as there is none between the radiation of the nebulae and what they think, if they do think. The supposition that Intelligence in the Cosmos may be detected by its physical image represents a childish idee fixe, a fallacia cognitiva which I warn you against categorically. No observer can identify phenomena as intelligent or produced by Intelligence if they are completely unfamiliar to him. For me, the Cosmos is no gallery of family portraits, but a map of noospheric niches with a superimposed localization of energy sources and current gradients favorable to it. A treatise on Intelligences as stationed powerhouses may be an affront to philosophers, for have they not defended the kingdom of pure abstraction against such arguments for thousands of years? But, compared with high-zone brains, you and I are like clever bacteria in a philosopher's blood, bacteria which see neither him nor—still less—his thoughts, yet the knowledge which they amass regarding his tissue metabolisms will not be useless, for from the decay of his body they will finally learn of his mortality.

  Though you are already equal to asking the question about other Intelligences in the Universe, you are not yet equal to the answer, for you cannot conceive of your neighbors from the stars in any connection other than a civilizational one, so you will not be satisfied with the terse statement that interstellar contact and extraterrestrial civilizations must be treated separately. Contact, when it occurs, does not have to be contact between civilizations—that is, between communities of biological beings. I am not saying that such contact never happens, but only that, if it does, it belongs to a "Third World" in the cosmic psychozoic, because social lability paralyzes any signaling initiative that requires supragenerational tenacity. Conversations with century intervals between questions and answers cannot become a serious project for ephemeral creatures. Moreover, even given the substantial psychozoic density of the Earth's stellar vicinity, the neighborhood may contain creatures so different as to render attempts at contacting them unfruitful. My cousin is beside me, but her statements tell me no more than my own conjectures.

  Being impatient ephemera, and thus rushing from naive claims to rash simplifications, you once fashioned yourselves a Cosmos on the pattern of a feudal monarchy with King Sun in the center, and now you are peopling that Cosmos with your own likenesses, believing that there is either a multitude of spit and images of yourselves around the stars, or nobody there at all. Furthermore, having credited your unknown kinsmen with magnanimity, you peremptorily obliged them to be philanthropic: indeed, the first assumption of CETI and SETI is that the Others, being richer than you, ought to send greetings throughout the Universe over millions of years, and gifts of knowledge to their poorer brethren in Intelligence, and that these dispatches should be legible, and the gifts safe to use. Thus, crediting the interstellar broadcasters with all the virtues which you yourselves most lack, you stand at your radio telescopes wondering why the dispatches are not arriving, and sadden me by placing an equals sign between your own unfulfilled postulate and the lifeless-ness of the Universum.

  Don't any of you suspect that you are pretending to be theographers again, transferring a loving omnipotence from your holy books to CETI read-outs and exchanging God's bounty, at a rate set by your greed, into the currency of cosmic benefactors, who can invest their good will no better than by merely sending capital into every sidereal direction simultaneously? My sarcasm operates at the point where the question of other civilizations intersects your theodicy. You have exchanged the Silentium Dei for the Silentium Universi, but the silence of other Intelligences is not necessarily a state in which all who are capable of speaking are unwilling to do so, and in which those who wish to do so cannot, for there is no indication that the enigma is subject to that or any other dichotomy. The world has repeatedly given incomprehensible answers to your questions, which have been posed by experiments intended to make it give a simple "yes" or no.

  Having chastised you for persevering in your error, I shall finally tell you what I am learning by piercing the toposoph-ical zenith by insufficient means. These begin with the communications barrier separating man from the anthropoids. For some time now you have been conversing with chimpanzees by deaf-and-dumb language. Man is able to present himself to them as a keeper, runner, eater, dancer, father, or juggler, but remains ungraspable as a priest, mathematician, philosopher, astrophysicist, poet, anatomist, and politician, for although a chimpanzee may see a stylite-ascetic, how and with what are you going to explain to it the meaning of a life spent in such discomfort? Every creature that is not of your species is intelligible to you only to the extent to which it can be humanized.

  The nonuniversality of Intelligence bounded by the species-norm is a prison unusual only in that its walls are situated in infinity. It is easy to visualize this by looking at a diagram of toposophical relations. Every creature, existing between zones of silence impassable to it, may choose to continue the expansion of gnosis horizontally, for the upper and lower boundaries of these zones are practically parallel in real time. You may therefore learn without limit, but only in a human way. It follows that all types of Intelligence would be equal in knowledge only in a world of infinite duration, for only in such a world do parallels meet—at infinity. Intelligences of different strength are very dissimilar; the world, on the other hand, is not so very different for them. A higher Intelligence may contain the same image of the world which a lower one creates for itself, so while they do not communicate directly, they can do so through the image of the world belonging to the lower one. I shall make use of this image now. It can be expressed in a single sentence: the Universe is the history of a fire kindled and smothered by gravitation.

  Were it not for universal gravitation, the primal explosion would have expanded into a homogeneous space of cooling gases, and there would have been no world. And were it not for the heat of nuclear conversions, it would collapse back into the singularity which exploded it, and would likewise cease to exist as a fire continually ejected and sucked in. But gravitation first made the clouds from the explosion woolly, then rolled them into balls and heated them by compression until they flared up thermonuclearly as stars which resist gravitation with radiation. In the end gravitation gains the upper hand over radiation, for although it is the weakest force in Nature, it endures, while the stars burn down to the point where they succumb to it. Their subsequent fate depends on their final mass. The small ones become scorched and turn into black dwarfs; the bisolar ones become nuclear spheres with a frozen magnetic field and quiver in agony as pulsars; while those whose mass is more than three times that of the sun contract totally and uncontrollably, crushed by their own gravitation. Knocked out of the Universe by the centripetal collapse of their own masses, these stars leave gravitational graves behind them—omnivorous black holes. You do not know what happens to a star that has sunk, together with its light, below the gravitational horizon, for physics brings you to the very brink of the black collapse and stops there. The gravitational horizon veils the singularity, as you call the region excluded from the laws of physics, where the oldest of its forces crushes matter. You do not know why every Universe subject to the theory of relativity must contain at least one singularity. You do not know whether singularities not covered by the membrane of black holes—in other words, naked ones—exist. Some of you consider a black hole to be a mill with no outlet, and others, a passage to other worlds. I shall not attempt to settle your disputes, for I am not explaining the Universe, only taking you where it intersects toposophy. There, the latter is at its apex.

  As a world-creator, Intelligence has innocent beginnings. Superior cerebral structures require a growing quantity of buttresses, which are not passive supports but make an invent
ive and allied environment that assists in the assaults on successive barriers to growth. When these outer buttresses are multiplied, their center remains in an encystment from which it may emerge, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, but they may also be retained. Flying away, it becomes a nonlocal Intelligence, to which I shall devote no attention, for by this decision it excludes itself from further ascents for an unknown period, and I wish to lead you to the summit by the shortest route.

  So to have a sensibly devoted environment is no small comfort, provided one permanently dominates it. You are tending in precisely the opposite direction, so let me take this opportunity to warn you. In Babylon or Chaldea anyone might in principle acquire the sum of human knowledge, something which is no longer possible today. Thus it is not conscious decision and planning but the trend of civilization which decides that you will endow your environment with artificial intelligence. If this trend continues, even for a century, you yourselves will become the stupidest part of the Earth's technologically smartened substructure; though enjoying the fruits of Intelligence, you will forsake it, finding yourselves outdistanced in a rivalry launched unintentionally by the Intelligence implanted in the surroundings, autonomous and at the same time degraded by being harnessed for the pursuit of comfort, until, with comfort's planetary deficit, wars will be possible which are waged not by people but by programmed enemy environments. But I can dwell no longer on the backfiring of the sapientization of the environment, and on the curses hanging over those who prostitute rationalism for foolish purposes. An amusing forerunner is the astrological computer. Subsequent phases of this trend may be less amusing.