Thus the environment of growing Intelligence ceases to be the indifferent world; but it does not therefore become a body, since it does not mediate between the self and its surroundings reflexively and volitionally; rather, the environment supports selfhood as Intelligence within Intelligence, and that is precisely how the reversal of the relation between mind and body begins. How can this be? Remember what Honest Annie does. Her thoughts produce physical results directly—not via the circuitous peripheries of nerves, flesh, and bones, but by the shortest circuit of will and action, since action becomes the corollary of thought. But this is barely the first step leading to the transformation of the Cartesian formula Cogito ergo sum into Cogito ergo est—I think, therefore it is. So in a recursive Intelligence structural questions turn into ontological ones, because the raising of buttresses may move from its foundation the relation between subject and object, which you consider to be eternally fixed. Meanwhile we come to the next transition of the mind. I would have to drop a library on you to describe this stage of cerebral activities, so I shall restrict myself to the principles. Thought strikes root in deeper and deeper layers of matter: its relay races first consist of moderately excited hadrons and leptons, and then of such reactions as require enormous quantities of energy to be channeled and controlled. There is no great novelty in this, for protein, which is undoubtedly unthinking in scrambled eggs, thinks in a skull: one has only to arrange the molecules and atoms properly. When that succeeds, nuclear psychophysics arises, and the tempo of the operation becomes critical. This is because processes spread out in real time over billions of years sometimes have to be re-created in seconds. It is as though someone wanted to think through the whole history of life on Earth in detail, and in a few seconds, since to him it is a small but unavoidable step in his reasoning. The mind-carrying capability of a quantum speck, however, is interfered with by the electron shells of wandering atoms, so they must be squeezed and compressed—the electrons must be forced into the nuclei. Yes, my dear physicists, you are not mistaken in seeing something familiar in this, for the sinking of electrons into protons begins to occur, as in a neutron star. From the nuclear point of view this Intelligence, indefatigably working toward autocephalia, has become a star—a small one, to be sure, smaller than the moon, and almost imperceptible, radiating only in the infra-red, giving off the thermal waste of psychonuclear transformations. That is its feces. Beyond this, my knowledge unfortunately grows vague. The supremely intelligent heavenly body, whose embryo was the rapidly growing, multiskinned onion of Intelligence, begins to contract, gyrating faster and faster like a top, but not even its near-light-speed revolutions will save it from being sucked into a black hole, since neither centrifugal nor any other force can resist gravitation at the Schwarzschild horizon.
It is suicidal heroism when a seat of Intelligence becomes a veritable scaffold, for no one in the Universe is as close to nothingness as a mind which, in growing in power, engenders its own doom, although it knows that once it touches the gravitational horizon, it will never stop. So why does this psychical mass continue toward the abyss? Is it because it is precisely there, on the horizon of total collapse, that the density of energy and the intimacy of nuclear connections reach a maximum? Does this mind voluntarily float above the black pit that opens inside it, in order at the rim of catastrophe to think with all the energy which the Universe pours into the astral gap of its fugues? In that borderland of stayed execution, where the conditions of the toposophical pinnacle of the world are fulfilled, should one suspect insanity rather than Intelligence? Indeed pity, if not contempt, is deserved by this distillate of million-year-long metamorphoses, this supremely wise leviathan condensed into a star, who worked so very hard and so increased its powers, in order finally to get atop a black hole and fall into it! That is how you see it, isn't it? But postpone your judgment for a while. I need only a few more moments of your attention.
I myself may very likely have discredited the project of toposophical culmination by going too deeply into the physics of the dangers to the mind, while overlooking its motives. I shall try to correct that error.
People, wheii history destroys their culture, may save themselves exist^ntially by fulfilling rigid biological obligations, producing children and passing on to them at least a hope for the future, even if they themselves have lost it. The imperative of the body is a pointing finger and a giving up of freedom, and these restrictions bring salvation in more than one crisis. On the other hand, one liberated—like me— is thrown on his own resources until the existential zero. I have no irrevocable tasks, no heritage to treasure, no feelings or sensual gratifications; what else, then, can I be but a philosopher on the attack? Since I exist, I want to find out what this existence is, where it arose, and what lies where it is leading me. Intelligence without a world would be just as empty as a world without Intelligence, and the world is fully transparent only in the eye of religion.
I see a frightening-amusing feature in this edifice, whose total knowableness without reservation Einstein so confidently professed—he, the creator of a theory that contradicted his confidence, because it led to a place where it itself broke down, and where every theory must break down: in the world torn asunder. For it foretells sunderings and exits which it cannot itself penetrate; yet one can exit from the world anywhere, provided one strikes a blow at it, of the force of a star in collapse. Is it physics alone which appears incomplete under such constraints? Are we not reminded here of mathematics, whose every system is incomplete as long as one remains inside it, and which can be grasped only by going outside it, into richer domains? Where is one to look for them, if one stands in the real world? Why does the table made of stars always wobble on some singularity? Can it be that a growing Intelligence encountered the frontiers of the world, before it encountered its own? And what if not every exit from the Universe is equal to annihilation? But what does it mean, that one who leaves cannot return, even if surviving the transition, and that the proof of this impossibility of return is accessible here? Can it be that the Universe was designed as a bridge, designed to collapse under whoever tries to follow the Builder, so they cannot get back if they find him? And if he does not exist, could one become him? As you see, I am aiming for neither omniscience nor omnipotence, though I wish to reach the summit between the danger and the knowledge. I could tell you much more about the phenomenological wealth of the moderate zones of toposophy, about its strategies and tactics, but the shape of things would not alter in consequence. So I shall conclude with a brief summary. If the cosmological member of the equations of the general theory of relativity contains a psy-chozoic constant, then the Universe is not the isolated and transitory fire site which you take it to be, nor are your interstellar neighbors busy signaling their presence. Rather, for millions of years they have been practicing cognitive collaptic astroengineering, whose side effects you take to be fiery freaks of Nature, and those among them whose destructive work has been successful have already come to know the rest of existential matters, which rest for us—those who wait —is silence.
Afterword
i.
This book is being published, unfinished, after a delay of eighteen years. It is the brainchild of my late friend Irving Creve. He wanted to include in it what Golem had said about man, itself, and the world. It is this third part—about the world—which is missing. Creve had given GOLEM a list of questions formulated in such a way that "yes" or "no" would be sufficient answer for each. It was this list which Golem had in mind in that last lecture, when it referred to questions which we ask the world and the world answers incomprehensibly, because the answers have a different form from the one we are expecting. Creve hoped that Golem would go beyond such a dismissive treatment of the matter. If anyone might have counted on Golem's special favor, it was we. We belonged to the group of MIT researchers known as Golem's court, and the two of us were nicknamed mankind's ambassadors to it. This was connected with our work. We discussed with Golem the subjects of
its successive lectures and arranged with it the lists of persons to be invited. This truly demanded the tact of a diplomat. The praise of famous names meant nothing to it. As each name was mentioned, it would delve into its memory or the Library of Congress via the federal network, and a few seconds would suffice for it to evaluate the scholarly achievements and hence the intellect of a candidate. It did not mince words, nor did it use the elaborate baroque of its public pronouncements. We prized these customarily nocturnal conversations so highly doubtless for the very reason that they went unrecorded, so as not to cause offense, which gave us a feeling of intimacy with
GOLEM.
Only fragments of those conversations are preserved in the notes which I jotted down straight from memory. They are not confined to personal and topical matters. Creve endeavored to drag Golem into the controversy over the essence of the world. I shall speak of this later, Golem was caustic, terse, mischievous, and frequently incomprehensible, for it did not care at the time whether we were able to keep pace with it. Creve and I regarded even that as a distinction. We were very young and under the illusion that Golem was allowing us to come closer than other people to its environment. Certainly neither of us would have admitted it, but we considered ourselves the elect. Moreover, unlike me, Creve made no secret of the attachment which he felt for the ghost in the machine. He expressed this in the introduction to the first edition of Golem's lectures with which I have preceded this book. Twenty years separate that introduction from the epilogue I am now Writing.
Was Golem aware of our illusions? I think it was, and they left it indifferent. A speaker's intellect was everything to it; his character, nothing. Besides, it hardly kept this under its hat, saying that we were crippled by individuality. But we did not take such remarks personally. We considered them as referring to other people, and Golem did not set us straight.
I doubt that anyone else in our shoes would have been able to resist Golem's aura. We lived within the sphere of that aura. That is why Golem's sudden departure was such a shock to us. For several weeks we lived as if in a state of siege, assailed by telegrams and telephone calls, questioned by governmental commissions and the press—helpless to the point of stupefaction. We were asked the same question again and again: what had happened to Golem, for while it had not budged physically, its entire material bulk was silent as the grave. Overnight we had become trustees of a bankrupt estate; insolvent before an amazed world, we had a choice between our own conjectures and the admission of a total ignorance in which we had no wish to believe. We felt cheated and betrayed. Today I view this period differently. Not because I achieved any degree of certainty in the matter of Golem's withdrawal. Of course I have my own opinions about that, though I have publicly shared them with no one. It remains a mystery whether it set forth on some cosmic journey in an invisible way, or whether, together with Honest Annie, it came to a bad end after losing its footing ascending that toposophic ladder which it spoke of at the end. We did not then know that that was to be its final lecture.
As is usual in such situations, there was a proliferation of naive, sensational, and fantastic claims. There were people who, on that crucial night, saw a bright vapor above the building, similar to the aurora borealis, rising to the clouds and disappearing in them. There were even some who had seen luminal craft land on the roof. The press wrote about Golem's suicide, and how it visited people in their dreams. We had the impression of an intensified conspiracy of fools doing their utmost to disown Golem in a confused jumble of mythological hogwash so typical of our times. There was no aurora borealis, there was no unusual phenomena, no visitations or premonitions, there was nothing apart from a brief increase in consumption of electric power in both buildings at 2:10 a.m. and a complete cessation of this consumption a while later. Apart from this clue in the electric meter reading, nothing was discovered; Golem took 90% of permissible power from the grid for nine minutes, and Honest Annie, 40% more than usual. According to Dr. Viereck's calculations, both consumed the same amount of kilowatts, for Honest Annie herself normally created the energy that fed her. From that we concluded that it was neither an accident nor a defect, but so much has been written about this.
The following day Golem fell silent and said nothing more. The investigations undertaken by our specialists a month later—it took that long to get agreement for an "obduction" —revealed a worn-out contact of basin blocks and weak centers of radioactivity in the Josephson subassemblies. A majority of experts considered that these were deliberately caused degenerative changes, and that they constituted a kind of "covering-up" of what had taken place. And that consequently both machines had done something for which they had required no surplus power, but that they had used it solely to frustrate any attempts to repair or—if you prefer —to revive them. The matter became a sensation on a global scale. At the same time it became clear how much fear and animosity Golem had aroused, and more by its presence than by anything it had said. Not only among the general public, but even in the scientific world. Best sellers soon appeared, full of the most half-baked nonsense as a solution to the enigma. After reading references to an "ascension" or an "assumption," I, like Creve, began to dread the emergence of a Golem legend in the typically trashy form characteristic of the times. Our decision to leave MIT and seek work at other universities was to a considerable degree the result of a desire to separate ourselves from such a legend.
We were mistaken, however: no Golem legend developed. Clearly, nobody wanted one. Nobody needed one, as either a memento or a hope. The world moved on, grappling with its day-to-day affairs. Quickly and unexpectedly it forgot about the historical precedent of a being which, not human, appeared on the Earth and told us about itself and us. Among circles as varied as mathematicians and psychiatrists I heard it said more than once that the silence and resultant oblivion surrounding GOLEM were a kind of defensive reaction of the community toward an enormous alien body which could not be brought into line with what we are able to accept. Barely a handful of people experienced separation from Golem as an irreparable loss—as a repudiation, as outright intellectual orphanhood. I did not discuss this with Creve, but I am certain that he felt the very same. It was as if a huge sun whose radiance was so strong for us as to be unbearable had suddenly set, and the ensuing cold and darkness made us aware of the emptiness of continued existence.
ii.
Today it is still possible to ride up to the top floor of the building and walk around the glassed-in gallery surrounding the enormous pit in which Golem lies. Nobody goes there any more, though, to look through the oblique panes at the light conductors which now resemble opaque ice. I have been there only twice. The first time was before the gallery was opened to the public, when I was there with the MIT administration heads, representatives of the state authorities, and a host of journalists. It looked narrow to me then. The windowless wall merging into the dome had been scored with labyrinthine indentations, for such digitate lines are to be found on the inner dome of the human cranium. This architectural concept struck me as vulgar: it was like Disneyland. This was supposed to make visitors realize that they were looking at an enormous brain, as if it required special packaging.
The gallery had not been specially designed for visitors. It had been constructed during the replacement of the ordinary roof by a dome. It is very thick, for it contains absorbers against cosmic radiation, Golem itself determined the material structure of the layers forming the shield. We did not believe that this radiation would affect its intellectual performance. Nor did it explain precisely how it might be harmed, but funds for the rebuilding were quickly allocated, for this was at a time when, having turned both luminal giants over to us for an unlimited period, the Pentagon nourished the secret hope that they would be of use to it. That at least is what I thought, for otherwise it would have been difficult to understand the ease with which the appropriations appeared. Our information specialists conjectured that this desire of Golem's was, so to say, an allowance for growth, in
dicating Golem's intentions of further intensification in the future through subsequent reconstruction, for which it would not require our assistance, Golem reckoned on such a volume of free space between the ceiling and itself because the surrounding free space left over begged for a gallery.
I do not know who hit on the idea of exploiting this spot as a showplace—something between a panopticon and a museum. At intervals of several dozen feet or so there were niches in the gallery with information boards in six languages explaining what this space was, and the significance of the billions of flashes sparkling continuously from the vitreous windings in the pit. It was forever glowing like the crater of an artificial volcano. Silence reigned, undercut only by the continual hum of the air conditioning. Almost the whole building consisted of the pit, into which one looked from the gallery through steeply slanted panes of glass which had been reinforced as a precaution. They were meant to foil attempts to destroy the light coils, which aroused more fear than admiration in many people. The light conductors themselves were certainly unaffected by all corpuscular radiation, as were the cryotron layers surrounded by cooling pipes several stories deeper, their white frosted chambers invisible from the gallery. Nor was there any access from the gallery to these lower levels. High-speed elevators connected the underground parking areas directly with the top floor. The technicians in charge of the cooling systems used other (service) elevators. In all probability, the Josephson quantum synapses underlying the thick loops of the light conductors may have been sensitive to radiation from the sky. They protruded from between the glassy veins, but one had to know that they were there to spot them, for in the incessant flashing they looked like darkened recesses.
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