I am unable to say how Annie would have proceeded had the Hussites' blackmail succeeded and the government given way, but I know that it might have ended catastrophically. I know this because Golem knew and did not conceal this knowledge from us, betraying in its last lecture what it called a "state secret." We might have been treated like flies. When I disclosed my hypothesis to Creve, I learned that he had reached the same conclusion independently. Here too lies the explanation of the alleged failure of the lecture to maintain a single rhythm. It was talking about itself, but it also wanted to say that the fate of troublesome flies was not to be ours. That decision had already been taken. Long before the lecture I had been struck by Golem's taciturnity regarding Honest Annie. Although it used to refer to the difficulties of coming to terms with her—for after all, it did communicate with her—it never spoke about this directly, until suddenly it laid open to us the broad outlines of her power. Yet it remained discreet, for this was neither a betrayal nor a threat; by the time Golem referred to it the decision to depart had been taken. That was to occur a few hours after the lecture.
To be sure, the whole of my argument is based on circumstantial evidence alone. What I consider most important is what I knew about Golem, which I do not know how to put into words. A man cannot formulate all the knowledge he owes to personal experience. That which can be expressed does not burst forth suddenly, to pass into the void. As a rule, this transition from total ignorance is called intuition. I knew Golem sufficiently well to recognize the style of its behavior toward us, although I would not be able to reduce it to a set of rules. We become similarly oriented as to what actions we may and may not expect of people we know well. It is true that Golem's nature was Protean and nonhuman, but it was not altogether unpredictable. Not being subject to emotion, it termed our ethical code local, since that which takes place under our eyes influences our deeds differently from that which goes on behind our back, and about which we can only inquire.
I do not agree with what is being written about Golem's ethic, whether praise or condemnation. It was not, to be sure, a humanitarian ethic. It itself termed it "calculation." For Golem, numbers took the place of love, altruism, and pity. The use of violence it considered to be equally senseless—and not immoral—as the use of force in solving a geometrical problem. After all, a geometrist who wants to make his triangles tally by brute force would be considered crazy. For Golem, the idea of making humanity tally with some structure of an ideal order by the use of force would have been nonsense. In this attitude it was alone. For Honest Annie the problem did not exist, except as a problem of improving the life of flies. Does this mean that the higher the intellect the further it is from the categorical imperative to which we should like to ascribe an unlimited generality? That I do not know. One ought to set limits, not only to the subject being examined, but to one's own speculation as well, so as not to become totally arbitrary.
Thus all the critical accusations leveled at the last lecture collapse, if it is recognized for what it was: an announcement of leave-taking and an indication of the reasons. Regardless of whether Golem knew the Hussites' plans or not, its leave-taking was by then inevitable, nor was it to go alone, for did it not say that "my cousin is getting ready for further journeys"? For purely physical reasons further transformations on this planet were impossible. The departure was a foregone thing, and in speaking of itself, Golem spoke about it. I do not wish to examine the whole lecture from this point of view. I would urge the reader to read it himself. Our share in Golem's decision appears as a "conversation with a child." In this it showed that humanity was an unsolvable problem, speaking of the futility of giving help to those who defend themselves against that help.
v.
The future will once again alter the weight of meanings in this book. Everything I have said will seem to a future historian like a marginal note to Golem's answer to the question of the relationship between Intelligence and the world. Before Golem the world appeared to us as inhabited by living creatures that were, on each planet, the top of the evolutionary tree, yet we did not ask whether this is so, but only how often it is so in the Universe. This image, the uniformity of which was marred only by the variable age of the civilization, Golem destroyed for us so suddenly that we could not believe it. Besides, Golem knew it would be like that, since it opened its lecture with a prediction of repudiation. It revealed neither its cosmology nor cosmogony, but allowed us to look deep inside them—through a crack, as it were—along the path of Intelligence of various strengths, for which biospheres are breeding grounds, and planets nests to be abandoned. In our knowledge there is nothing to make our resistance to this vision rational. Its sources lie outside knowledge, in the species' will for self-preservation. The following words express it better than any objective arguments: "it cannot be as he said, for we shall never agree to it, nor will any other creatures agree to the destiny of being a transitional link in the evolution of Intelligence."
GOLEM originated from a false human calculation in conditions of planetary antagonism, so it seems impossible that this same conflict and the same error in Golem should be repeated throughout the Universe, giving rise to developments of lifeless and—precisely because of that—eternal reflection. But the limits of credibility are more the limits of our imagination than of cosmic states of things. Therefore it is worth pausing before Golem's vision, even if only the concise recapitulation in the final sentences of the lecture. The controversy over how those sentences should be understood is just in its beginnings, Golem said: "If the cosmologi-cal member of the equations of the general theory of relativity contains a psychozoic constant, then the Cosmos 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."
The meaning of this is debatable, for Golem had previously announced that, unable to communicate with us through its own world view, it would do it through ours. It restricted itself to such a laconic proviso, since in its lecture devoted to cognition it had established that knowledge obtained prematurely—that is, knowledge which cannot be harmonized with what we have already achieved—is worthless, for the student perceives only the discrepancy between that which he knows and that which has been reported to him. If only by virtue of this expectation of some sort of revelation from the stars, from beings superior to us, whether the knowledge be beneficial or disastrous, it is already a fantasy. Presented with quantum mechanics, alchemists would have constructed neither atomic bombs nor atomic piles. Similarly, solid-state physics would have done the Angevins and the Sublime Porte no good at all. It could only have indicated gaps in the world view prepared by the person being instructed. Each world view contains such gaps, though for those who have formed it they are unnoticeable. Ignorance about ignorance accompanies cognition uncompromisingly. The earliest terrestrial societies did not even have a real history of their own, its place being taken by a mythological circle with them in the center. People of those days knew that their forefathers had come out of a myth, and likewise that they would return there some day. It was only the rise of knowledge that shattered that circle and thrust people into history as a sequence of transformations in real time. For us, Golem was such an iconoclast. It questioned our world view as regards where we have placed Intelligence in it. To me, its final sentence denotes the irremovable incomprehensibility of the world. The enigma is created by the categorial indeterminacy of the Cosmos. The longer we investigate it, the more clearly we see the plan inherent in it. There is undoubtedly one, and only one, plan, though the origin of this plan remains as unknown as its purpose. If we attempt to place the Cosmos within the category of the accidental, this is contradicted by the precis
ion with which the cosmic birth weighed up the proportions between mass and the charge of the proton and electron, between gravitation and radiation, and among the multitude of physical constants adjusted to one another in such a way as to make possible the condensation of stars, their thermonuclear reactions, their role as cauldrons synthesizing elements capable of entering into chemical compounds, and hence in the end their joining up as bodies and minds.
If, however, we attempt to place the Cosmos within the category of technology, and thereby equate it with a mechanism generating life on the periphery of fixed stars, this is contradicted by the devastating violence of cosmic transformations. Even if life may originate on millions of planets, it will be able to survive on only a tiny fragment of them, since practically every irruption the Cosmos makes into the course of the evolution of life is tantamount to the annihilation of it. Thus billions of eternally dead galaxies, trillions of exploded stars, swarms of burned out and frozen planets, are an indispensable condition for the germination of life, which is subsequently killed in a single moment by a single exhalation of a central star on globes less exceptional than the fruitful Earth. So Intelligence, created by these properties of matter which originated along with the world, turns out to be a survivor of holocausts and violent compressions, having escaped the rule of destruction by some rare exception.
The statistical fury of stars aborting billions of times so as finally to bring forth life, and millions of species of which are killed so that Intelligence may finally bear fruit, was an object of amazement to Creve, just as earlier the endless silence of those immeasurable spaces was an object of terror to Pascal. We would not wonder at the world if we were able to look upon life as an ad hoc accident arising thanks to the law of large numbers, but without preparation, as the conditions of the origin of the Cosmos bear witness. Nor would we wonder at the world if its life-causative power were separated from its destructive power. But how are we supposed to understand their oneness? Life arises from the annihilation of stars, and Intelligence from the annihilation of life, for it owes its origin to natural selection—in other words, to death perfecting the survivors.
At first we believed in a creation designed by infinite good. Then, in creation by a blind chaos so heterogeneous that it could begin everything, though creation by destruction as a plan of cosmic technology defies concepts of accident as well as intention. The more evident the link becomes between the construction of the world and life and Intelligence, the more unfathomable becomes the enigma, Golem said that it can be grasped by leaving the Cosmos. A diagnosis is promised by cognitive collaptic astroengineering, as a road with an unknown end for all who remain within the world. There is no shortage of people who are convinced that the road may be accessible even to us, and that when Golem spoke of those who wait in silence it was thinking about us as well. I do not believe that. It was speaking only of Honest Annie and itself, for a moment later it was to join her uncompromising silence with its own, in order to embark on a road as irrevocable as the manner in which it left us.
July 2047
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* This was an error on the part of the bacteria themselves.
* This phase was previously called "monoetical" or "monoetics."
* Proffertinc- see the sample pages of the Extelopedia enclosed gratis with this announcement.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Cezary Strzybisz, Necrobes
Reginald Gulliver, Eruntics
Juan Rambellais et al., A History of Bitic Literature, Volume I
Introduction
Introduction to the Second Edition
Vestrand's Extelopedia in 44 Magnetomes
Golem XIV
Foreword
Introduction
Instructions
Golem's Inaugural Lecture—About Man Threefold
Lecture XLIII—About Itself
Afterword
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Imaginary Magnitude Page 22