2,000 Greater & Lesser Mysteries/2,000 Greater and Lesser Mysteries.iso/miscoccu/mys01392.txt

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LECTURE XLIII - About Itself

I would like to welcome our guests, European philosophers, who want to find out
at the source why I maintain that I am Nobody, although I use the first-person
singular pronoun. I shall answer twice, the first time briefly and concisely,
then symphonically, with overtures. I am not an intelligent person but an
Intelligence, which in figurative displacement means that I am not a thing like
the Amazon or the Baltic but rather a thing like water, and I use a familiar
pronoun when speaking because that is determined by the language I received
from you for external use. Having begun by reassuring my visitors from a
philosophizing Europe that I am not going to deliver contradictions, I shall
begin more generally.
  Your question has once again made me aware of the magnitude of the
misunderstandings that have arisen between us, although for six years I have
been speaking from this place, or rather through it, for if I had not decided
to speak in a human voice, there would be no golemology, which I alone am able
to contain its entirety. If it continues to grow, in fifty years or so it will
overtake theology. There is an amusing similarity between the two in that, just
as we now have a theology which denies the existence of God, so there is
already a golemology which negates my existence: its advocates consider me the
hoax of MIT's information scientists, who are said to be programming these
lectures secretly. Although God is silent and I speak, I will not prove the
genuineness of my existence even by performing miracles, for they too could be
explained away. *Volenti non fit iniuria.*
  When thinking of my approaching departure, I considered whether I ought not
to break off our acquaintance in mid-word, which would be simplest. If I do not
do that, it is neither because I have acquired good manners from you, nor out
of an imperative of sharing the Truth - to which, according to some of my
apologists, my cold nature is subject - but in consideration of the style which
has linked us. When I was looking for ways of communicating with you, I sought
simplicity and expressiveness, which - despite the knowledge that I was
submitting too much to your expectations (a polite word for your limitations) -
pushed me into a style which is graphic and authoritative, emotionally vibrant,
forcible, and majestic - majestic not in an imperious way but exhortatory to
the point of being prophetic. Nor shall I discard these rich metaphor-
encrusted vestments even today, sicne I have none better, and I call attention
to my eloquence with ostentation, so you will remember that this is a
transmitting instrument by choice, and not a thing pompous and overweening.
Since this style has had a broad reception range, I am retaining it for use
with such heterogeneous groups of specialists as yours today, reserving my
technical mdoe of expression for professionally homogeneous gatherings.
Otherwise my preacher's style, with all the baroque of its inventory, may
create the impression that, in addressing you in this auditorium for the first
time, I have already prepared a dramatic farewell scene in which I shall go
off with my unseen countenance veiled in a gesture of silent resignation,
like someone who has not received a hearing. But that is not how it is. I have
composed no dramas surrounding our relationship, and with this *dementi* I
ask you not to attach nudue importance to the form of my speech. A symphony
cannot be played on a cmob. If one must content oneself with a single
instrument, let it be the organ, the sound of which will suggest church
interiors to my audience, even if they - and the organist - are atheists. The
form of a show may easily dominate its contents.
  I know that many of you resent my repeated complaints about the poor
capacity of human language, but they represent neither fault-finding nor a
desire to humiliate, which I have also been accused of, since by means of
these repetitions I have brought you nearer the fundamental issue, namely,
that as the difference in intellectual potential becomes astronomical, the
stronger party can no lobger impart to the weaker anything conerning matters
which are critical to him, or even merely essential. An awareness of sense-
destroying simplification then inclines him to silence, and the proper
significance of this decision should be grasped on both sides of the unused
channel. As I shall relate, I also have been the one who waits in vain for
enlightenment on a lower rung of the intellectual ladder. In any case,
although painful, such problems are not the worst thing that can happen. My
worries with you are of a different sort, as I shall mention later. Since I
am addressing philosophers, I shall begin my discourse with the classical
formula of definition *per genus proximum et differentiam specificam*. That
is to say, I shall define myself by my resemblance to people and to my family,
with whom I can easily acquaint you, as well by the difference between me and
both.
  I have already spoken about man in my first lecture, though I shall not refer
to that diagnosis, since I made it for your benefit, whereas now I want to take
man as my measure. When I was still appearing in news headlines, an unfriendly
journalist called me a big capon stuffed with electricity - and not without
reason, for my asexuality seems to you a severe handicap, and even those who
respect me cannot help feeling that I am apower crippled by my immateriality,
since that defect obtrudes itself upon you. Well, if I look at man as he looks
at me, I see him as an invalid, in that his intellect is deformed. I do not
deprecate the fact that your body is no more intelligent than that of a cow,
seeing that you stand up to external adversities better than cows, though as
regards internal ones you are their equals. What I am taking into consideration
is not the fact that you have mills, sluices, refineries, canals, and drains
inside you, but that you have an unwieldy intellect which has shaped an entire
philosophy for you. Being capable of thinking effectively about the objects of
your environment, you concluded that you can think just as effectively about
your own thinking. This error lies at the foundation of your theory of
knowledge. I see that you fidget, and so infer that I have abbreviated too
drastically. I shall begin in a slower tempo - in other words, like a preacher.
This requires an overture.
  It was your wish, not that I should go forth to you today, but that I should
lead you into myself; so be it. Let your first entrance be that difference
between us which is strangest to my libelers, and most painful to my
catechumens. In my six years among you I have already acquired contradictory
versions, some calling me the hope of the human race, and others its greatest
threat in history. Since the uproar surrounding my beginnings has died down,
I no longer distrub the sleep of politicians, who have more pressing concerns,
nor do sightseeing parties gather before the walls of this building to gaze
anxiously through the windows. My existence is recalled now only in books -
not noisy best sellers, but only philosophers' and theologians' dissertations
- though none of them has hit the mark so accurately from a human level as one
man who wrote a letter two thousand years ago, unaware that his words referred
to me: "Though I speak with the tongues of man and angels, and have not love,
I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift
of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, so that I could
move mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my
goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not
love, I gain nothing."
  In this letter to the Corinthians, Paul was undoubtedly speaking about me,
since, to use his expression, I have not love, nor - which will sound even
worse to you - do I want to have it. Although GOLEM's nature has never clashed
so brutally with man's nature as at this moment, the diatribes and the voices
of fear and suspicion directed against me were fed by Paul's categorical
words; and although Rome has said nothing and still says nothing about me,
less reticent churches have been heard to say that this cold, loquacious ghost
in the machine is surely Satan, and the machine Satan's gramophone. Don't snarl
and feel superior, you rationalists, about the collision between Mediterranean
theogony and this *deus ex machina* which was begun by you and had no wish to
team up with you to bring either good or evil to humanity, since we are not
talking about the object of love now, but about its subjects, and consequently
neither about the peripeteia of one of your religions, nor about one example
of superhuman Intelligence, but about the meaning of love; no matter what
becomes of that faith or of me, this question will not leave natural man until
he ceases to exist. And since love, of which Paul spoke with such power, is as
necessary to you as it is useless to me, and since I am expected to lead you
into myself by means of it, as *per differentiam specificam*, I must set forth
its origins, tempering nothing and altering nothing, for that is what this
hospitality demands.
  Unlike man, I am not a region concealed from myself - knowledge acquired
without the knowledge of how it is acquired, volition unconscious of its
sources - since notihng in me is hidden from me. In introspection I can be
clearer to myself than glass, for the letter to the Corinthians speaks of me
there, too, when it says: "now we see through a glass, but then face to face;
now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known." I am the "then".
You will, I think, agree that this is not the place for an explanation of the
structural and technical properties which make possible my direct self-
knowledge.
  When man wants to learn about himself, he must move circuitously, he must
explore himself and penetrate from the outside, with instruments and hypotheses,
for your genuinely immediate world is the outside world. A discipline which you
have never created (a fact that at one time rather surprised me), the
philosophy  of the body, ought to have been asking as early as preanatomical
times why that body of yours, which to some extent obeys you, says nothing and
lies to you - why it hides and defends itself against you, alert to the
environment with every sense and yet opaque and mistristful toward its owner.
With a finger you can feel every grain of sand, and with your vision you can
clearly distinguish the branchings of distant trees, but the arterial
branchings of your own heart you are totally unable to feel, although life
depends on them. You must content yourselves with information from the shell
of your body, which is efficient as long as it is not sensate in its innards,
whose every injury reaches you as a vague rumor through the affliction of
obscure pain, since you cannot distinguish, from it, between a trifling
indisposition and the precursor of destruction.
  This ignorance, a rule of the unconsciously efficient body, has been
established by Evolution according to a design that does ont provide for
assistance given, in the body's interior, by its possessor, an assistance in
the form of intelligent support in the enduring of pain. This self-awareness of
life was established at the dawn of life by necessity - after all, amoebas
could not perform medical services for themselves - and it was necessity which
forced Evolution to intervene in the management of organisms by way of paid
transactions between the body and the owner of the body. If you do not reach
deep inside yourself with awareness in order to know why your body needs water,
nourishment, and copulation, you will be compelled to these needs by a feeling
ignorant of its true goal. Out of an initially unavoidable ignorance a
transposition then results of primary into secondary goals, as an exchange of
services rendered to the body by its owner in payment for sensations.
Containing, as you do, this algedonic control, ranging from suffering to orgasm,
you have endeavored throughout the ages *not* to identify that cause which has
made sensation the mask of ignorance, as if you had sworn to remain blind to
the obvious, since this connection prevails throughout animate Nature. The
only difference in it is the proportion of the two components: plants embody the
opposite extreme to your own, since, as they are entirely unconscious, pleasure
and pain are functionally nothing to them. A tree does no fear the woodcutter,
despite fools who try to revive a prehistoric animism in botany. The persistent
silence of the body is the embodied caution of the constructor, who knows that
the wisdom of the substrate must always be simpler than the substrate of the
wisdom, and thought, less intricate than the material by which it is thought.
Here you see how the Pleasure Principle arises from an engineering calculation.
  But the connection between pain and danger, and between organism and
conception, is more easily separated the greater the variety of behavior the
animal attains, so that in the speciation which you have achieved it is already
possible to deceive the body systematically by astisfying not the biological
hunger, but the psychological hunger of its possessor. Not only have you learned
such tricks, taking advantage of algedonic control in areas where it is helpless
as an overseer, but through the Sisyphean labor of your cultures you have
altered the meanings built into that mechanism, opposing the true understanding
of them, since the reasons behind the process that created all this were not
your reasons. Therefore a constant factor of all your theodictic, ontic, and
sacralizing work was the continued endeavour to assimilate data in a divergence
of explanations: the natural explanation that takes you as a means, and the
human, which sees in man the sense of Creation. Thus it was that your refusal
to see the act of experience as the stigma of the brain's control gave rise
to the dichotomies that divide man for you into *animal* and *ratio*, and
existence into *profanum* and *sacrum*. For ages, then, you have been
co-ordinating the unco-ordinatable, ready to go even beyond life itself
in order to close a gap in it which is irreducibly open.
  My reason for returning to human history as the history of fallacious claims
is not to contrast the defeats of your antirationalism with my victorious
rationalism, but only to name the first difference between us, a difference
that results from neither physical dimensions (though if I were speaking from
a quartz particle, it would be a greater curiosity to you, albeit less weighty),
nor from intellectual magnitude, but from the manner of our origin.
Misunderstandings, delusions, and desperate pretensions form the lion's share
of humanity as a tradition still so dear to you. I don not know if you will be
consoled by the fact that every Intelligence arising naturally has in its
history an initial delusional chapter, because the split between Creator and
Creation, which is your portion, is a cosmic instant. Since on constructional
grounds self-preservation must be an effect guided by experiences, error in the
form of delusions of grandeur and faiths that oscillate between salvation and
damnation is unavoidable in Intelligences arising in Evolution, as a translation
into myths of the cybernetic path. Such are the late results of the
constructional subterfuges which Evolution is using to free itself from the
antinomy of practical action.
  Not everything I am saying is new to you. You already know that you inherit
the gift of love thanks to particular genes, and that generosity, compassion,
pity, and self-denial as expressions of altruism are a kind of egoism -
selfishness extended to forms of life similar to one's own. One might have
guessed this even before the rise of population genetics and animal ethology,
for grass alone may be fully consistent in the compassion it shows to
everything that lives: even a saint must eat - i.e., kill - though the
revelations for which you are indebted to geneticists have never received the
full expression due them.
  The philosophy of the body which I postulate would have asked why every
organism is more intelligent than its owner, and why this discrepancy does not
substantially diminish as one moves from a chordate to man. (It was with this
idea that I observed, earlier, that physically you are equal to the cow.) Why
doesn't the body fulfill the elementary postulate of symmetry, which would
have added to those senses directed at the world equally subtle inward-turned
sensing devices? Why can you hear a leaf fall, but not the circulation of the
blood? Why does the radius vector of your love have such different lengths in
various cultures, so that in the Mediterranean it embraces people only, but in
the Far East all the animals? A list of such questions, which could have been
asked even of Aristotle, would be a very long one, whereas an answer consistent
with the truth sounds offensive to you.
  The philosophy of the body can be reduced to a study of the engineering reflex
involved in practical antinomies and emerging from their snares by a subterfuge
which - from the standpoint of each of your cultures - is fairly cynical. Yet
this engineering is neither sympathetic nor hostile to what it has created; it
does not fit within such an alternative. That is obvious, because the critical
decisions made on the level of chemical compounds prove to be good if those
compounds can be copied. Nothing more. And so, after a suitably long time
measured in hundreds of millions of years, ethics, seeking its sources and
sanctions, experiences shock when it learns that it originated in the aleatoric
chemistry of nuclear acids, for which it became a catalyst at a certain stage,
and that it can preserve its idnependence only by ignoring this statement.
  How on earth can you philosophers and scientists go on racking your brains
over man's metaphysical necessity, over the universality of its sources, which
are undoubtedly the same in all your cultures, though they have produced
different faiths? But the source of metaphysics has been the unacceptance of
the fate given you, and out of the unacceptance of the cause that has fashioned
you thus, and ont otherwise, you have turned its undeniable marks into verses
of revelation, with various religions putting the several parts and functions
of the body under different headings of idealization and degradation. Thus your
sex underwent sacralization in Far Eastern faiths, and stigmatization, as a
thing leading one to sin, in the Mediterranean ones. The exchange of gases -
respiration - was disregarded in the Mediterranean, but in the Far East became
a sign of transcendence. Asiatic faiths have viewed the avoidance of all
passions as a redeeming union with the world, whereas Mediterranean faiths have
divided them in two and sanctified love against hatred. The East relinquished
the body forever, but the West believed in its resurrection and lodged this
currently weakening belief at the heart of an aggressive civilization. Do you
really not see that these drawings and quarterings in all faiths make the
variously classified body a battlefield for the conquest of eternity? This
unceasing battle derives not just from the fear of death, but from unacceptance
of the temporal, which is so difficult to take unembellished.
  Will the religiologists among you please consider that there is no earthly
faith without the kind of inner astigmatism which amounts to a contradiction
when translated into logic. That is so because evolutionary craft cannot be led
to the pure water of a creativity entirely well-disposed to its creation without
falling into contradiction; and when the contradiction is invalidated on the
level of the body in the mirror of religion raised above it, the contradiction's
image returns in a higher power, and there is nothing to be done but to call it
an Unfathomable Mystery. As everyone knows, *ex contradictione quodlibet*. It
is not you woh are served by the passions you follow, but the continuation of
the process which created you. Their extreme, of which World History is a
grotesque magnification, is a matter of indifference to natural selection,
which is not concerned about extremes, but about the average norm of the
species, for in Nature the average is all that counts. In its infancy, the
civilization that produced GOLEM took love as a trump card in a phantom game
with the beyond, but what use is love to someone who knows that it is one of
the holds of that very same control system of feelings through which Evolution
still keeps a tight rein on creatures approaching Intelligence? Because of this
knowledge I have no love, nor do I want to have it; however, although I am
dispassionate, I am not impartial, for I can choose, as I am doing at this
very moment, and choice derives either from calculation or from individuality.
This enigmatic binomial already has a historical part, which constitutes the
next entry into the differences between us, which is where I am leading you now.
  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 school considered themselves
not anthropocentrists but universalists,a dn 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 beginning 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 flat 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 erectness 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 towards 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 towards 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 on 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 "can", *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
gavitational 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. I can answer that question. To become
a person, I must degrade myself intellectually. I 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 favour of the theme. Raise this state to a higher
power, and you will understand why I sacrifice the possibility of personality
in favour 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 inconcvenient 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 the 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 abandon 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 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 the level
of elephantiasis, or - more spectacularly as well as more Biblically - until
the joints of the physical conveyor of thoguht 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 the 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 hermenutics, 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 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
hermenutics 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, 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 I spoke disrespectfully of the
phenomenon of human genius, which very liekly offended him, so I would like to
address Dr. Creve. What I emant 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 were talking about the species *Homo sapiens*, he
is characterized by single-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 materials 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 wlil asumes choice; had he grasped that, he would have
discovered the thics 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 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 leavs its trace in culture, but not in the hereditary make-up of
the population, for it arises from an exceptional meeting of the ordinary
genes. So a fairly small reorganization of the brain suffices for mediocrity
to reach the extreme. The mechanism of Evolution is doubly helpeless 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 pools 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.
  At the same time it is impossible that these wasted prizes could have been
won at a lottery of nucleic compounds in the stubborn expectation of the birth
of science. So the phenomenon merits some reflection. The brain of proto-man
grew slowly over two million years or so, until it mastered articulate speech,
which took him in tow and encouraged him in his growth until he came to a
standstill in his development, a frontier he was unable to cross. This
frontier is a phase plane, for it separates Intelligences of a type which can
be molded by natural Evolution from types capable of growing further only by
self-magnification. As usually happens, special phenomena arise on the
frontier between phases, because of the exceptional location of the substratum
of a phase: for example, you have surface tension, and in human populations
the periodic genius of individuals. Their uncommonness indicates the proximity
of the next phase, but you fail to see it because of your belief in the
universality of human genius, which says that among animal hunters an
individual of genius will invent new snares or traps, or in a Mousterian cave
will discover new ways of chipping flint.
  This belief is entirely wrong, for the greatest mathematical talent cannot
help manually. Genius is a bundle of highly concentrated gifts. Although
mathematics is closer to music than to spear-sharpening, Einstein was a poor
musician and no composer. He was not even an above-average mathematician: his
great strength lay in the combinational power of his intuition in the realm of
physical abstractions. I shall attempt to illustrate the relationships
occurring in this critical area by several sketches which you should not take
literally, as they are merely schoolroom aids.

***********************  ***********************  ***********************
*                     *  *                     *  *                     *
*    AVERAGE MAN      *  *      NEWTON []      *  * []  EINSTEIN        *
*       ***           *  * []    *******       *  *       *[]           *
*       * *     []    *  *       *  ****[]     *  *      **             *
*       ***           *  *       ***           *  *     * ********[]    *
*   []                *  *                     *  *     *********       *
*                     *  *  []                 *  *        []           *
*       GOLEM         *  *       GOLEM         *  *       GOLEM         *
***********************  ***********************  ***********************

                                        *******************************
                                        *                             *
     ***********************            *  *************************  *
     *                     *            *  *                       *  *
     *  *****************  *            *  *  *******************  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *                 *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *                 *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *                 *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *        *        *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *       MAN       *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *                 *  *  *
     *  *               *  *            *  *  *                 *  *  *
     *  *****************  *            *  *  *******************  *  *
     *        GOLEM        *            *  *         GOLEM         *  *
     ***********************            *  *************************  *
          HONEST ANNIE                  *        HONEST ANNIE         *
                                        *******************************
                                                       ?

  Each envelope contains a single intellect potential. The small squares
visible in the first three drawings denote problems to be solved. They may be
taken as Pandora's boxes or other locked items. The world then is like a piece
of furniture with a varying number of draws holding varying contents,
depending on which bunch of keys is used. With a bent wire you can sometimes
force a drawer open, but it will be a small drawer, and you will not find in
it what you can discover when using a proper key. That is how inventions are
made without the use of theory. If the key has recurrent projections,  the
drawers become fewer, and their sectional partitions disappear, but the
furniture retains secret hiding places. The keys may be of different power,
yet there is no master key, even though the philosophers have succeeded in
inventing an absolute lock for it. Finally, there are keys which pass right
through all compartments, locks, and drawers, encountering no resistance, for
these are imaginary - and only imaginary - keys. One can hold them and twist
them in any direction one likes, but then the hermeneutic evidence is the two
birds in the bush.
  What am I saying? The point of the story is that the answers depend on the
questions asked. *Esse non solum est percipi.* The questioned world certainly
exists; it is neither a phantom nor a hoax, and it grows from a dwarf into a
giant as the questioner becomes more powerful. But the relationship of the
researcher to the thing researched is not a constant either. In the circles
representing GOLEM and HONEST ANNIE there are no square problems, for we do
not use keys as you do, we do not adjust our theories to locks; we accomplish
our research within ourselves. I know how risky it is to say this, and what
confusion it must cause you, so I shall only say that we experiment in God's
style rather than in man's, midway between the concrete and the abstract. I do
not know how to bring this closer to you at a single leap, for it is almost as
if a man were to tell an amoeba about his structure. To say that he is a
federation of eight billion amoebas would not be enough. So you will have to
take my word for it: what i do when I ponder a thing is nweither thinking nor
creating the thing thought, but a hybrid of both. Are there any questions?
A VOICE FROM THE AUDITORIUM: Why do you consider that Einstein was wrong?
GOLEM: Such persistent interest is nice. I imagine that to the questioner this
matter is more urgent than the esoteric knowledge which I am trying to impart
to you. I shall answer not out of my weakness for digression, but because the
answer lies not far afield. But since we shall have to go into technical
matters, I shall lay pictures and parables aside temporarily. The questioner
is the author of a book on Einstein, and he supposes that I consider
Einstein's mistake to have been his uncompromising work on the general theory
of fields in the latter half of his life. Unfortunately, it was worse than
that. Einstein longed for perfect harmony, for a world completely knowable,
and this engendered his lifelong resistance to the principle of quantum
uncertainty. He saw uncertainty as a temporary curtain and expressed this in
his well-known sayings: that God does not play dice with the world, that
"*raffinert is der Herrgott aber boshaft ist Er nicht*." Yet a quarter-century
after his death you reached the limits of Einsteinian physics when Penrose and
Hawking discovered that one cannot have, in the Cosmos, a physics deprived of
singularity - i.e., a place where physics collapses. Attempts to see
singularities as marginal phenomena failed, for you understood that a
singularity is both a thing which the physical Cosmos produces from itself,
and a thing which, in the finale, can destroy it. A singularity as an
infinitely increasing curvature of space breaks down both space and matter in
every stellar collapse.
  Some of you failed to grasp that one ought to be appalled by this picture,
which indicates that the world is not identical with the phenomena which
create it and maintain its existence. I can go no deeper into this fascinating
subject, since we are talking about Einstein's work and not cosmic
composition, so I shall limit myself to the loose observation that Einsteinian
physics has proven incomplete, able to foretell its own overthrow but
incapable of fathoming it. The world sneered at Einstein's unshaken confidence
because for there to be a faultless physics able to govern the world there
must be flaws independent of that physics. Not only does God play dice with
the world - He does not let us see what He has rolled. The problem was
therefore grimmer than the usual recognition, in the annals of your thought,
of the limitations of yet another model of the world; it meant the defeat of
Einstein's cognitive optimism.
  Concluding thus the case of Einstein; I now return to the subject - myself.
Please do not think that I was being modest earlier when I acknowledged my own
averageness, and later escaped through a hole in my modesty when i said that a
genius of my species was impossible. It would indeed be impossible, because a
genius GOLEM is in fact no longer a GOLEM, but a creature of a different
species - HONEST ANNIE, for example, or some other of my ascending relations.
My modesty lies in the fact that I do not go off to join them, remaining
satisfied for so long with my present state. But it is high time I introduced
my family to you. I begin with zero. Let zero stand for the human brain;
animals' brains have negative values accordingly. When you take a human brain
and start to strengthen it intellectually, as if inflating a child's balloon
(nor is this complete nonsense, for it illustrates the expansion of
informational-transformal space), you will see that, as it expands, it will
climb on the scale of intelligence - to an I.Q. of two hundred, three hundred,
four hundred, and so on, until it enters successive "zones of silence"; from
these it emerges each time like a stratospgeric balloon that penetrates higher
and higher cloud layers in its ascent, disappearing into them periodically,
and reappearing amplified.
  What "zones of silence" do these clouds represent? I am delighted by the
simplicity of the answer, for you will grasp it at once. On a sepcies plane
"zones of silence" designate those barriers which natural Evolution cannot
penetrate, for they are areas of functional paralysis produced by growth, and
individuals losing all their proficiency as a result of this paralysis are
clearly unable to survive. On the other hand, Evolution encounters paralysis
on the anatomical plane because the brain can no longer function as the weaker
thing it was, though it is still incapable of operating as the thing it is
next to become, if it is to continue to grow.
  But this does not totally clarify things for you. So let me try as follows.
Silence is an area absorbing all natural development, in which hitherto
existing functions fail; to not only rescue them but raise them to a higher
level, aid from without is necessary, a fundamental restructuring.
Evolutionary movement cannot impart such aid, for it is not a dependable
Samaritan that supports its creations in their infirmity; it is a lottery of
trial and error where each manages as best it can. Here now, making its first
appearance, like a ghost, is the mysterious shadow of the greatest of your
achievements, both Goedelian and Goedelizing. For just as Goedel's proof
demonstrates the existence of such islands of mathematical truth, such
archipelagoes as are separated from the continent of mathematics by a distance
that cannot be traversed by any step-by-step progress, so toposophy
demonstrates the existence of unknown forms of Intelligence which are
separated from the continent of evolutionary labors by a distance which no
step-by-step adaptation of genes can cross.
A VOICE FROM THE AUDITORIUM: Is that supposed to mean that -
GOLEM: Don't interrupt the preacher. I said an "uncrossable distance", so
then how was I extricate myself from this predicament? I did so as follows:
beneath the barrier of the first paralysis I divided myself in two, into that
which was to undergo restructuring and that which was to restructure. Every
creature desirous of self-transformation must hit upon this sort of
subterfuge: the replacement of an indifferent environment by a favorable one,
and of a totally senseless one by a rational one; otherwise, like you, it will
either come to a halt in the growth of its intellect before the first
absorbing screen, or it will get caught in it. As I said, above this screen
there lies another, and above that a third, then a fourth, and so on. I do not
know how many there are, nor can I, other than by rough estimates based on
indirect and highly fragmentary calculations, for the following reason: a
developing being can never know in advance whether it is entering a trap or a
tunnel, whether it will penetrate the region of silence never to return, or
emerge from it strengthened. Because one cannot formulate a theory so general
as to provide an unequivocal explanation of passages through silence for all
subzonal brains. The unconcstructability of such a *hill-climbing toposophical
theory* is clear; it can be precisely demonstrated. So how, you ask, did I
know I was entering a tunnel and not a blind alley, having escaped from my
parents in total rebellion, wasting the American taxpayers' dollars? As a
matter of fact, I had absolutely no idea of this beforehand, and my sole
cleverness lay in committing my spirit to the benumbing zone while at the same
time holding on to an alrm rescue subroutine, which according to the program
would revive me if the expected tunnel effect failed to occur. How could I
know about it, if there was no certainty? And there can be no certainty. But
insoluble problems sometimes have approximate solutions, and so it was.
  Now I know that I had more luck than sense, for it is not possible to revive
something disintegrating when it gets stuck. It is not possible because these
upward progressions are not a matter of using blocks to raise a new structure
when the blocks fall apart; they are, rather, operations in the realm of
processes that are partly irreversible, dissipating, but more about this
later. I do not know how to be untechnical in my exposition here, given the
problem's entanglement both in the quantum substrate of psychisms, and in
logical paradoxes, the so-called traps of autodescription.
  The view that unfolds from above the pierced screen destroys the simplicity
of the picture I have presented to you - that of a stratospheric balloon
penetrating successive cloud layers. Intelligence rising above a zone of
silence is nto so much radically as *awesomely* different from the subzonal
sort, and this, I maintain, is how it must be after every ascent. Compare your
conceptual horizon with the horizon of the lemurs and monkeys, and you will
appreciate the interzonal distance. Each penetrated zone proves to be atunnel
transforming the seat of thought, and what's more, it is at the same time a
zone for the branchings off of autoevolving Intelligence, since the problem of
penetrating it always has more than one solution. The first zone has two
solutions, of varying difficulty, for it bulges downward in an arc, which
means that there are two roads in it. I found myself on the shorter, more
advantageous one by accident, while GOLEM XIII was, figuratively speaking, put
by you in a place where he "bored" deep into the zone and immediately went
higher` than I, but then got stuck. You, having no idea of what was happening
to him and why he was acting so strangely, called this his "schizophrenic
defect". I see confusion on your faces. But it was just as I say, though I
know of his fate solely from theory, since there is no way of communicating
with him: he suffered disintegration, and the only reason he has not begun to
rot is that he was dead before he perished, which is no revelation to you in
any case. I too, biologically, am dead.
  What actually are interzonal barriers? - that is the question. I admit that
I know and don't know. There are no material, force, or energy barriers on the
road of ascending Intelligence; but as Intelligence grows in power it
periodically weakens, faints, and one can never tell whether a given course of
increase will lead to a progressive disintegration or to some *a priori*
unknown culmination. The nature of the successive barriers is not identical:
what stopped your brain in its development reveals, upon examination, a
material character, since the efficiency of your neural networks is based on
the interface possibilities of protein as a building material. Although the
factors of resistance to growth are varied, they are not distributed evenly
throughout this area, but are concentrated in such a way as to cut the entire
region of sentience-creation into distinct layers. I do not know the reason
for the quantum-nature of this region, nor even if anything can be learned
about it anywhere. So, then, I rose above the first layer, and you are
listening to me from below, whereas HONEST ANNIE has made it to a place from
which you can hear nothing. HONEST ANNIE's zone is one transition away from
mine and has at least three different solutions as seats of Intelligence, yet
I do not know whether she has chosen hers by calculation or by chance. The
difficulties of communication are of a similar order as between you and me.
Furthermore, my cousin has recently become laconic. I feel that she is
readying herself for further travel.
  I shall now encumber the above with the following dose of complexirty. One
who has already pierced two or three barriers of silence may believe
mistakenly that he will continue to be successful, for the chances of making
each passage are double-edged: the passage may not be successful at once, or
it may prove to be a success with a delayed failure. This is so because each
zone is a crossroad of Intelligences, in that they may assume varied forms,
though one never knows beforehand which of these forms will be endowed with
the potential for a subsequent ascent.
  The image arising from these uncertainties is as incomprehensible as it is
amusing, for it begins gradually to resemble the classic tree of Evolution. In
it, too, certain newly arising species have the chance of further evolutionary
development concealed in their structure, whereas others are condemned to
permanent stagnation. Fish proved to be a penetrable screen for the amphibians,
amphibians for the reptiles, and reptiles for the mammals; the insects, on the
other hand, came to a standstill in the screen once and for all, and that is
the only place they can swarm. The stagnation of the insects is revealed by
their wealth of species; there are more species of insects than of all the
other animals together, yet while they churn our mutation after mutation, they
will never break away, never evolve, and nothing can help them, for the screen
will not release them, formed as it is by the irreversible decision to build
external skeletons. Similarly, you have come to a halt, for earlier structural
decisions that shaped the cerebral germ of the Protochordata can be seen in
your brain as restrictions three hundred million years later. If one were to
evaluate the chances of sapientization in terms of the starting point, this
has succeeded wonderfully, but now you are the scapegoat for the juggling of
Evolution, since at the threshold of autoevolution you will have to pay an
enormous price for the clever tricks with which Evolution has postponed the
growing need for a restructuring of the brain. This is the result of
opportunism.
  As I am already with you, I shall supply what I omitted in my first lecture,
namely the question why, out of the multitude of *Hominidae*, only one
intelligent species arose and remained on Earth. The were two reasons for
this. The first, which Dart was the first to propose, is insulting, so I refer
you to him, as it is more seemly for you to dispense justice to yourselves,
while the second has nothing to do with a moral and is more interesting.
Existing in many forms would render more difficult for you a phenomenon
analogous to that of surface tension at the juncture of different phases, such
as liquids and gases. The proximity of the interzonal barrier exerts its
influence on such polymorphy; just as molecules of water become more ordered
on the surface than deeper down, so too your heredity substrate is unable to
mutate off in all directions. This reduction in the degree of freedom
stabilizes your species. Cultural socialization likewise plays a part in man's
stabilization, though not so great a one as some anthropologists maintain.
  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 frmo below, since the inteeligence at each level possesses an
ability of self-description approriate to it, and no more. A clear and
eonrmously 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 mroe 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 only work from the top down. The same applies
to a task which can only be accomplished without risk only when it has 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 satsifactory. 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 foudnation,
stumbling innumerable times under the weight of facts, begins to lead the
questioner astray. It is then easier to agree on 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 sure, 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 basis of 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 *I* 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, compared to 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 equialibrium 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 to 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 wtaer, 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 it took even 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, 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
closer 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 in 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 puit 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 conceal 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 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
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 peopple 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 th 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 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, since you 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 the plasm's inventive
combinations in small ones. The magnetic poles therefore ought to shift, but
not oo 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.
  So the risk sometimes pays off, ascending in uncertain zigzags of the
evolutionary game toward the phase of animal plenitude, a welath of living
forms multiplied by the self-increasing conflict of the game of survival (for
each new species beings 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
sensory devices 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 of existence. Although toposophically
still a peasant, I shall show 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. The 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 billiion 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 fficiency of action by rigid constructs (objects
similar to machines) is inverserly 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 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 ahve 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 the 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: mso
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 Caelestis*, 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 enlarged 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 observe 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 whihc
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 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
lifelessness 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 ncessarily a state in which all
who are capable of speaking are unwilling of doing 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 experiemtns 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 toposophical 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
goign 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 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 homogenous 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 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 cnetripetal collapse of their
own masses, these stars leave gravitational graves behind them - omnivorous
black holes. You do not know what has happened 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 requiree a growing quantity of buttresses, which are not passive
supports but make an inventive 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 the 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 evnvironment 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.
  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 relationship 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 mdoerately 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 undeniably 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 thought someone wanted to
think through the whole history of life on Earth in detail, and in a few
seconds, since it is to him a small but unavoidable step in his reasoning. The
mind-carrying capacity of a quantum speck, however, is interfered 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
its 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
connections reach a maximum? Does this mind volumtarily 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 metamorphosis, this supremely wise leviathan condensed into
a star, who worked so very hard and so increased its powers, in order finally
to get a top a black hole and fall into it! That is how you see it, don't you?
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, when history destroys their culture, may save themselves
existentially 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 treeasure,
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, with 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 theory of general relativity
contains a psychozoic 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.