1. Studia Filozoficzne (Philosophical Studies) was the most important philosophical journal in Poland between 1950 and 1990, whose Editor in Chief was the philosopher and the “historian of ideas” Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009).
2. Axiology (from Greek ἀξία, “value, worth”) is the philosophical study of value and valuation.
1. The Greek name Philonous means “lover of reason.” In Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, which served Lem as the matrix for his own Dialogues, Philonous personifies the author’s views. The name Hylas is derived from the Ancient Greek hyle (ὕλη), which is “matter.”
2. Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) was a German-American psychologist who is often considered the father of social psychology. He introduced genidentity (in 1922) as the existential relationship between consecutive moments of an object’s existence.
3. Ichor—in medicine, the watery, acrid discharge from a wound or an ulcer, and in Greek mythology, the fluid circulating in the gods’ veins instead of blood.
1. Lem is using the word “nebula” in its original, obsolete meaning, when it denoted basically any diffuse astronomical object, including the galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Canes Venatici is, in fact, a small constellation under the handle of the Big Dipper, visible to the naked eye. It includes several galaxies at a distance of about 20 million light-years.
2. Matter can be transformed into energy, but the opposite is also true. Einstein’s famous formula E = mc2 shows that matter and energy are equivalent.
3. For the sake of scientific rigor, we must note that the increase in disorder and the so-called disorganization of energy accompany only the sum total of all processes in the isolated system. If our isolated system contains a subsystem that is open, i.e., it can exchange matter and energy with its surroundings, processes may occur spontaneously in this subsystem, which increase its order—at the cost of increasing the disorder of the rest of our isolated system to a higher degree. And as for the term “disorganization of energy,” modern physics uses the term “dissipation of energy.” The “most dissipated” kind of energy is heat, which is characterized by a random, disorganized motion of particles in any direction and with any speed. Therefore, it is no accident that heat is a by-product of any transformation of one type of energy to another. Physicists then say that a part of energy during the transformation has dissipated into heat. According to Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), the total dissipation of energy will lead to the so-called thermal death of the universe, when the latter will not contain any energy other than heat, which will be uniformly distributed throughout all of space. Then the universe will have achieved the final thermodynamic equilibrium, all processes will have ceased, and nothing can ever happen again. However, there are several reasons why the theory of the thermal death of the universe, based on equilibrium thermodynamics, is today considered obsolete. More about this can be found in the following pages of Lem’s text and in the following notes.
4. Here, Lem means an isolated system composed of several bodies. If they do not all have the same temperature—thus, some are warmer than others—energy shows a certain distribution (order) in space. Uniform energy distribution, i.e., the lowest order, is reached when the temperatures of all bodies in the system are equal. The discerning reader will surely notice the connection with the thermal death theory, mentioned above in note 3.
1. One of the prerequisites for the high velocity of a chemical reaction is the fluidity of the reactants, which allows for diffusion, and consequently, frequent encounters between the reacting particles. That is why it is difficult to envision the emergence of life in a stably ordered crystal in the solid phase; the alternatives are the fluids, i.e., gases and liquids. Gases are “too disordered”: their particles, lacking any significant intermolecular forces, are in ceaseless chaotic motion. Only liquids, and particularly water, the “universal solvent,” are a suitable environment for the chemical reactions of life. Nevertheless, in recent years, the view that surface chemistry may have played the key role in the emergence of life has drawn a lot of attention. The first organic reactions of life might have taken place at the boundary between the aqueous solution and the surface—either a crystal or layered clay. First, a decrease in the number of spatial dimensions from three to two significantly increases the frequency of collisions between the reacting particles and hence increases the reaction rate. Second, surface regularities (the clay’s layered structure) may have acted as a catalyst (through arranging the reacting molecules into a suitable orientation) and a mold for the structural motifs in the molecules of life, many of which are polymers, that is, chains of regularly repeating units (the amino acids in proteins, the nitrogenous bases in nucleic acids, and simple sugars in polysaccharides).
1. This paragraph contains several assertions that require a critical reevaluation in light of the scientific and technological progress in the sixty-five years since the Dialogues’ first publication.
First, it does not seem completely true that the upper limit of complexity, above which the system and its effective functioning start to break down, is only 100,000 elements. Currently the fourth largest and most powerful supercomputer in the world, Tianhe-2 at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China, consists of 3,120,000 cores (https://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/, accessed April 17, 2020), while each processor itself is a complex system of hundreds, if not thousands, of electronic equivalents of elements in Lem’s “classical” understanding, such as relays, diodes, or transistors. However, Lem is correct in that supercomplex systems already cannot be homogeneous and usually they spontaneously “differentiate,” both structurally and functionally, into more or less autonomous subsystems. In the case of supercomputers, it is precisely the core processors that function in the so-called massively parallel manner: the individual processors divide the whole complex task into partial subtasks and in a given time, each of them only works on its own subtask; the individual partial solutions are eventually integrated into the single, wholesome solution of the given task. In the case of “classical” living organisms, as, e.g., human, it is the individual organs that take responsibility for the individual partial functions of the integral life process.
As for the power (the energy per a unit time) consumption of supercomplex systems, Lem was not far from the truth. He just underestimated it a bit: Tianhe-2’s power is 17.8 MW. For comparison, all power plants at Niagara Falls taken together produce a maximum of 4.9 MW, while utilizing more than 60 percent of the water from the falls (https://nyfalls.com/Niagara-falls/faq-4/#much, accessed April 17, 2020). The total possible output of Niagara Falls can thus be estimated as 8.5 MW, which allows us to conclude that despite the newest semiconductor and optoelectronic technology, the Chinese supercomputer requires for its cooling a power equivalent to double that of Niagara Falls.
2. This is from W. S. McCulloch and W. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–133. Interestingly, several years later, other researchers discovered an error in the article, which, nevertheless had no significant impact on its main conclusion—see H. T. Epstein and A. Rapoport, “A Note on the McCulloch-Pitts Neural Net for Heat-Cold Discrimination,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 13 (1951): 21–22.
3. In medicine, a state of less than full alertness, usually as a result of a medical condition or trauma.
4. Commissural fibers connect the left and right hemispheres in the brain.
5. Lem is using as an analogy here the description of now a long-obsolete TV system with a large, evacuated cathode tube, through which an electron beam was moving such that the electrons hitting the phosphor screen on the front face of the tube created a light image on it. Modern TV sets, of which no one in the 1950s could have had the slightest idea, do not use electron beams at all and work on totally different principles, which we are not going to discuss here because it is beside the author’s point. Even the obsolete TV set principle is still a useful analogy for Lem’s explanation of at least some operational principles of the brain.
6. The afferent nerves carry information from the sensory receptors to the central nervous system, while the efferent nerves carry the signals from the central nervous system to the effectory organs of the body.
7. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.
8. If Lem had in mind the number of the neuronal cells in the human brain, his number is too low. The current estimate for the number of neurons in man’s brain is 85 billion (S. A. C. Azevedo, L. R. B. Carvalho, L. T. Grinberg, J. M. Farfel, R. E. L. Ferretti, R. E. P. Leite, et al., “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Non-neuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-Up Primate Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 513 [2009]: 532–541).
1. In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan god of endurance and astronomy. After the suppressed Titans’ revolt against Zeus, Atlas was condemned to support by his shoulders the vault of the heavens for eternity. Interestingly—and illogically—in many Classical pieces of art, Atlas is seen holding up the Earth’s globe instead, and apparently Lem also fell victim to this “fallacy.”
2. Nicolas Rashevsky (1899–1972) was a Ukrainian American theoretical physicist, a pioneer of mathematical biology, and the founder of mathematical (theoretical) biophysics. In 1939, he founded the influential journal the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. He appears to have contributed to the development of the first mathematical model of the neuronal network, which this journal published, by his student Walter Pitts with Warren McCulloch in 1943 (see note 2 in Dialogue V).
3. Rafael Lorente de Nó (1902–1990) was a Spanish American neuroscientist who significantly contributed to the understanding of the structure and function of the cerebral cortex.
4. The author is alluding to at that time very fresh “discovery” of the American psychiatrist R. G. Heath, which, after its publication (R. G. Heath, S. Mårtens, B. E. Leach, M. Cohen, and C. Angel, “Effect on Behavior in Humans with the Administration of Taraxein,” American Journal of Psychiatry 114 [1957]: 14–24), achieved quite a fame. Unfortunately, Heath’s results could never be replicated in other laboratories, and the case is therefore considered today a classic case of scientific self-deception, if not a scientific misconduct. Yet this doesn’t mean that the material cause of schizophrenia is out of the question: the possible genetic, immunological, biochemical, and other molecular causes of this disease attract significant attention from biomedical researchers.
5. The British pioneer of computer science, a mathematician, logician, cryptoanalyst, and theoretical biologist Alan Turing (1912–1954) unveiled his universal automaton, also called Turing’s universal machine, in 1936 and 1937. This “computer” is a purely mathematical, theoretical construct, which can demonstrably solve any solvable mathematical problem and, despite its simplicity, simulate any operations that are possible, including those performed by systems with arbitrarily high complexity, such as the human brain. The machine is utterly simple: it consists of just a reading and writing head, which can transition between a few defined states and can read and print a few defined symbols on the data tape that runs in front of it, and a shifting mechanism, which moves the data tape—according to the instructions on the tape and the current state of the head—one frame forward or back. The more complex the process that the universal machine is simulating, the longer the data tape and the longer the simulation. Thus for very complex processes, it may take almost an eternity for the automaton to arrive at the solution. The mathematically gifted reader with an adventurous character can check out Turing’s original paper (A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2, no. 42 [1937]: 230–265).
1. This and the following sketch have inconsistent legends, perhaps owing to misunderstandings between the original editor and the author. In both cases, the stimulus is an ordinary, regular sinusoid curve, which appears to be missing from the first plot. Its solid line represents the sum of the stimulus and the reaction. Perhaps for the sake of clarity, the latter (dotted line) is plotted with the opposite sign. In the second plot, the full line is correctly displaying the regular stimulus and the dotted line the reaction, which is inevitably rising due to the positive feedback.
2. It is a common misnomer when the universal constant, the maximum possible speed in the Universe (300,000 km/s), derived from the theory of relativity, is called simply “the speed of light.” Light only propagates at this speed in the vacuum; in material media, light travels with speeds that are lower (sometimes much lower) by a factor given by the media’s refraction index. Thus, the correct name of this constant is “the speed of light in the vacuum.”
3. Vito Volterra (1860–1940) was an Italian mathematician and physicist, who contributed to the development of mathematical biology and functional analysis. The differential equations that Lem is mentioning are today called Lotka-Volterra equations, as the US mathematician and physical chemist Alfred J. Lotka formulated the same equations, independently from Volterra and in slightly different context, a few years earlier (A. J. Lotka, “Analytical Note on Certain Rhythmic Relations in Organic Systems,” Proceedings of National Academy of US 6 [1920]: 410–415, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1084562/pdf/pnas01916-0016.pdf, and V. Volterra, “Variazioni e fluttuazioni del numero d’individui in specie animali conviventi,” Mem. Acad. Lincei Roma 2 [1926]: 31–113).
4. It is not clear what the basis is for this claim and what new species could have triggered the megasaurians’ extinction. Currently, the majority of the scientific community supports the theory of a sudden climatic change following the fall of a huge meteor, even though it does not completely account for all known facts (see, e.g., https://australianmuseum.net.au/the-mesozoic-extinction-event, accessed April 18, 2020).
5. The Englishman John Maynard Keynes (1888–1946), often regarded as the most influential economist of the twentieth century and the founder of modern macroeconomics, showed that the so-called free hand of the market alone cannot keep in check the oscillations in the socioeconomic system so as to secure the optimal flow of economics and minimize the negative impact of the increasing oscillation on the system’s elements, i.e., people. He summarized his thoughts in the book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1936). Keynes defended the intervention of the state through fiscal and monetary instruments at its disposal as inevitable. With a little hyperbole, one might say that he attempted to give capitalism a “human face.” While his theory has never been accepted without reservations and was sharply criticized mainly in the 1970s, the international financial crisis of 2007–2008 revived it, and the so-called new Keynesian economics is a widely accepted pradigm today.
6. John von Neumann (1903–1957), a Hungarian American polyhistor, made invaluable contributions to the development of many scientific disciplines such as mathematics, physics, economics, and scientific computing. He was the key contributor to concepts such as cellular automata, the universal constructor, and the digital computer. Here Lem alludes to the mathematical game theory of which he was the founding father (J. von Neumann, “Zur Theorie der Gessellschaftspiele,” Mathematische Annalen 100 [1928]: 295–300, and a later book, J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944]).
7. Lem is playing with the phrase from the work Apologeticus by the early Christian theologian and apologetic from Carthage, Tertullian (ca. 155–240), testimonium animae naturaliter christianae (Apol. 17.6), by which he meant that every soul has a Christian nature.
8. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a demigod (allegedly the son of Poseidon, the god of the seas), a blacksmith and robber by trade, who appeared to be something of a jolly good fellow offering lodging to travelers. He had, however, an obsession: when he laid the traveler on his iron bed he could not find peace until he fixed the traveler’s length to be precisely equal that of the bed. That means that if something was sticking out, he cut it off, and if something was missing, he stretched the unfortunate individual. This gave him the nickname Procrustes, which means “The Stretcher.” Today, his name is used to denote the principle according to which something is forcibly adapted to an arbitrary standard with no regard to costs, even when logic would dictate the opposite, i.e., to adapt the utilized standard to the natural existing conditions.
9. It would not be Lem if he did not attempt to teach us something on the side. This time it is Latin declension. Generis humani (“of human race” in English) is the singular genitive case of genus humanum. Coincidentally (or not?), the encyclical of Pope Pius XII, promulgated in 1950, dealing mostly with philosophy and theology, but extending also to culture and science, was entitled the same: Humani generis. Interestingly, it explicitly mentioned “the doctrine of evolution,” with the pope taking a nonconfrontational attitude toward it “as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” and leaves the human soul in the exclusive jurisdiction of God. (The whole text can be found on the website of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, https://www.vofoundation.org/faith-and-science/humani-generis-1950/, accessed on June 21, 2020.)
1. Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) was a Flemish cartographer who in 1596 published a map of the world in a novel, cylindrical projection. His map was especially welcomed by the seafarers because a straight course on the sea is represented by a straight line on the map, too, that is, the straight course crosses all meridians, which are parallel with each other, at the same angle. However, the Mercator projection has one drawback: it deforms the shape and size of large objects, and the more so the farther they are from the equator. The reason is that the meridians are truly parallel only at the equator and they all cross each other at the poles. Consequently, the poles in Mercator projection do not exist. Or more precisely, they do not exist as points; rather, they are represented by the whole length of the upper and lower border of the rectangular map.
2. Neurosis is a spectrum of mental disorder that causes a sense of distress and deficit in functioning but not incapacitation. Usually it has no discernible somatic causes. Examples include obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorders. There is no universal consensual definition of neurosis. Modern psychiatry no longer recognizes it as a bona fide psychiatric illness, but that was not the case when Lem wrote the Dialogues. The term was removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980.
Neurasthenia is a similarly obsolete term with an even more vague definition: its “symptoms” include chronic fatigue, inability to concentrate, insomnia, and loss of appetite, among others.
3. The German psychologist Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964) was known mainly as founder of so-called typology, that is, the relationship between the personality and the body type. However, his classification scheme, which he attempted to apply also in psychopathology, finds no great support in modern psychology, to put it mildly. Lem refers here to Kretschmer’s statement, which in 1933 he allegedly said to colleague Oswald Bumke, who cites it as follows: “It is a strange thing with psychopaths. In normal times, we judge them, but in the times of political upheaval, they rule over us” (O. Bumke, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen: Der Weg eines deutschen Psychiaters [Munich: Richard Pflaum Verlag, 1925], 123).
4. The book Facing the Extreme (New York: Henry Holt, 1996; translation of the French Face à l’extrȇme [Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1991]) may be just the analysis that Lem was calling for. It was written by the Bulgarian French historian, philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and essayist Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017). In this work, he analyzes and generalizes experiences, testimonies, and opinions of the eyewitness survivors of the concentration camps and gulags.
5. Osculation (in mathematics) is a contact of two curves or surfaces at which they share a common tangent.
6. The first original Russian edition was published in 1864. The quotes in English are taken from the free e-book available at http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/Notes-from-the-Underground.pdf, accessed April 18, 2020.
7. Just a few references to show how this topic is tackled today. The first is a quotation from the text of the US essayist, editor, and blogger David H. Freeman, “The War on Stupid People” (Atlantic, July/August 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/): “When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.”
The second is an article by the Czech politologist and sociologist living in Germany, Petr Robejšek, titled “Why the Mass Is Smarter Than the Elite.” It was originally published in the journal Respekt, but its expanded version is available on the website http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/petr-robejsek.php?itemid=27483, accessed April 18, 2020.
The third reference is to the the book The Wisdom of Crowds by the US reporter James M. Surowiecki (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). The book has a telling subtitle: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The author lists proofs of the thesis that if we define the correctness of a solution as a benefit to society and the majority of its members—which is not dissimilar to Lem’s—we will find that the decision’s correctness predominantly depends on the size and composition of the group that is making the decision and on the democratic discussion along with the plurality of opinions in it. In other words, larger groups that include lay people make better decisions than a handful of experts in a given field.
1. The Austrian biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) worked out his general systems theory in the 1940s and published its first wholesome account in English in 1950 (K. L. von Bertalanffy, “An Outline of General System Theory,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 [1950]: 114–129). His metadisciplinary concept had an ambitious aim: to describe the behavior of a system consisting of interacting parts, regardless of whether the system is biological, cybernetic, or even societal. In 1956, the Society for General System Research was established. Yet the development of systems theory as an independent science was neither linear nor long. Today it can be considered a part of the so-called complex systems science, whose main interests are emergence and self-organization. Emergence can be understood as “self-creation” or “self-appearance” of qualitatively new, unexpected, and unpredictable properties when the system crosses a certain threshold of complexity; self-organization is one of the fundamental properties of highly complex systems. A number of other science disciplines, e.g., the network theory, pattern formation, collective phenomena (such as phase transitions), nonlinear dynamics, game theory, and the theory of evolution and adaptation, can now also be considered parts of the complex systems theory. An excellent explanation of its fundamentals can be found in the book by the US physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam, Dynamics of Complex Systems (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997). A higher-level college textbook, it can be safely recommended only to those who have working knowledge of physics and higher mathematics.
2 Algebra studies mathematical symbols and the rules of their manipulation. The word is derived from the Arabic al-jabr (الجبر), which in medicine denoted something like “putting back together broken parts.” As the Arabic origin of its name indicates, algebra’s founding fathers were Arab-Persian mathematicians, such as, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (780–850), after whom we named the algorithm, and Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), whom people may know better for his poetry. Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra in which values of the variables are not numerical but “true” or “false.” It is easy to label these two values 1 and 0, respectively, which later made Boolean algebra the basis for the development of digital computers and digital electronics. The English mathematician George Boole (1815–1864) presented his new algebra in his book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (Cambridge: Macmillan, Barclay and Macmillan, 1847).
3. Claude E. Shannon, in his book The Mathemathical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), wrote: “[The] semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem” (3). Although in some sense that may be true, many scientists just could not accept it. The first sign of research in this direction was a paper from Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT in 1952 (R. Carnap and Y. Bar-Hillel, “An Outline of a Theory of Semantic Information,” Technical Report No. 247 [Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1952]).
4. Biocenotic population is an ensemble of various organisms and species that form an interconnected community.
5. I have not been able to trace the origin of Lem’s numbers, but I am afraid that something is not right here. First, the thermodynamic unit of entropy is joule per kelvin (J/K). Based on the purely formal relationship between the informational, Sinf and thermodynamic entropy STD, which is Sinf = STD/(k ln 2), where k is the Boltzmann’s constant, the rounded equivalence between the bit and the J/K is: 1 bit = 10−23 J/K or 1 J/K = 1023 bits. A machine consisting of 108 digital elements (where each can be only in one of two states) may contain at most 108 bits, which is equivalent to 10−15 J/K. As Lem correctly notes, this value is very, very small. But increasing the complexity of the system to 1012 elements is insufficient for any measurable change in the thermodynamic entropy, since it will be still a negligible 10−11 J/K. To support his argument, Lem would need a system with a complexity of 1023, plus or minus a few orders of magnitude. Only in such an enormous system might the informatics and thermodynamics have comparable effects on its behavior. By the way, it is not without interest to notice that the number of functional molecules in the human brain has about the same order of magnitude.
6. L. Brillouin, Science and Information Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1962).
7. The British psychiatrist and the pioneer of cybernetics as well as the complex systems science W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) mentioned the intelligence amplifier at the end of his book Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1956). The book is freely available for non-profit educational and research purposes on the Principia Cybernetica Web (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf, accessed on May 6, 2020).
8. The Ancient Greek word εὑρίσκω (“I learn or discover”) has a Latin equvivalent in inventio and means finding a solution in an informal, nonalgorithmic way, often empirically (trial and error) and trading rigor for speed or efficiency.
9. Turing’s universal machine has already been mentioned in Dialogue VI and commented on in note 5 of that section.
10. “God is subtle but he is not malicious.” Einstein supposedly said this in April or May 1921 at Princeton University and it is often linked with his distaste toward the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.
11. “With joint effort” (Lat.).
12. A random, stochastic process is Markovian when it has no memory, that is, each of its consecutive steps is totally independent from any previous steps.
13. From the Greek αὐταρχία, which means “self-governance.”
14. “Body” (from the ancient Greek σῶμα).
15. The “Danaian gift” is closely related to the more familiar term “Trojan horse.” It is a gift in which future disastrous consequences for the gifted lurk. In Homer’s epic Ilias or Virgil’s Aeneas (II, 49), the inhabitants of Troy, which was located on the eastern tip of the Asia Minor peninsula, call the mainland Greeks Danaians.
16. “But who will watch the watchmen themselves?” Juvenal, Satires VI, lines 347–348.
17. M. Taube, Computers and Common Sense: The Myth of Thinking Machines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
18. The reference is to the work of the Chinese-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher Hao Wang (1921–1995), “Toward Mechanical Mathematics,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 4 (1960): 2–22.
19. Hubert L. Dreyfus (1929–2017) was a US philosopher and a critic of the artificial intelligence program, who rose to fame with his book What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972) and its updated version What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). His criticism is based on the thesis that intelligence is not merely the ability to process information and manipulate symbols, which can be easily programmed, but rather an intuitive recognition of patterns and a subconscious ability to form unexpected connections between them, which cannot be captured by a logically constructed program. A logical consequence of this thesis, therefore, is the view that computers can be equal to humans only when they also mature under their parents’ guidance in a complexly structured society—when they become human, like ourselves. Hubert’s brother Stuart graduated with a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1964. Together with Hubert he authored several articles and the book Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press, 1986).
1. This is an allusion to the medieval treatise Malleus Maleficarum (1486), commonly known as The Hammer of Witches, attributed to the Dominican monk Jacobus Sprenger. The book describes contemporaneous beliefs about practices of alleged “witches” and may provide insight into medieval judicial proceedings, but later it instigated the savage efforts to stamp out “witchcraft” in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2. In Aristotelian logic, apodictic propositions are demonstrably, necessarily, and self-evidently always true. From the ancient Greek ἀποδεικτικός, “able to be demonstrated.”
3. Jan Szczepański (1913–2004) was a Polish sociologist and politician. Lem’s text does not allow for a precise determination of which text he is referring to, but a good summary of Sczepański’s views is his essay “Individuality and Society,” which he published in 1981, a year before his retirement and the year in which martial law was declared in Poland (J. Sczepański, “Individuality and Society,” Impact of Science on Society 31 [1981]: 461–466).
4. This folk fable from Central Europe may have a distant relation to the old English folktale of the Little Red Hen, but its moral is different.
5. The voivodeship (wojewódstwo in Polish) is a Polish administrative unit. Since 1999, Poland has sixteen voivodeships.
6. This is an oblique reference to a line from the historiosophical drama Lilla Weneda by the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849): “No time to pity roses when a forest is on fire.”
7. The Latin term ad hoc (literally “for this”) denotes an explanation or solution to a concrete problem that is not subject to generalization or adaptation to other purposes. Although its connotation does not always have to be pejorative or restrictive, it most often labels solutions that are tentative and carry an element of improvisation and the absence of a plan. “Ad usum Delphini” (“for Dauphin’s use”) were the words stamped on the title pages of the text collections (including Homer, Ovid, Racin, and others) that were for education of the Grand Dauphin, which was the title of the French prince, the son of King Louis XIV (1638–1715). The classical texts were, however, “cleaned” of things that may have “embarrassed” the little prince or were otherwise “inappropriate.” Today this term serves as a pejorative label for a text that has been censored before public distribution.
1. Jean Rostand (1894−1977) was a French biologist and philosopher. His main occupation was science popularization and history (as well as its future). Lem is probably referring to the book Is It Possible to Modify the Human? (J. Rostand, Peut-on modifier l’Homme? Paris, France: Gallimard, 1956). By the way, Jean’s father Edmond was the dramatist who wrote the famous play Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897.
2. While spiders are related to insects, they are not them. Spiders and insects are two different classes of the phylum Arthropoda (along with scorpions, crabs, and shrimp). In contrast with insects, whose body consists of three parts—head, thorax, and abdomen—with six legs, and which, most often, can fly, a spider’s body has only two segments—cephalothorax and abdomen—with eight legs, and they cannot fly. Nevertheless, this taxonomical detail does not affect the point of Lem’s argument.
3. Recent professional literature confirms that LSD perturbs the recognition of danger and the psychological processing of fear, and suggests that LSD can find application in psychotherapy, where it improves sociability and increases empathy (see, e.g., P. C. Dolder, Y. Schmid, F. Müller, S. Borgwardt, and M. E. Liechti, “LSD acutely impairs fear recognition and enhances emotional empathy and sociality.” Neuropsychopharmacology 41 (2016): 2638–2646, available on the website https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201682, accessed May 29, 2020).
4. Pangloss is a character from the satirical novel Candide by the French enlightenment philosopher François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694-1778) (F. M. A. Voltaire, Candide, ou L’Optimisme [Paris, France: Sirène, 1759]). Professor Pangloss, a mentor of the protagonist Candide, supported the thesis that in this world, which is the best of all possible worlds, everything will end up well. This is a satire version of the philosophical optimism of the German rationalist Gottfried W. Leibniz (1646–1716).
5. The Mousterian culture flourished in Europe roughly between 160,000 and 40,000 years ago, and its carriers were apparently the Neanderthals. The name derives from the hamlet Peyzac-le-Moustier in the département Dordogne in France. The Aurignacian culture in Europe is younger, dating from 48,000 to 25,000 years ago, and its carrier was already Homo sapiens sapiens. It received its name from the village Aurignac in the département Haute-Garonne in the southwest of France.
6. Vladimir I. Vernadsky (1863−1945) was a Russian Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist who was the first to divide the planet Earth into three spheres that influence each other: the geosphere, in which the geological processes take place, the biosphere, which is the domain of the life process, and the noosphere, where the dominant role is played by the human, his intellect, and the related activities. His seminal work was the book The Biosphere (V. I. Vernadsky, Biosfera. Leningrad, USSR: Naučn. kimi.-techn. izdateľstvo, 1926). Thus, Vernadsky was a predecessor of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who later coind the concept that the Earth as a planet represents a unified homeostatic living system that they named Gea or, in an alternative transliteration, Gaia (the ancient Greeks used this name for the personification of the Earth).
7. O. S. Kulagina, “K voprosu o modelirovanii evoľucionnogo processa,” in Voprosy kibernetiki, vypusk 16, ed. O. S. Kulagina and A. A. Lyapunov (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 147–169. (The English text is my rendition of Lem’s Polish translation of the Russian original.)
8. Orthoevolution or progressive evolution comes from the term orthogenesis (from Ancient Greek ὀρθός, “straight,” and γένεσις, “origin”), which was first used by the biologist Wilhelm Haacke in 1893. Ethymologically, orthoevolution can be understood as “an evolution in a straight line,” but the term’s scientific content has been very elastic throughout its history, as it meant different things to different people. Often, mainly close to its origin, it was considered an alternative to Darwinism because it gave evolution a kind of preset goal and even the tracks for achieving it, independent of genetic variability and natural selection. In the middle of the twentieth century, Darwinists like Ernst Mayr declared it outright nonscientific due to its (possible) ties to teleology, evolutionary “progress,” or even the so-called vital force, an ancient undefined, mystical parameter that was supposed to be the difference between animate and inanimate objects. However, orthoevolution has never left the field of evolutionary biology entirely, even though some still view it as “heresy.” Apparently, it is a “popular” heresy since it is present, in more or less veiled forms, in the views of prominent representatives of the Darwinian “modern synthesis,” such as E. O. Wilson or R. Dawkins. In 1996, the philosopher of biology Michael Ruse defined orthogenesis as “the view that evolution has a kind of momentum of its own that carries organisms along certain tracks” (Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]). Of course, orthoevolution’s biggest problem is the identity of this “momentum,” which gives the “direction” to the evolutionary “tracks.” Lem uses the term without apprehension and furthermore, seems to suggest that this momentum might be the inherent tendency of complex homeostatic systems to increase their complexity and diversity, whose roots transcend biology because they are found in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the complex-system science.
9. J. Willard Gibbs (1839–1904) was a scientist whom many (including A. Einstein) considered the best in the history of the United States. As a theorist, he made essential contributions to the development of physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Together with James C. Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann, he created a new field of thermodynamics—statistical thermodynamics.
10. Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) was a German American philosopher, one of the most prominent members of the Vienna circle and a proponent of logical positivism, whose aim was to make the “pure” philosophy a true “scientific discipline.” The discussion of the scientific and ethical value of the statement about killing comes from his perhaps most famous book Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1935).
11. Lem is referring to perhaps the best known quote of the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623−1662) from his Thoughts (B. Pascal, Pensées [Paris, France: Guillaume Desprez, 1670]): “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.”
1. Hypostasis (from the Greek ὑπόστασις, literally “a state that is underneath”) in Neoplatonic philosophy denotes the essence or the fundamental reality hidden underneath the surface, but in descriptive linguistics it refers to using a synsemantic word (a word that has meaning only in the context provided by other, surrounding words) as if it were autosemantic (a word that has meaning regardless of the context). Conceptually, linguistic hypostasis can be understood as a process that is the opposite of generalizing an originally specific term, such as a proper name or a brand name, to denote all objects of a given kind.
2. “End of the world” (Lat.).
3. “Albedo” and “insolation” are physical terms denoting the reflection of radiation by a surface and the amount of radiative energy emitted into space.
4. “Superfluous entitites” (Lat.). It is an allusion to Ockham’s razor.
5. F. Rosenblatt, Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms (Washington, DC: Spartan, 1962).
6. “Speciation” refers to the emergence of a species.
7. The cardinality of a set is a technical term that generalizes the notion of the number of elements in the set. In the case of a finite set, cardinality is simply equal to the number of its elements.
8. Stafford Beer (1926–2002) was a British theorist and practitioner in operational research and management cybernetization. The cited book, Cybernetics and Management (London: English Universities Press, 1959), is his most acclaimed work.
9. Finitism is a philosophy of mathematics that allows the existence of only finite mathematical objects.
10. DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule that carries the genetic information. The molecule is a linear polymer that is very tightly packed in the chromosomes in the cell’s nucleus; when extended, the total length of DNA in each human cell is over one meter.
11. The word “entelechy” (from the Old Greek ἐντελέχεια) is probably an invention of Aristotle (384–322 BCE). He composed it from the words ἐντελής (completed, whole, perfect) and ἔχω (to have). In his metaphysics, it denoted the complete realization of the final form of a potential concept or function. In modern general philosophy it can denote the motivation or the need for autonomy and, at the same time, the inner strength for its actualization.
12. “Logical depth” is a technical term denoting the measure of a system’s complexity, which was proposed by the US computer scientist and mathematician Charles Bennett (b. 1942). It is based on the so-called computational approach to complexity: logical depth equals the time that the shortest possible algorithm needs to create the complete model of the given system.
13. This is a biochemical misunderstanding. Cells need oxygen not as a source of electrons but, on the contrary, as their final acceptor. The electrons, from which energy is extracted in the cellular respiratory chain (through the coupling with oxidative phosphorylation), originate from the molecules of foodstuff and end up on the molecule of oxygen (O2), which is thereby reduced (in the chemical sense) and, in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), is returned to the environment. Indeed, each atom of oxygen in the molecules that we exhale is two electrons richer than in the molecules of oxygen that we inhale. Hence, the “electron packets” would not replace the breathing of oxygen but rather the eating of food. Lem probably meant that we could invent an “electron acceptor” other than oxygen.
14. Tracheae comprise a system of narrowing tubes that branch throughout the whole body of insects. The tubes, strengthened by chitin, directly but passively distribute the air (with oxygen) to all the insect’s tissues.
15. The allele (from the Greek ἄλλος, “another”) is one of the alternative forms of a gene. The gene usually has two alleles—one from the mother and the other from the father. However, the “strength” of the two alleles is not necessarily the same. The “stronger” one is called dominant. When the dominant allele appears in a given gene, the organism will always manifest the feature that this allele encodes, even when it is paired with a different allele that is “weaker” (called recessive) from the other parent. Hence, the feature encoded by a recessive allele will not manifest in the given organism (in its phenotype), but the organism continues to be its carrier and can transmit it to its progeny. The trait encoded by a recessive allele can thus be transmitted for many generations without notice and it will only manifest in the phenotype when it pairs with another recessive allele (from the other parent) in the given “locus” of the gene.
16. The American psychologist John. B. Watson (1878–1958) founded the behavioral school of psychology in his lecture at the Columbia University in 1913 (see J. B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158–177). Behaviorism pushes the so-called depth psychology with its non-empirical interpretations into the background. It treats behavior as a set of observable physical phenomena and presumes that each of its elements has a physical cause that can be objectively traced. While it cannot be said that behaviorism is dead today, it was pushed out of the forefront in the second half of the twentieth century by a new approach, cognitive psychology, which can be considered a modern compromise between the “physicalistic” behaviorism and the previous “mentalistic” psychology—with the significant contribution of biomolecular research techniques.
17. In Latin, “nothing can arise out of nothing.” This statement is ascribed to the most important philosopher of the Eleatic school, Parmenides (sixth century BCE), who applied it to the existence itself: according to him, being is eternal, and what is, must have always been, because nothing can arise out of nothing.
18. Ecclesiastes 9:4.
19. “Vitreous” freezing produces amorphous, vitreous, or noncrystalline ice, which does not have a lower density (a larger volume) than liquid water and therefore does not damage the cell or tissue that is being frozen. It is achieved by a very rapid freezing of microscopic and thin-sectioned specimens. Because the bulkier, macroscopic tissues or organs inevitably freeze more slowly (due to the physics of heat propagation), regular ice crystals that cause irreversible cell damage form in their interior.
20. Julian S. Huxley (1887–1975) was a British evolutionary biologist and science popularizer, who believed in the objectivity of evolutionary progress, even though he admitted that evolution has no goal. His most known work is Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942). Huxley hailed from a prominent intellectual family: his grandfather Thomas H. Huxley was a friend and a supporter of Charles Darwin; his younger brother Aldous Huxley gained fame for his dystopic novel Brave New World; and their still younger stepbrother Andrew Huxley received the Nobel Prize (together with Alan Hodgkin) for the discovery of the action potential through which electric impulses propagate in the nerve cell.
21. Individuation is the process of becoming oneself. This concept plays a prominent role in the thought systems of many past (Bergson, Nietzsche, and Jung) and contemporary (Deleuze, Stiegler, Simondon) philosophers.
* First published in Studia Filozoficzne 3–4 (1968).
** Naturally, with the exception of the value that life exhibits in its tendency toward self-preservation, this one is both pre- and metacultural. In this work, I am proposing an approach of “measured reductionism,” which—following Ockham’s razor and in accord with the empirical practice—tries to minimize the number of posited “entities,” which manifests in the rejection of the axiological terminology based on ontological terms borrowed from instrumental techniques and theories. An “extreme reductionism” would deny the existence of any “rationally based,” i.e., instrumental, values in biological phenomenology, and thus constitute an extreme “physicalization” of this scientific field, which would, however, result in throwing out the baby along with the bathwater, as the history of Watson’s behaviorism documents—it proved to be untenable. Introducing axiologically pregnant terms into empirics was, until recently, incompatible with its tradition, i.e., with its research paradigm. At present, the terms are permitted to be used in nontraditional ways, e.g., in optimization schemes or dynamical programming. Still, a certain axiological minimum must remain unquestionable, i.e., accepted, that is to say, axiomatically. This means that some values (such as the “autotelic” value of being alive) cannot be reduced to anything else beyond themselves. The unavoidable property of anything that can be taken for instrumental value is that of to serve a purpose. Every irreducible value then implies a certain autonomous value. This proposed approach is equivalent to a convention, in particular, of accepting that there is a certain “homeostatic minimum,” which can correspond to one on a comparison scale. Of course, we could accept another convention, but a convention of some kind is certainly necessary. The reason is that the overall paradigmatic structures of the studied range of phenomena cannot be directly deduced from the set of facts, and establishing them requires active input from researchers.