Cybernetics and Human Knowing. Vol. 22 (2015), no. 1, pp. 97-105

Stanislaw Lem’s : Cybernetics and Machine Knowing?

Joseph E. Brenner, Ph.D.1

A review of Summa Technologiae, by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Joanna Zylinska. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2013. 440 pages. ISBN 13: 9780816675777. $19.50 USD.

1. Introduction

In 1964, the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, at the beginning of an exceptional career as a philosopher, essayist and author of , published a book, entitled Summa Technologiae (Lem, 2013), modeled after the 13th Century Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. The latter was intended as a compendium of all orthodox philosophical and theological knowledge about the world. The former is a compendium of Lem’s views of the state of scientific knowledge and human knowledge in general, with special emphasis on the enormous potential of cybernetics. Shortly after, he published a major collection of science fiction stories, (Lem, 1974) about a universe in which robots have developed beyond humans and established control over it, although remaining in an uneasy truce with the surviving primates. Forty years later, shortly before his death, Lem essentially repudiated his core thesis, expressed in the Summa Technologiae (ST) that technology was the answer to the problems of the human condition. He was disillusioned about the glut of information in the information society, and apparently considered that the concept of truly intelligent robots was an illusion. Why then do the editors of this journal believe that, in 2014, a review of ST is of interest and perhaps importance for its readers? In my opinion, it is because Lem has asked questions about the existence of man and the world, and suggested answers in terms of science, philosophy and technology that few other philosophers have been able to manage. A simple recapitulation of ST does justice neither to it nor to Lem. His ideas called and still call for a minimum critique that places them in their historical context as well as the context of today’s world, in which essentially none of the problems of concern to Lem are being adequately addressed. This task was all the more difficult for me as I am not an expert on Lem, and I hope readers who are familiar with his thought will

1. International Center for Transdisciplinary Research, Paris; c/o Chemin du College 1, CH-1865 Les Diablerets, Switzerland. Phone and FAX: +4124 492 21 18. E-mail: [email protected] 98 Joseph E. Brenner excuse the errors of a well-intentioned student. As Lem said himself, he does not make interpretations of his books or stories, but leaves this to the reader.

2. Historical Notes

Lem published ST and The Cyberiad in the middle of the cold war period, when Poland, under Wladislav Gomulka, as all the Eastern European countries under Soviet control, required that artists and writers follow an anti-Western party line. Luckily, Lem was able to avoid stuffing too much nonsense into ST, although not in other works. One senses, however, a certain intellectual isolation, despite his apparent access to some Western sources. The 1950s and 1960s were an important period for new fields of thought: the Austrian Ludwig von Bertalanffy, to whom Lem refers, published his influential General Systems Theory (Bertalanffy, 1969) and the Franco-Romanian Stéphane Lupasco his application of a non-standard logic to problems in biology and psychology (Lupasco, 1962/1986). Logical positivism was on the way out, and the seminal ideas of Ashby and von Neumann were bridging the gap between science and philosophy. I have up-dated and expanded the Lupasco system in a recent book in English (Brenner, 2008). Also active in this period was the great Italian writer Italo Calvino (1976), who, like Lem, incorporated fundamental physics and evolutionary biology in his stories. Other favorite writers of mine of fantastic fiction include Nabokov, the Yugoslav Milan Pavic and of course Borges, but science and technology as such play only a small role in their work. For a discussion of the philosophy of technology, its roots and its ethics see the article of Franssen, Lokhorst, and van de Poel (2010) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Of particular relevance to Lem’s work is the point that science influences society indirectly, through technology. It is a mistake, however, and this review should be read with this in mind, to think that ST is only about technology. It is rather about how to think about how anything does and can happen at all that we observe and are a part of. The book might just as well be called a Summa Scientiae where science is both knowledge and knowing in the broadest possible sense. Lem’s concepts about the development of computational systems are relatively uncontroversial. His question is directed towards “machine thinking,” that is whether, to what extent, how and how fast machines would supersede (or supervene on) human beings. In the ST itself, Lem’s faith in the machine, that is, in potential technological solutions to all the problems of humanity seems solid. “What is at stake for us is trying to improve on man” Lem says [p. 346] in a section entitled “Reconstructing Man.” In The Cyberiad he satirizes his final loss of faith in the view referred to above.

Book Review 99

4. Outline of Summa Theologiae

The book is organized into nine chapters, each of which is divided into several titled but unnumbered sections. The first four chapters are primarily historical- philosophical, along the lines of the post-humanist turn to which Lem contributed; the second group beginning with chapter 5, “Prolegomena to Omnipotence,” sets a tone which can only be described as Promethean. For every major issue affecting man in the world, Lem proposes that a technological solution can exist and can be implemented; there are (almost) no limitations to what man + machine can achieve. Of course, the solution does not exist yet, but progress is being made toward it and we can proceed to discuss the consequences of its having been found. If, in this inevitable process, the machine triumphs, so be it, etcetera, etcetera. And yet, this is a first-level simplistic reading; Lem is always reminding us that there are no guarantees that all or any of the technological solutions he imagines will be actualized. Then, as Lenin said, “What is to be done?” I found only one hint of a possible new perspective in a passage in which Lem talks about an alternative fundamental structure of the universe, one in which a fundamental dynamic principle of interaction between a process and a related anti-process is critical in the development of phenomena.

5. Lem’s Post-humanist Vision

Post-humanism has been with us now for about a quarter-century (Halberstam & Livingston, 1995) but it remains a resolutely optimistic doctrine that we ought to try to develop, in safe and ethical ways, technological means of exploring possible, non- anthropocentric modes of being. This is Lem’s starting position, expressed at several points in the ST. His program is to imagine and keep imagining “a revolutionary program that would institute a re-engineering of the (human) organism—in a primitive and naïve way, for sure, but we certainly can do it” (Lem, 2013, p. 347; italics mine). The term trans-humanism can be applied to such a vision of how the transformation of at least some basic human capabilities might be accomplished, although, as Capurro (2012) reiterates, the transformations remain hypothetical and problematic.

5.1 The Future As Lem states clearly in his introductory chapter, “Dilemmas,” in speaking of the future, Lem will make projections from current aspects of our civilization no matter how improbable their actualization.

What lies at the foundation of our hypothetical constructions are technologies, i.e., means of bringing about certain collectively determined goals that have been conditioned by the state of our knowledge and our social aptitude – and also those goals that no one has identified at the outset. [pp. 3-4; italics in original] 100 Joseph E. Brenner

One related theme, frequently repeated, is that technology is simply an “artificial extension of the innate tendency of al living beings to gain mastery over their environment or at least not to surrender to it in their struggle for survival” [p. 4]. A third theme is that “man knows more about his dangerous tendencies than he did a hundred years ago, and in the next hundred years, his knowledge will be even more advanced. Then he will make use of it” [p. 6]. Humanism is not a solid foundation for anything he writes, and so Lem’s future is essentially a post-humanist one.

5.2 Life and Evolution As others, Lem sees the dynamics of biological and technical evolution as morphologically analogous, although as the biologist Raymond Pictet (pers. comm., June, 2005) pointed out to me, there is no analogue of DNA in technology. In any event, all processes, involving positive and negative feedback are circular and cause and effect instantiate one another. With regard to biological evolution, Lem repeatedly criticizes its failures and inefficiencies, especially in a late chapter entitled “A Lampoon of Evolution.” “And thus the process of self-organization is not unique but rather typical; while the emergence of life is only one possible enactment of the process of homeostatic organization, which is widespread in the Universe” [p.21]. Perhaps Lem saw himself here as the spiritual descendent of Copernicus, also a Pole.

5.3 Ethics In the future, technical evolution, rather than creating (sic) narrowly specialized devices, will result in constituting the entire content of the known universe. Lem understands the ethical concerns that techno-evolution raises, but obviously believes that, to some extent, we can trust its development and influence its direction. For a recent discussion of ethics and information technology see Introna (2005). But Lem clearly does not believe in transcultural and transhistoric moral standards (no absolute Newtonian frame of reference: no absolute simultaneity). Later in the book, Lem attacks the subject of morality directly by saying that “it is not we who are introducing questions of ethics into cybernetics: it is cybernetics that, as it expands, envelops with its consequences all that which we understand as morality” [p. 99]. “Morality is as arbitrary as mathematics, because both are deduced from accepted axioms by means of logical reasoning” [p. 100]. Of course, Lem’s own position is acceptable to us, but then he is playing, too dangerously for me, with cultural relativism. Tavani (2007) for instance believes nothing has changed with regard to fundamental human moral imperatives as a consequence of the information revolution. Here, with hindsight, one can say that Lem missed the internal contradiction in cultural relativism. Thus he is left, at the end of his argument and his life, with nothing except the “hopeful” prediction that “in a million years time man will give up his entire animal heritage and his imperfect and impermanent body for the sake of a more Book Review 101 perfect design, and turn into a being so much higher than us that it will become alien to us” [p. 40]. One should always keep in mind that Lem is not advocating some kind of techno- eugenics. He repeats that he does not wish to create anxiety by talking about an eventual “replacement of man by the machine” [p. 91]. As a scientist, in the 1990s one might have called him a futurologist, Lem does not advocate anything; he is not telling us what should happen but what will happen, and it is up to us to choose what we do with it. He is an “‘auto-evolutionist’ (who) sees future transformation as inevitable, which is why he is looking for all kinds of reasons that would support it, so that the necessary action overlaps with the decision made” [p. 307]. The result is not guaranteed to be good, but one can hope that it may be good.

6. Core Thesis: The Technological Imperative

Given the above vision, the remainder of Lem’s thesis is to show the paths that could, as he wishes, get us to the indicated future. The essential ingredient, of course, is the access, still illusory, to unlimited, manageable sources of energy. Lem expresses the relation between man and nature always in terms of conflict, and he coins the term imitology to describe man’s ability to create models. (“According to imitology, everything man does is a form of modeling” [p. 187]). For the time being, man cannot imitate nature’s processes of self-organization, but it is possible to invent natures and universes that are different from ours. Actualization of them is another matter. I will summarize just a few other of the fascinating directions in which Lem’s thought takes us.

6.1 The End of an Era In chapter 7, entitled “The Creation of Worlds.” despite its cosmogonic flavor, Lem is primarily concerned with the consequences of the successes of technology. “Civilization lacks the knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries” [p. 235]. For Lem, the problems of humanity were (and of course still are) growing faster in number and gravity than can be solved by humans themselves (scientists) or by humans and machines built and controlled by humans. The only new solution can come from machines built and controlled by other machines. As noted above, Lem was aware of the paradoxes and dangers involved, but he accepts them as givens. As a more practical objective, Lem proposes that, “we are to invent a device that will gather information, generalize it in the same way that scientist does, and present the results of this inquiry to experts” [p. 242]. Eventually, we will have an autognostic or cybergnostic machine that will express the structural information in the environment (see below, section 6.4). 102 Joseph E. Brenner

6.2 The Dyson Sphere Lem refers to the construction, imagined by Dyson, of an empty material sphere whose radius would be that of the Earth’s orbit and which would capture and make usable the entire energetic output of the sun. Despite Lem’s claim for its scientific reasonableness of ideas like the manipulations of suns and stars by the Constructors in The Cyberiad, the concept can be relegated to the domain of science fiction for the time being. The teleportation that has been demonstrated to date is limited to single atoms, that is, collections of quantum objects outside the domain of thermodynamics.

6.3 Alone in the Universe? Lem takes us through the thought experiments based on combination of statistics and the absence of contacts with us by extraterrestrial intelligences which have developed into civilizations. True to his method, Lem asserts 1) that we can expect to find intelligence in the universe, although it may be in a form which we cannot currently comprehend: 2) insists upon maintaining a minimum scientific objectivity through the use of Occam’s Razor, but allows the implicit if not explicit postulation of the existence of extraterrestrial life; 3) claims that we may already be receiving messages from outer space, but perceive them as noise; 4) sees as positive the absence of cosmic miracles. I tend to agree with Lem that one should think, at least from time to time, about the implications of being or not being alone in the universe. Lem would have been pleased by the many recent discoveries of exo-planets, some within the range capable of sustaining life as we know it. But his even earlier 1961 novel , of which several cinema versions have been made, imagined an entire planet as a living organism. In the original story, the planet is more intelligent and human than the human beings who land on it by accident and interact with it.

6.4 Information. The Information Farm I consider Lem’s treatment of the ubiquity, nature and role of information and informational processes in science as very up-to-date. For Lem information is not an abstraction: It always has a target or addressee. However, Lem also insists on the need (and therefore possibility) of automating human information systems, leading to information machines which would not be analogous to the nervous system. To avoid being buried in an avalanche of information, there must be a “radical restructuring of science as a system that acquires and transmits information” [p. 86]. The way to do this, Lem says, is to extract information from Nature directly, without going through a human or electronic brain. There is thus a certain logic to Lem’s approach: He does not advocate the replacement of man by the machine, to construct a synthetic humanity, but to go to some (as yet undefined) new technology that will mean “a completely new type of control man will gain over himself, that is, over his organism” [p. 91], and we are back to the post-human imperative. An intelligence amplifier will exist, a black box that will solve all problems and all our problems, acting automatically and naïvely but efficiently and infallibly. Finally, such a black box can be constructed because we ourselves are such black boxes. Book Review 103

Lem does not have much use for mathematics and proposes that science, instead of translating material phenomena into mathematical systems should be translating mathematics into material phenomena. One sets up an information farm that “cultivates empirical information, inverting the tree of biological evolution” [p. 263]. (Cyber)-semioticians (Brier, 2010) will be interested in Lem’s idea that we “need to represent processes by some other processes, not with formal signs.”

6.5 Cybernetic Sociology In the above few lines, one may see how Lem circles between existent and totally non- existent states-of-affairs. Reading Lem thus requires a clear head to maintain the proper distance from this and similar arguments. Thus, in a passage in which Lem’s ambivalence is clear, he states that it is possible yet undesirable to resort to the machinic (sic) regulation of social systems. “What we need is cybernetic sociology, not a theory of how to design and engineer ruling machines,” [p. 109] and both the decision-making power and plans of action should remain in human hands. In The Cyberiad there is a striking, and amusing, disjunction between the advanced state of technology and the medieval structure and actions of the robot protagonists. Perhaps due to political limitations, Lem did not analyze the society he lived in. His approach is thus necessarily different from, for example, the major work of Castells on economic and political applications of new information and communication technologies in the emerging information society, first published in 1993.

6.6 Computer Technology. Virtual Reality As implied above, Lem’s intuitive assessment of the role of computer technology in science, engineering and medicine was largely justified even if he, as most other people, underestimated the computational power that has already become available. Its application in particular in the area of virtual reality (phantomology) and the philosophical and moral issues it raises (Heim, 1993) is among the most clearly prescient of his ideas.

6.7 Experimental Metaphysics For Lem, metaphysical information is a kind of information that is not subject to empirical verification for several possible reasons. Experimental metaphysics is then the modeling of the dynamic process through which inconsistent beliefs, for which there are no empirical relata, may result in new explanations. The construction would, of course, not create, within a machine, transcendental concepts. The objective would be to help discover the general principles that govern the way metaphysical models of the world come into being. Interestingly, Lem suggested that quantum field theory was not metaphysical since its then still unknown consequences could be subject to experiment. Shimony and Redhead, in the 1990s, on the other hand, used the term in relation to aspects of quantum mechanics (Redhead, 1995). 104 Joseph E. Brenner

7. Conclusion

It is impossible, as I wrote above, to do justice to all the varied themes addressed by Lem in the ST. He has important things to say about language, especially the language of chromosomes and he goes do far as to say that it is superior to the language of the brain. I hope nevertheless that the above outline is sufficient to justify its consideration as a significant part, if nothing else, of the history of ideas. I note, how Lem attempts even a brief, serious analysis of telepathy, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance. (He finally discards the alleged evidence on evolutionary grounds, that is, telepathy is such an efficient method of information transfer that if possible, it should be widespread in nature.) While predicting, in the ST, the inevitability of a new technological mode of existence for humankind and its possible successors, Lem was able to be lucid about what could be lost in the process. Some people (like this writer) are skeptical today of the promised benefits of technology and do not see it as an unmitigated blessing. They are routinely stigmatized as Luddites2 by those who, unlike Lem, refuse to see its negative side. I am therefore convinced of the necessity of understanding the historical debates and discussions about the potential of technology in order to be able, in line with its current pattern of evolution,3 to exercise some sort of control and selection between possible strategies. Of course, carried away by his flow of thought, Lem is sometimes guilty of both a pathetic fallacy and a logical fallacy: He ascribes causal efficacy to abstract concepts like cybernetics, technology, science: “Does technology cause us, or do we cause it?” [p. 12]. Having defined everything as a machine—an atom, a human being, a star—since machines are by definition capable of being made, then everything can be made. One can perfectly well, however, bracket such excesses, as well as his apparent belief that the technology, when found, will be perfect and accept the book for showing us, very completely, in what living in a technological world consists. In conclusion, therefore, I can only highly recommend Summa Technologiae to the readers of CHK as a necessary document for study. Against it, one can measure one’s own understanding of what has happened since it was first published as well as possible (and impossible) futures in order not to be “lost in the transience of the here and now” [p. 3]. Lem’s insight, imagination and honesty set a high standard for current and future transdisciplinary work at the intersection of philosophy, science, technology and literature.

2. The term Luddites refers to the workers in England in the early 19th Century who organized themselves to destroy new industrial machinery on the grounds that it would destroy employment. 3. I will not discuss here whether we are experiencing technological evolution or revolution, about which (too) much has been written. Revolution will have been a term to avoid in Lem’s Poland. Book Review 105

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Søren Brier, Editor of CHK, for giving me the opportunity of becoming familiar with both the Summa Technologiae and The Cyberiad.

References

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. (1969). General system theory. New York: George Braziller. Brenner, J. E. (2008). Logic in reality. Dordrecht: Springer. Brier, S. (2010). Cybersemiotics: An evolutionary world view going beyond entropy and information into the question of meaning. Entropy, 12, 1902-1920. Calvino, I. (1976). Cosmicomics. New York: Harcourt. Castells, M. (2000). The information age: Economy, society and culture: Volume I. The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Franssen, M., Lokhorst, G.-J., Poel, I. van de. (2010). The philosophy of technology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring, 2010 ed.). Retrieved April 30, 2015 from http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2010/entries/technology/ Halberstam, J., & Livingston, I. (Eds.).(1995). Posthuman bodies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heim, M. (1993). The metaphysics of virtual reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Introna, L. (2005). Phenomenological approaches to ethics and information technology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer, 2011 ed.). Retrieved April 30, 2015 from http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/ethics-it-phenomenology/ Lem, S. (1974). The CYBERIAD. New York: Harcourt. (Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, 1967). Lem, S. (2013). Summa Technologiae (J. Zylinska, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published in Polish by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, 1964). Lupasco, Stéphane. (1986). L’énergie et la matière vivante. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. (Originally published by Julliard, Paris, 1962). Capurro, R. (2012). Beyond humanisms. In T. Nishigaki & T. Takemouchi (Eds.), Information ethics: The future of the humanities (pp. 26-74). Nagoya, Japan: V2 Solution Publishers. Redhead, M. (1995). Experimental metaphysics. In From Physics to Metaphysics (chapter 3, pp. 41-62). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Tavani, H. T. (2007). Ethics and technology. Ethical issues in an age of information and communication technology. New York: John Wiley &Sons. (see http://www.wiley.com/college/tavani)

Seaman, B. & Howe, D. (2008, 2009, 2010). The Architecture of Association. Generative video/audio/ text installation; still #567. internet fellowship is like — being in heaven? we’re disembodied spirits struggling to affect each other. patterns of ‘on and off’ in the waves and wires like cells in an organism

we’re disembodied spirits launched from our slowly burning bodies, the fuel for our cognitions, like charcoal for a flame maybe this is (what) heaven (is like) launched upon the embers of hell. —Stanley Salthe

Seaman, B. & Berreth, T. (1995, 2010). Passage Sets. Generative visual poem interactive installation; still 10e Constructions.