A Perfect Vacuum (22 page)

It is clear—states Professor Kouska—that in the year 1900 only a lunatic would have granted all these events even the remotest credibility. And yet they have come to pass. If, then, nothing but improbabilities have taken place, why exactly should this pattern suddenly undergo a radical change, so that from now on only what we consider to be credible, probable, and possible will come true? Predict the future however you will, gentlemen—he says to the futurologists—so long as you do not rest your predictions on the computation of maximal chances....

The imposing work of Professor Kouska without a doubt merits recognition. Still, this scholar, in the heat of the cognitive moment, fell into an error, for which he has been taken to task by Professor Bedřich Vrchlicka in a lengthy critical article appearing in the pages of Z
ëmledëlské Noviny.
Professor Vrchlicka contends that Professor Kouska's whole antiprobabilistic line of reasoning is based on an assumption both unstated and mistaken. For behind the façade of Kouska's argumentation lies concealed a “metaphysical wonderment at existence,” which might be couched in these words: “How is it that I exist now of all times, in this body of all bodies, in such a form and not another? How is it that I was not any of the millions of people who existed formerly, nor will be any of those millions who have yet to be born?” Even assuming that such a question makes sense, says Professor Vrchlicka, it has nothing at all to do with physics. But. on the surface it appears that it has and that one could rearticulate it thus: “Every man who has existed, i.e., lived till now, was the corporeal realization of a particular pattern of genes, the building blocks of heredity. We could in principle reproduce all the patterns that have been realized up to the present day; we would then find ourselves before a gigantic table filled with rows of genotypic formulas, each one of which would exactly correspond to a particular man who arose from it through embryonic growth. The question then leaps to one's lips: in what way precisely does that one genetic pattern in the table which corresponds to
me,
to
my
body, differ from all the others, that as a result of this difference it is
I
who am the living incarnation of that pattern into matter? That is, what
physical
conditions, what
material
circumstances ought I to take into account to arrive at an understanding of this difference, to comprehend why it is I can say of all the formulas on the table, ‘Those refer to Other People,' and only of one formula, ‘This refers to me, this is I AM'?”

It is absurd to think—Professor Vrchlicka explains—that physics, today or in a century, or in a thousand years, could provide an answer to a question so framed. The question has no meaning whatever in physics, because physics is not itself a person; consequently, when engaged in the investigation of anything, whether it be bodies heavenly or human, physics makes no distinction between me and you, this one and that one; the fact that I say of myself “I,” and of another “he,” physics contrives in its own way to interpret (relying on the general theory of logical automata, the theory of self-organizing systems, etc.), but it does not actually perceive the existential dissimilarity between “I” and “he.” To be sure, physics does reveal the
uniqueness
of individual people, because every man is (omitting twins!) the incarnation of a different genetic formula.

But Professor Kouska is not at all interested in the fact that each of us is constructed somewhat differently, that each has a physical and psychological individuality. The metaphysical wonderment inherent in Kouska's line of reasoning would not be diminished one jot were all people incarnations of one and the same genetic formula, were humanity to be made up entirely, so to speak, of identical twins. For one could then still ask what brings about the fact that “I” am not “someone else,” that I was born not in the time of the Pharaohs or in the Arctic, but now, but here, and still it would not be possible to obtain an answer to such a question from physics. The differences that occur between me and other people begin for me with this, that I am myself, that I cannot jump outside myself or exchange existences with anyone, and it is only afterward and secondarily that I notice that my appearance, my nature, is not the same as that of all the rest of the living (and the dead). This most important difference, primary for me, simply does not exist for physics, and nothing more remains to be said on the subject. And therefore what causes the blindness of physics and physicists to this problem is not the theory of probability.

By introducing the issue of the estimation of his chances of coming into the world, Professor Kouska has led himself and the reader astray. Professor Kouska believes that physics, to the question “What conditions had to be met in order that I, Kouska, could be born?,” will answer with the words “The conditions that had to be met were, physically, improbable in the extreme!” Now, this is not the case. The question really is: “I see I am a living man, one of millions. I would like to learn in what way it is I differ
physically
from all other people, those who were, who are, and who are to be, that I was—or am—not any of them, but represent only myself and say of myself ‘I.' ” Physics does not answer this question by resorting to probabilisms; it declares that from its point of view there is, between the asker and all other people, no
physical
difference. And thus Kouska's proof neither assails nor upsets the theory of probability, for it has nothing whatever to do with it!

The present reviewer's reading of such conflicting opinions from two such illustrious thinkers has thrown him into great perplexity. He is unable to resolve the dilemma, and the only definite thing he has carried away with him from reading the work of Professor B. Kouska is a thoroughgoing knowledge of the events that led to the rise of a scholar of so interesting a family history. As for the crux of the quarrel, it had best be turned over to specialists more qualified.

Professor Dobb's book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called “the cruelest science man ever created.” Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral; we are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way, in the research, to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one's natural instincts, and if nowhere else it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded. We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called “experimental theogony.”. Even so, this reviewer is struck by the fact that when the press played up the thing, nine years ago, public opinion was stunned by the personetic disclosures. One would have thought that in this day and age nothing could surprise us. The centuries rang with the echo of the feat of Columbus, whereas the conquering of the Moon in the space of a week was received by the collective consciousness as a thing practically humdrum. And yet the birth of personetics proved to be a shock.

The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives: “persona” and “genetic”—“genetic” in the sense of formation, or creation. The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the eighties, crossbred with applied intellectronics. Today everyone knows of personetics; the man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings—an answer not wide of the mark, to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter. To date we have nearly a hundred personetic programs. Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the “linear” type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.

The theoretical possibility of creating sentience was divined some time ago, by Norbert Wiener, as certain passages of his last book,
God and Golem,
bear witness. Granted, he alluded to it in that half-facetious manner typical of him, but underlying the facetiousness were fairly grim premonitions. Wiener, however, could not have foreseen the turn that things would take twenty years later. The worst came about—in the words of Sir Donald Acker—when at MIT “the inputs were shorted to the outputs.”

At present a “world” for personoid “inhabitants” can be prepared in a matter of a couple of hours. This is the time it takes to feed into the machine one of the full-fledged programs (such as
BAAL
66,
CREAN
IV, or
JAHVE
09). Dobb gives a rather cursory sketch of the beginnings of personetics, referring the reader to the historical sources; a confirmed practitioner-experimenter himself, he speaks mainly of his own work—which is much to the point, since between the English school, which Dobb represents, and the American group, at MIT, the differences are considerable, both in the area of methodology and as regards experimental goals. Dobb describes the procedure of “6 days in 120 minutes” as follows. First, one supplies the machine's memory with a minimal set of givens; that is—to keep within a language comprehensible to laymen—one loads its memory with substance that is “mathematical.” This substance is the protoplasm of a universum to be “habitated” by personoids. We are now able to supply the beings that will come into this mechanical, digital world—that will be carrying on an existence in it, and in it only—with an environment of nonfinite characteristics. These beings, therefore, cannot feel imprisoned in the physical sense, because the environment does not have, from their standpoint, any bounds. The medium possesses only one dimension that resembles a dimension given us also—namely, that of the passage of time (duration). Their time is not directly analogous to ours, however, because the rate of its flow is subject to discretionary control on the part of the experimenter. As a rule, the rate is maximized in the preliminary phase (the so-called creational warm-up), so that our minutes correspond to whole eons in the computer, during which there takes place a series of successive reorganizations and crystallizations—of a synthetic cosmos. It is a cosmos completely spaceless, though possessing dimensions, but these dimensions have a purely mathematical, hence what one might call an “imaginary” character. They are, very simply, the consequence of certain axiomatic decisions of the programmer, and their number depends on him. If, for example, he chooses a ten-dimensionality, it will have for the structure of the world created altogether different consequences from those where only six dimensions are established. It should be emphasized that these dimensions bear no relation to those of physical space but only to the abstract, logically valid constructs made use of in systems creation.

This point, all but inaccessible to the nonmathematician, Dobb attempts to explain by adducing simple facts, the sort generally learned in school. It is possible, as we know, to construct a geometrically regular three-dimensional solid—say, a cube—which in the real world possesses a counterpart in the form of a die; and it is equally possible to create geometrical solids of four, five,
n
dimensions (the four-dimensional is a tesseract). These no longer possess real counterparts, and we can see this, since in the absence of any physical dimension No. 4 there is no way to fashion genuine four-dimensional dice. Now, this distinction (between what is physically constructible and what may be made only mathematically) is, for personoids, in general nonexistent, because their world is of a purely mathematical consistency. It is built of mathematics, though the building blocks of that mathematics are ordinary, perfectly physical objects (relays, transistors, logic circuits—in a word, the whole huge network of the digital machine).

As we know from modern physics, space is not something independent of the objects and masses that are situated within it. Space is, in its existence, determined by those bodies; where they are not, where nothing is—in the material sense—there, too, space ceases, collapsing to zero. Now, the role of material bodies, which extend their “influence,” so to speak, and thereby “generate” space, is carried out in the personoid world by systems of a mathematics called into being for that very purpose. Out of all the possible “maths” that in general might be made (for example, in an axiomatic manner), the programmer, having decided upon a specific experiment, selects a particular group, which will serve as the underpinning, the “existential substrate,” the “ontological foundation” of the created universum. There is in this, Dobb believes, a striking similarity to the human world. This world of ours, after all, has “decided” upon certain forms and upon certain types of geometry that best suit it—best, since most simply (three-dimensionality, in order to remain with what one began with). This notwithstanding, we are able to picture “other worlds” with “other properties”—in the geometrical and not only in the geometrical realm. It is the same with the personoids: that aspect of mathematics which the researcher has chosen as the “habitat” is for them exactly what for us is the “real-world base” in which we live, and live perforce. And, like us, the personoids are able to “picture” worlds of different fundamental properties.

Dobb presents his subject using the method of successive approximations and recapitulations; that which we have outlined above, and which corresponds roughly to the first two chapters of his book, in the subsequent chapters undergoes partial revocation—through complication. It is not really the case, the author advises us, that the personoids simply come upon a readymade, fixed, frozen sort of world in its irrevocably final form; what the world will be like in its specificities depends on them, and this to a growing degree as their own activeness increases, as their “exploratory initiative” develops. Nor does the likening of the universum of the personoids to a world in which phenomena exist only to the extent that its inhabitants observe them provide an accurate image of the conditions. Such a comparison, which is to be found in the works of Sainter and Hughes, Dobb considers an “idealist deviation”—a homage that personetics has rendered to the doctrine, so curiously and so suddenly resurrected, of Bishop Berkeley. Sainter maintained that the personoids would know their world after the fashion of a Berkeleyan being, which is not in a position to distinguish “esse” from “
percipi
”—to wit, it will never discover the difference between the thing perceived and that which occasions the perception in a way objective and independent of the one perceiving. Dobb attacks this interpretation of the matter with a passion.
We,
the creators of their world, know perfectly well that what is perceived by them indeed exists; it exists inside the computer, independent of them—though, granted, solely in the manner of mathematical objects.