"Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

What constitutes its crown may not be cut free from its roots, because
it arose not in the course of the three hundred or eight hundred years of
civilized history, but through the millennia of linguistic evolution: at the
loci of man's encounter with his environment, from the time of tribes and
rivers. Language is wiser than the mind of any one of us, just as the body is
wiser than the discernment of any of its units as it moves, self-aware and
many-faceted, through the current of the life process. The inheritance of both
evolutions, of living matter and of the matter of informational speech, has
not yet been exhausted, but already we dream of stepping beyond the boundaries
of both. These words of mine may make poor philosophizing, but that cannot be
said of my proofs of the linguistic genesis of mathematical concepts, of the
fact, in other words, that those concepts arose neither from the enumerability
of things nor from the cleverness of reason.
The factors that contributed to my becoming a mathematician are complex,
no doubt, but one major factor was talent, without which I could have
accomplished in my profession no more than could a hunchback in a championship
track-and-field competition. I do not know whether the factors that had to do
with my character, rather than with my talent, played a role in the account I
intend to give -- but I should not rule out the possibility, for the
importance of the affair itself is such that neither natural modesty nor pride
ought to be considered.
As a rule, chroniclers become extremely honest when they feel that what
they have to say about themselves is of monumental importance. I, on the
contrary, with the premise of honesty arrive at the complete immaterialness of
my person; that is, I am forced into an insufferable garrulity simply because
I lack the ability to tell where the statistical caprice of personality
composition leaves off and the rule of the behavior of the species begins.
In various fields one can acquire knowledge that is real, or the kind
only that provides spiritual comfort, and the two need not agree. The
differentiation of these two types of knowledge in anthropology borders on the
impossible. If we know nothing so well as ourselves, it is surely for this
reason: that we constantly renew our demand for nonexistent knowledge, i.e.,
information as to what created man, while ruling out in advance, without
realizing it, the possibility of the union of pure accident with the most
profound necessity.
I once wrote a program for an experiment of one of my friends. The idea
was to simulate, in a computer, families of neutral beings; they would be
homeostats, cognizant of their "environment" but possessing, initially, no
"emotional" or "ethical" qualities. These beings multiplied -- only in the
machine, of course, therefore in a way that a layman would call
"arithmetically" -- and after a few dozen "generations" there continually
appeared, over and over again, in each of the "specimens," a characteristic
that made no sense at all to us, a sort of equivalent of "aggression." After
many painstaking but fruitless checking calculations, my friend, at his wit's
end -- really grasping at straws -- began examining the most trivial
circumstances of the experiment; and then it turned out that a certain relay
had reacted to the changes of humidity in the air, and thus those changes had
become the hidden producer of the deviation.
I cannot help thinking of that experiment as I write, for is it not
possible that social evolution lifted us from the Animal Kingdom in an