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

exponential curve -- when we were fundamentally unprepared for the ascent? The
socialization reaction began when the human atoms had barely given evidence of
their first cohesiveness. Those atoms were a material strictly biological, a
material made and prepared to satisfy typically biological criteria, but that
sudden movement, that upward shove, seized us and carried us off into the
space of civilization. How could such a start not have bound onto that
biological material accidental convergences, much as a probe that, lowered to
the ocean floor, scoops up from it, along with the desired object, debris and
chance pieces of junk? I recall the damp relay in the sophisticated computer.
And the process that engendered us -- why, pray, must it have been in every
respect perfect? Yet neither we nor our philosophers dare consider the idea
that the finality and singularity of the existence of our species do not at
all imply a perfection under whose aegis the species originated -- just as
such perfection is not present at the cradle of any individual.
It is a curious thing that the marks of our imperfection, which identify
the species, have never been, not by any faith, recognized for what they
simply are, that is, the results of uncertain processes; on the contrary,
practically all religions agree in the conviction that man's imperfection is
the result of a demiurgic clash between two antagonistic perfections, each of
which has damaged the other. The Light collided with the Dark, and man arose:
thus runs their formula. My conception sounds ill-natured only if it is wrong
-- but we do not know that it is wrong. The friend whom I mentioned
caricatured it; he said that according to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who,
in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for
thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump,
because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is
purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan,
that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the
twists and turns of anthropogenesis.
But I intended to speak about myself, not about the species. I do not
know where it came from or what caused it, but even now, after all these
years, I find within myself that malice, as vigorous as ever, because the
energies of our most primitive impulses never age. Do I shock? Over many
decades now, I have acted like a rectification column, producing a distillate
composed of the pile of my articles as well as of the articles occasioned by
them -- hagiography. If you say that you are not interested in the inner
workings of the apparatus which I unnecessarily bring out into the light, note
that I, in the purity of the nourishment I have vouchsafed you, see the
indelible signs of all my secrets.
 Mathematics for me was no Arcadia; it was, rather, a court of last
resort, a church that I entered, unbelieving, because it offered sanctuary. My
principal metamathematical work has been called destructive, and not without
reason. It was no accident that I called into question, irreversibly, the
foundations of mathematical deduction and the concept of the analytic in
logic. I turned the tools of statistics against these basic notions -- until
at last they crumbled. I could not be a devil underground and an angel in the
light of day. I created, yes, but on ruins, and Yowitt is right: I took away
more truths than I ever gave.
For this negative balance the epoch was held to account, not I; because
I had followed in the steps of Russell and G├╢del -- after the former had