Between an Animal and a Machine

Front matter

Modernity in Question Studies in Philosophy and History of Ideas 10

Pawet Majewski

Between an Animal and a Machine

Part Two Summa Technologiae - Technology as Lifeworld

7 Kolakowski's Review e —— 69 8 What Is Lens Essay’? ua 73 9. Prolesomens ioseph Us EA IRR eU dra ai 77

10 Evolutions RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMRMMMMMMMMMAKRhRRR7VAMNMMAEMEM 85

Contents

Turing Body...

Metatheary Qu ——— Á—

16 Putting Pieces Together u...

Part Ihree Autoevolution and Posthumanism

Utopia in ST...

Contents 7

3: | Psychology A —————— ÉÁSI/A 4

Introduction

Lemology Pure and Applied

Gyórgy Lukäcs’s book about young Hegel has 606 pages in a classic English edition, and 1,011 pages in the Polish edition.’ A book about the life and work of Faulkner by Joseph L. Blotner consists of two volumes amounting to 1,846 pages of the main text, supplemented by 269 pages of references with separate page numbering.’ A biography of Thomas Mann, written by Klaus Harpprecht in its one volume edition consists of 2,253 pages of very fine print,’ while Sartre's unfinished work on Flaubert takes up 2,801 pages (in three volumes).* So how many pages would it take to write exhaustively about the life and works of Stanislaw Lem? A comparable number perhaps. Such an exhaustive description is not what this work is after though.

The readers’ response to Lem’s works has gone through a number of phases. His novels and short stories started being talked about and appreciated in the 1950s in communist Poland, as well as in other countries of the Soviet Bloc, especially the USSR and East Germany. By the late 1960s they gained renown in West Germany and the United States as well. For a long time, however, he was perceived as a sci-fi author, and the genre was seen as inferior literary production by institutions in a position to determine literary value. The label did a lot of evil to Lem, because for years there would be no appreciation of intellectual values of his works. And once they eventually started being noticed, they left many critics puzzled, as the intellectual input made by Lem by far exceeded the competence of most literary scholars, while scientists representing particular disciplines explored by Lem did not deem his literary works and essays worthy of a thorough discussion.

This somewhat schizophrenic state seems to continue until today really. In the 21st century the intellectual circles appreciate Stanislaw Lem, but the appreciation is often conventional. He is being praised for some vague achievements bordering on literature and science, for accurate predictions of technological

1 Gyórgy Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. by R. Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT, 1977). Idem, Młody Hegel: o powigzaniach dialektyki z ekonomig, trans. by M. J. Siemek (Warszawa: PWN, 1980).

2 joseph L. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974).

4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Lidiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971, 1975).

o2

10 Introduction development - but it is not easy to tell what that in fact meant. Every once in a while his work is still seen as “not quite serious. His situation as a writer is peculiar: his work as a whole is not "literary" enough for literary circles, and it is not "scientific" enough for scientists. Therefore, it is very difficult to classify him into any literary or philosophical current. On the other hand his work cannot be qualified as “science.” From the very beginning Lem would take up topics in-between two disciplines - which has become a scientific practice only several decades later (apart from the episode of cybernetics). So to any specialists he by necessity appeared to be an amateur. The unlucky proximity with trashy sci-fi and pseudoscientific charlatans, combined with the seeming abyss separating his work from the pantheon of literature and philosophy have contributed to the unfortunate image of Lem as a sort of technology prattler. Only as late as in the 1970s have there emerged a thorough criticism and interpretation, both in Poland and abroad, which would place him among the most eminent contemporary authors. Decades of being underestimated had grown in him into a lasting sense of frustration, which only became stronger in the last years of his life.

This book will be primarily devoted to Stanislaw Lem's two discursive works: Dialogues and Summa Technologiae. I will try to prove that they are the authors most significant input in the process of understanding civilizational changes in the West in the late 20th and early 21st century - even though they were in fact written several decades earlier. Lems fiction will be referenced here often, but marginally, as a detailed analysis would complicate the argument excessively. Lem's two later theoretical treatises are wilfully omitted here: The Philosophy of Chance and Science Fiction and Futurology. They are devoted to completely different issues and employ different theoretical and interpretation methodology. They deserve a separate monograph.

Both Dialogues and Summa Technologiae are presented here against a broad theoretical background, as this approach helps unveil the intellectual sources that inspired them. Part One is devoted to Dialogues, which constitute Lem's interpretation of cybernetics. After outlining the history of the discipline and its significance in world science in the 1950s and 1960s, I proceed with an analysis of Dialogues, where I show that by writing the book Lem attempted to apply the system of categories provided by cybernetics to build his own anthropological project. However, being aware of philosophical contradictions inherent to the attempt, he could not coherently complete the plan.

Within Lem's oeuvre, Dialogues prepare the ground for a much bolder work: Summa Technologiae. The scope and the open structure of the text make it impossible to come up with unequivocal interpretation. In Part Two, I offer an interpretation according to which Summa Technologiae is an elaborate utopian

Lemology Pure and Applied 11 project of autoevolution of the human species, of transition from a phase of haphazard biological evolution toward a planned phase of controlled regulation of human biological and physiological features.

Part Three, which takes up most of this book, is devoted to contemporary intellectual currents, which take up on Lems project of autoevolution. The most important among them is posthumanism, which was established in the United States in the 1980s.° Similarities it shares with Lem's thought, while significant, are in fact accidental. Yet, it does not change the fact that Summa Technologiae and posthumanism belong to the same intellectual process.

My main task when analyzing both Lems texts and the works of other authors referenced here is to reconstruct their covert assumptions. By revealing and analyzing them, I offer and further prove a thesis that both Lem's and posthumanists' anthropology have traits of utopian liberalism, based on an assumption of human rationality. In order to interpret Lem in a way that will not be limited to a narrow range of linguistic and genre-related issues, I need to refer to a wide range of disciplines. Therefore, this book will invoke tools of literary criticism, sociology, history of ideas, philosophy, science studies, bioethics and a few other disciplines, which means that as a whole this work cannot be classified as belonging to any single of the disciplines listed above. It can be its disadvantage, but it may also open a broader perspective on Lem’s works.

5 In this book I use the notion of *posthumanism" in a different sense that is prevalent today - I do not mean an intellectual current, which developed from a rejection of anthropocentrism in the humanities, but a technocratic ideology of sorts that allows a possibility that the human species could transcend its biological limitations with advanced technology.

Part One Dialogues - Cybernetics as an Anthropology

The intellectual climate of the 21st century is not particularly favorable to the so-called "grand narratives" - intellectual approaches that aim to explain the entire reality available to human mind, or at least a large portion of it. It is commonly accepted that structuralism was the last such grand narrative, which seemed to serve as a metatheory of the humanities in the 1960s and 1970s. However, its predecessor in that regard - cybernetics - is rarely mentioned, even though it was even more prevalent between the end of the 1940s and mid-1960s.

Part One of this book is to be devoted to Dialogues - the one among Lems works in which his fascination with cybernetics is the strongest.° In fact, Dialogues cannot be understood without referring to the swift career of the discipline. Therefore, before discussing cybernetics itself, I should outline briefly its history. This description of what cybernetics is will, however, come from an amateur. The mathematical tools and vocabulary used by the creators and proponents of cybernetics remain unavailable to me. I will be treating cybernetics as a phenomenon in the history of science and ideas, leaving mathematics in a sort of “black box,” which is not to be opened, but which is being observed focusing on its location and functioning. It is justifiable, as the cyberneticists never limited themselves to producing mathematical arguments. The founding father of cybernetics himself, Norbert Wiener showed the path here (I will return to it). In fact, some branches of cybernetics detached themselves completely from science. And these branches happened to wither the earliest.

Cybernetics is commonly described as “a scientific study of control and communication in complex systems" - thisis how it was defined by its creator, Norbert Wiener.’ The general character of this description is quite significant, indicating not only a broad background and a variety of sources of the discipline, but also its broad scope. Wiener gave it a name derived from Greek.* "Kybernetes" means

6 “This book [...] comes from a captivation with cybernetics.” Stanislaw Lem, “Przedmowa do drugiego wydania; in: Dialogi, 3rd edition (Kraków: WL, 1984), 5. All translations from Dialogues, which have not been translated to English in full, have been made for this work by Olga Kaczmarek.

7 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT, 1965), 11.

8 Ibidem.

“helmsman” and is derived from the verb “kybernao’, meaning “to steer? The term "governor" has the same root.

Cybernetics was largely born from war-time needs and was related to technologies of building quick counting machines - in both cases the purpose was to facilitate calculating trajectories of missiles targeting bullets. In an introduction to his book Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,? which became the founding work of the entire discipline, Wiener describes in detail how the ideas of cybernetics were born during seminars he participated in at Harvard's Vanderbilt Hall in 1941-1944 together with mathematicians (including von Neumann), engineers, biologists and doctors." This interdisciplinary gathering observed that there are numerous analogies between the functioning of new calculating machines and biological organisms when it comes to mechanisms of steering and control. It turned out some processes within calculating machines and human nervous systems can be described with the same mathematical formulae - that is, processes that include feedback and oscillations.” Research continued after the end of the war was conducted simultaneously in engineering and biology. This duality of research directions is characteristic ofthe entire cybernetics, and it will be important for the argument that follows.

Wiener himself played a pivotal role in shaping the new discipline - he stood behind its laws and ideology. As a child this versatile scholar and intellectual was fascinated by nature, and traces of such interests are clear in his works, which combine mathematics with physiology. It must have tickled the imagination ofa young physician Stanislaw Lem, when he read his books in Mieczyslaw Choynowski's seminar; learning English from them.? Wiener was not only a

9 A Greek-English Lexicon compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott (LSJ) ed. 1996 s.v. (s. 1004). Both words can be found in Homer (Il. 19, 43; Od. 9, 78; 3, 283). As early as Aeschylus (Suppliants 750, “shepherd of the ship") and Plato (Phaedrus, 247 c, "charioteer"), the word "kybernetes" is used metaphorically.

10 Idem, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948); all quotes and references from the 2nd edition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961).

11 Wiener, Cybernetics, 21 and following.

12 Such processes include movement disorders in Parkinson’s disease.

13 Stanislaw Lem, Stanislaw Bereś, Tako rzecze ... Lem (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie 2001), 43. “Choynowski set up Science Seminar for Jagiellonian University Research Assistants and on behalf ofthe group he approached innumerable research institutions in Canada and United States requesting books for the starved Polish academia. Seeing all these treasures, unavailable to me because of the language, I sat down to learning English with utmost diligence. I cannot say this was typical science I studied, because mathematician, but also an engaged social critic, which can be best seen in his book The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society (1950), which is nota scientific work, but a collection of essays about science for a general public, oftentimes with a journalistic air to them. The fact that this particular book has become a popular guide to cybernetics shows that unlike other disciplines, cybernetics was tied to its social context from the very beginning - its creator himself has positioned it that way, and he did it on purpose. This was certainly aided by his powerful, authoritarian personality, which emanates from his determined arguments admitting no opposition and densely marking his texts, as well as from his very critical remarks about the postwar American society."

Apart from contemporary needs and an intellectual osmosis between biologists and engineers, for Wiener the sources of cybernetics lied primarily in the development of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the late 19th century. He had especially great respect for one of the men behind both these disciplines - Josiah Willard Gibbs, whose long underestimated works greatly enriched statistical interpretation of energy transmission processes. ^ Information transmission is part of these processes, as Wiener and his colleagues remarked - and the information is treated as a physical quality here. In Cybernetics, Wiener provides basis for a mathematical description of information,'* which was then developed further by his disciple, Claude Shannon. This is where physics and biology meet: according to Wiener a biological organism is an energy and information processing system.

Later cyberneticists developed the discipline much further and found some much earlier antecedents for it. They saw all thinkers and engineers involved in combinatorics and building calculating or moving machines as early cyberneticists, from Ramon Llull and Jaquet-Droz to Pascal and Leibniz (Wiener presented the latter as the "patron saint of cybernetics"). Even cabalist mystics itstarted with Wiener's Cybernetics, which I read almost like Champollion deciphering the hieroglyphs [...] slowly [...] with dictionary in my hand.”

14 Cf Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), Chapters 2, 7 and 9; quoted from the edition: (London: Free Association Books, 1989); idem, Cybernetics and Communication. .., Chapter 8.

15 Ludwig Boltzmann is usually seen as the main creator of thermodynamics, but Wiener hardly ever mentions him. About Gibbs see The Human Use..., “Introduction,” 7-15; and Cybernetics..., chapter 2, “Groups and Statistical Mechanics,” 45-59.

16 Cybernetics, chapter 3, “Time Series, Information and Communication,’ 60-94.

with their search for Golem were listed in that context." Mathematical roots

of cybernetics were largely impacted by early game theory and von Neumann's

theory of automata,!* Turings works on computability and the probability theory,

which was being developed at the time by thinkers such as Andrey Kolmogorov

and Ronald Fisher (all these names come up both in Wiener’s and Lemis texts). It was soon observed that certain kinds of machines and some living organisms - particularly the higher living organisms - can, as we have seen, modify their patterns of behavior on the basis of past experience so as to achieve specific antientropic ends. In these higher forms of communicative organisms the environment, considered as past experience of an individual, can modify the pattern of behavior into one which will in some sense or other will deal more effectively with the future environment.”

It was another step toward conceptually placing humans and machines on a par. A theory of “learning machines” started being developed, together with building such machines, initially quite primitive, and then increasingly complex.

In 1948 William Ross Ashby made the first Homeostat - “a physical model imitating the phenomenon of homeostasis [i.e. physiological balance in a variable environment] and the self-organizing capacities of the brain?” The Homeostat was in fact the first practical success of cybernetics. In the 1950s and 1960s cybernetics developed swiftly and had its big entry into such disciplines as biology, economy, technical sciences (including telecommunication), sociology, political science and other?! The marriage of cybernetics and biology gave rise to a discipline sometimes called bionics (usually biocybernetics) - and this was when for the first time there were publications on systems that combine biological and mechanical components, based on thorough research on the functioning of human nervous system.? I emphasize that so much, because such

17 Henryk Greniewski (1903-1972), one ofthe Polish cyberneticists referred to the myth, labeling his own theory of machines imitating humans as "the Golems theory?

18 John von Neumanns last unfinished work was titled The Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

19 The Human Use..., 48.

20 Maly slownik cybernetyczny, ed. by M. Kempisty (Warszawa: WP, 1973), 147; it includes a detailed description of Ashby's Homeostat.

21 Cf. G. R. Boulanger, “Prologue: What is Cybernetics?’ in: Survey of Cybernetics. A Tribute to Dr Norbert Wiener, ed. by J. Rose (London: Illiffe Books Ltd.), 7-12. The text is one of the manifestos of the omnipotence of cybernetics.

22 Cf. Michael A. Arbib, The Metaphorical Brain. An Introduction to Cybernetics as Artificial Intelligence and Brain Theory (New York-London-Sydney-Toronto: Wiley, 1972). Two parts of this book provide a detailed description of methodological and systems (cyborgs) will be one of the main topics of Part Three of this book. For some time it seemed like creating a structure that would combine features of a biological organism and a machine is close. Research in economical cybernetics looked promising. New subdisciplines were formed too, such as socio- and psychocybernetics and military, medical, pedagogical and linguistic cybernetics (the latter producing the first attempts at machine translations). Researching all types of steering processes, scholars focused on problems such as the impact of steering signals and feedback on the quality and stability of control, the impact of the structure of the systems on their reliability and the resistance of steering systems to interference. It needs to be emphasized, given the liberties with terminology taken by later epigones of cybernetics, that all these notions originally had precise mathematics determinants, formed on the basis of advanced fields of the science. In the 1970s it was further enriched by linking cybernetics to the general system theory,? which made it possible to research complex steering systems, among other things.

While creating cybernetics, Norbert Wiener saw it not only as a new, revealing discipline of science but also as a remedy to the increasing atomization of sciences? and as a major tool shaping social life.” Very soon, however, in the 1960s it became clear that neither of these “metascientific” goals of cybernetics is or scientific implications of two views: the evolutionary one according to which humans are animals, and the cybernetic one, according to which they are mechanisms.

23 It is a theory formed in 1930-1960 by an Austrian philosopher and biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), who claimed that a biological organism is not a simple sum of components, but constitutes a system characterized by unity and integrality, coordinating functions and processes, the organization of which is an important feature of life. The theory was to be an alternative to mechanistic and vitalist approaches in biology. It became an important argument for those who opposed reductionism in philosophy of science.

24 “For many years ... I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas of the growth ofthe sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields, which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin. Today there are a few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may bea topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist? (Cybernetics..., 2)

25 Significant part of The Human Use of Human Beings is devoted to discussions of the implications of the cybernetics on social life; cf. particularly chapters 6-9, 112-162.

can be achieved. Instead of quickly becoming a mathesis universalis, it started dividing into subdisciplines, which were losing connection with one another. The attempts to apply cybernetics to social sciences, which were in fact undertaken against Wiener’s will,”° soon failed, as they turned cybernetic terminology from a precise vocabulary into a set of blurry metaphors with no heuristic value (I shall provide examples of that later). The purely technical fields of cybernetics, such as the theory of automata, of adaptive control systems and of optimal and hierarchical control, as well as the more specialized biocybernetical research, met the same fate as all other subdisciplines: this atomization and formal sophistication have made them completely inaccessible for those who specialize in slightly other fields (not to mention amateurs). What happened was exactly what Wiener was trying to save the science from.

There are innumerable texts about cybernetics. Globally there are hundreds of monographs and dozens of thousands of articles. It is impossible to pin down the moment when all this production got relegated to the margins of real science, because naturally the cyberneticists themselves have never admitted it had happened. It can be said that the 1970s brought the final fading of classic cybernetics, even though it is also the moment when Heinz von Foerster announced the end of “first-order cybernetics" and the beginning of "second-order cybernetics" in a work titled Cybernetics of Cybernetics. He defined the former as cybernetics of observed systems, while the latter as cybernetics of observing systems (which means the discipline has not avoided the self-referentiality, which became overwhelming in social sciences and the humanities at the time). This "second-order cybernetics" is now represented by sociocybernetics, which investigates the so-called autopoietic - or self-reproducing - systems." The

26 "Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion ofthis side of cybernetics ... the human sciences are very poor testing-grounds for a new mathematics technique: as poor as the statistical mechanics of gas would be to a being of the order of size of a molecule, to whom the fluctuations which we ignore form a larger standpoint would be precisely the matters of greatest interest.” (Cybernetics..., 24-25).

27 The term was first introduced in the 1970s by two Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. It is a distant consequence of the notion of homeostasis and of learning machines, as well as of the general system theory. Niklas Luhmann incorporated it into his vocabulary. For more on sociocybernetics, see under "sociocybernetics" in: International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. by N. Smelser, P. B. Baltes (Amsterdam, New York: Elsevier, 2001), vol. 21, 14.549-14.554.

highly abstract character of these inquiries situates them beyond the main scope of sociology and social sciences, although such theories did have considerable impact on, for instance, biology of ecosystems for a while (there existed a branch called cybernetic ecology).

There still exist professional associations such as the American Society for Cybernetics (www.asc-cybernetics.org, the website includes numerous links to other sites of similar character), as well as journals, such as the monthly Biological Cybernetics.” Today’s cybernetics is largely related to contemporary antireductionist theories, such as constructivism. The term includes attempts undertaken mostly by German scholars to encompass the entire human mental activity in one general theory, centered on the notion of "construction" (construction of reality in human cognitive apparatus) and employing the achievements of contemporary epistemology, system theory and system biology.

None of this means that cybernetics has not contributed anything to the mainstream world science after the period when it was one of the constituting disciplines. Fields such as IT, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) (which cyberneticists wrote about as early as in the 1950s), the theory of automata, organization theory, telecommunication and system engineering also owe a lot to cybernetics. Economic cybernetics contributed to the development of management theory (including managing "human resources"), optimizing theory and decision theory. The specialists in neural networks, which were the thing of the time in the 1980s and 19905, are especially indebted to cybernetics. The problem of complexity, which was in fashion at the time, investigated by both physicists (such as Stuart Kaufmann) and biologists (such as Ilya Prigogine), has a lot in common with system theory combined with an indeterminist philosophical orientation.

A detailed investigation of the growth of cybernetics in specific countries would be very time consuming. Nevertheless, it is important to glance at what happened with it in Poland, which is, I believe, a good sample, illustrating in detail the process of degeneration, which I have outlined earlier.

28 The subtitle is Communication and Control in Organisms and Automata. The editorial team is international, mostly German, and the publisher is Springer-Verlag. The examples of titles from 2001 are: "Mathematical models of the eye movements in reading,’ “Synergetic analysis of spatio-temporal EEG patterns: Alzheimer's disease"

and “Noise-inducted transition in excitable neuron models.” The profile of these articles suggests loyalty to Wiener’s methods and goals.

The situation of cybernetics in Poland was peculiar. Up until 1956 it was seen as “a reactionary pseudoscience ... a form of contemporary mechanicism ... targeted against materialistic dialectics, against contemporary scientific philosophy established by I. P. Pavlov, and against a scientific approach to the laws of social life?” After that date, the political pendulum swung to the other side and very quickly - within a few years - cybernetics was made one of the main disciplines in the USSR, which was certainly connected to the utopian endeavors in social engineering undertaken there. Wiener and Ashby were translated into Russian in the 1950s.*° Many volumes of translations from Western languages were published, as well as Russian works. The boom lasted until the 1970s and it quickly spread into USSR’s satellite states.

First, in 1957, a number of translations of minor books were released; in 1959 Henryk Greniewski published his Elementy cybernetyki sposobem niematematycznym wyłożone [Elements of cybernetics laid out in a nonmathematical manner],?' in 1960 Wieners Human Use of Human Beings came

29 Krótki slownik filozoficzny, ed. by M. Rozental and P. Judin (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1955), 76-77.

30 For example: Wiener’s Kibernetika i obshchestvo, 1958, and Ashby's, Vvedenie v kibernetiku, 1959, with an introduction by Kolmogorov; Wiener' autobiography was also translated, as well as his minor essays, such as “God and Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion,’ was translated as: "Tvorets i robot. Obnizdenie niekotorych problem, v kotorych kibernetika stalkivaetsja s religiej?

31 Henryk Greniewski (1903-1972) was a logician and a mathematician, a professor at the University of Warsaw, a disciple of Tadeusz Kotarbiński; cf. Elementy... (Warszawa: PWN, 1959); his other books on cybernetics include Cybernetyka z lotu ptaka (Warszawa: KiW, 1959), 2nd edition amended and co-authored by Maria Kempisty (Warszawa: KiW, 1962); or Cybernetyka niematematyczna (Warszawa: PWN, 1969). In the latter book, part one repeats the text of Elementy..., while part two consists of Greniewski' original input to the theory of complex systems, while part three includes his theory of Golems, that is, *nodels imitating humans in at least one of the following areas: (1) imagination and dreams; (2) mastering language or languages; (3) conceptual thinking (especially deduction); (4) introspection"; this part is accompanied by a rich “Historical background” section. Greniewski's works are elegant, clear and precise.

out, and in 1961 - Ashby's Introduction to Cybernetics. The dates are important: they clearly show that Lem’s Dialogues, which were first published in 1957 and were largely based on works by Wiener and Ashby, which Lem read in original English, were bound to fall on deaf ears.? It could hardly have been otherwise in a country where a year earlier the word “cybernetics” would have been used in the context defined by Krótki stownik filozoficzny [“A short dictionary of philosophy" ]* - if at all. In Lem’s essay Niebezpieczne związki | Dangerous liaisons"] (1962), devoted to vain attempts to apply Shannons theory of information in the humanities, there is a following remark: “Eleven years ago I sat in the Czytelnik café in front of a learned gathering who were to decide about the publishing of The Magellan Nebula. This harmless book aimed for teenagers, was accused of smuggling, among other things, cybernetics, which I have not managed to successfully camouflage with a pompous term *mechaneuristics??? Moreover, as usual, Lem never provided any of the most basic explanations, instead dropping the reader right into the middle of his own observations, which constituted a very unorthodox approach to cybernetics. I shall try to prove how unorthodox it was later, for now suffice it to say that it could not have made understanding Dialogues any easier for the readers of their first edition (or the following ones).

32 William Ross Ashby, Wstep do cybernetyki, trans. by B. Osuchowska and A. Gosiewski (Warszawa: PWN, 1961); 2nd edition 1963 [original edition: An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall, 1958)]. It is an extensive, formal description of the functioning of a general model of a machine as a complex system (automaton), with a transition to biological systems in part three; it includes numerous references to Shannons mathematical theory of information.

33 "Ihave probably written this book too early, so all these issues seemed outworldly and did not resonate as a whole, it went to waste completely" (Tako rzecze ... Lem, 84).