Summa Technologiae

Conclusion

CONCLUSION A book’s conclusion is to some extent its summary. It may thus be worth pondering once again the eagerness with which I have shifted responsibility for the future Gnosis of our species onto the dead shoulders of nonexistent machines. Someone could ask whether this was not caused by some kind of frustration of which the author himself was not fully aware, a frustration resulting from the fact that—owing to historical and his own limitations—he was unable to penetrate science and its prospects. Consequently, he seems to have invented, or rather slightly modernized, a version of the famous Ars Magna,1 which clever Lullus presented quite a long time ago, that is, in the year 1300, and which was rightly mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Leaving the question of my incompetence aside, I would reply as follows. This book differs from pure fantasy in that it tries to provide a relatively firm basis for its hypotheses, while also considering that which exists to be the most solid thing. This is why it constantly refers to Nature, since this is where the“autonomous apsychic predictors”and the “intelligent device” are located—in the form of chromosomal roots and a brainlike crown that form the large tree of evolution. The enquiry as to whether we can imitate those predictors and that device is worth the effort because it is based on reason. Yet, when it comes to the actual possibility of designing the preceding, it is a nonissue because all those “devices”already exist—and they have passed, rather well, an empirical test that is billions of years old. The question that remains concerns my privileging of the “chromosomal ” model of nonintelligent causality over the “brain” model of intelligent causality. This decision was based purely on design factors 360 CONCLUSION regarding matter and information because, when it comes to their capacity , throughput, degree of miniaturization, economy of material, independence, efficacy, stability, speed, and last but not least, universality , chromosomal systems manifest superiority over brain ones, beating them in all the areas listed previously. They also lack any kind of formal linguistic limitation, which means that no complex problems of semantic or psychological nature are likely to arise in the course of their material operation. Finally, we also know that a direct confrontation between genotypic aggregates on a molecular level, which is supposed to optimize the results of their material causality according to the state of the environment , is possible—as demonstrated by every act of fertilization. Fertilization is an act of“taking a molecular decision”in a confrontation between two partly alternative“hypotheses”about a future state of the organism, whereby the gametes of both sexes are “carriers” of those hypotheses. The possibility of recombining in a similar fashion the material elements of a prediction does not result from imposing on ontogenetic processes some other processes that would be external to the ontogenetic ones but is rather built into the very structure of the chromosomes. Besides, genotypes are dedicated to the problem of prediction—which is so precious to science—in an exclusive and absolute way. The brain lacks any of those design features. Brains as systems that are more “definitely closed” than genotypic systems are unable to confront their full information content directly (the way chromosomes can), while a significant part of their high complexity, which is permanently involved in tasks connected with system control, cannot commit itself to “prediction work.” Brains seem to be “finished” or “tested” models, or prototypes. They “just” need to be repeated, perhaps by using some selective amplification, if they are to become, in their synthetic versions, inducers of theory formation. Engaging specialized systems such as chromosomal ones in this task would in turn not only be extremely difficult but might also prove impossible. Yet the success of “heredity devices,” measured in the number of bits in a time unit per a carrier’s atom, is so high that it may be worth trying it, and not just with one single generation. In any case, what technologist is going to resist such a temptation? From twenty letters of amino acids Nature constructed a “pure” language, which expresses—via a slight rearrangement of nucleotide syllables—phages, viruses, bacteria,T. rexes, termites, hummingbirds, forests, and nations, as long as it has enough time at its disposal. This language, so perfectly atheoretical, anticipates not only the conditions at the bottom of the oceans and at the tops of [3.135.209.249] Project MUSE...