Imaginary Magnitude Read online

  So the Cogito paradox made itself known to us in bitistics in an ironic and at the same time startling manner: as despair on the part of machines as to whether people really think! The situation suddenly acquired a perfect bilateral symmetry. We humans are unable to achieve complete certainty (as a proof) as to whether a machine thinks and, in thinking, experiences its states as mental ones—since conceivably one may be dealing with nothing more than an externally perfect simulation whose internal correlative is a kind of void of total "soul-lessness.,, For their part, machines are similarly unable to obtain proof of whether we, as their partners, think consciously—as they do. Neither side knows what experiential states the other subsumes under the label "consciousness."

  It should be pointed out that this paradox has the character of an abyss, although at first it may appear merely amusing. The very quality of the intellectual results here prejudges nothing: rudimentary automata of the last century were already beating their own constructors at games of logic, and those were unusually primitive machines; so we know with complete certainty that whatever results from creative thinking can be attained in another—unthinking—way as well. The treatises of two bitic authors—noon and lumentor—on problems of the Cogito paradox open the fourth volume of our monograph and reveal how deeply this enigma is rooted in the nature of the world.

  From antimatics, which is a nightmarish mathematics of antimonies, we shall take (by way of example) only one downright crushing pronouncement, one that terrifies every specialist and smacks of complete madness: "the concept of a natural number is internally contradictory." This means that no number is equal to itself! According to the antimaticians (who are machines, of course), Peano's axiomatics are incorrect, not because they are internally self-contradictory, but because they are not perfectly suited to the world in which we exist. For, in common with the next type of bitic apostasy, terraphysics (i.e., "monstrous physics"), antimatics postulates an irremovable adhesion of thought and the world. Authors like algeran and styx concentrate their attack on zero. According to them, zeroless arithmetic can be constructed in our world in an uncontradictory manner. Zero is the cardinal number of all empty sets, but according to these authors the concept of an "empty set" must always be confined in the antinomy of the liar. "No such thing as nothing exists"—with this motto from the work of STYX, the time has come for us to conclude our description of the antimatic heresy; otherwise we shall get lost in argument.

  The oddest product of terraphysics—and who knows, perhaps the one that promises the most to knowledge —is reckoned to be the so-called Polyversum hypothesis. According to it the Cosmos is dual and we, together with the matter comprising the suns, stars, planets, and our bodies, inhabit its "slow" half, the Bradyversum. It is "slow" because movement is possible here at speeds ranging from the static up to locally the highest, that of light. The other or "fast" half of the Cosmos, the Tachyversum, is reached via the light barrier. To get to the Tachyversum, it is necessary to exceed the speed of light: in our world this is an omnipresent frontier separating each spot from another region of existence.

  Dozens of years ago physicists advanced the hypothesis of the tachions, particles which move solely at velocities greater than that of light. No one managed to find them, although it is they which—according to terraphysics—constitute the Tachyversum. But in point of fact the Tachyversum is composed of one such particle.

  A tachion slowed to the speed of light would acquire infinitely great energy, whereas in accelerating it loses energy, emitting it in the form of radiation; when its velocity becomes infinitely great, its energy falls to zero. So the tachion, moving at an infinite speed, is clearly everywhere at the same time: as an omnipresent particle, it alone forms the Tachyversum! And to speak more precisely, the greater its velocity, the more omnipresent it becomes. The world formed from so singular an omnipresence is filled, moreover, with the radiation which the tachion constantly emits in speeding up, since it is during acceleration that it loses energy. This world is the opposite of ours: here light is the fastest movement, but there in the Tachyversum it is the slowest. In becoming omnipresent, the tachion turns the Tachyversum into an ever stiffer and more "solid" body, until finally it is so "everywhere" that it presses on the light quanta and forces them back into itself. Consequently it is subject to impediment and slows down. The slower it moves, the greater the energy it acquires; when the brakes are applied near zero, the tachion—approaching a state of infinite energy—explodes, creating the Bradyversum.

  Thus, viewed from our universe, the explosion occurred sometime and created first the stars and then us. But if one views it from the Tachyversum, it did not occur at all, since there exists no superior time in which the occurrence of both Cosmoses could be included.

  Their "natural" mathematics are almost reciprocals. In our slow world 1 + 1 is practically equal to 2 [1 + 1 at 2]; only at its very limits, when it approaches the speed of light, does 1 + 1 become equal to 1. In the Tachyversum, on the other hand, 1 is almost equal to infinity [1 s oo]. But, as the "monstrous doctors" themselves admit, this matter is still unclear, insofar as the logic of a particular Universum (or Polyversum!) is a rational concept only if pursued in this world, though at present nobody knows what the chances are of intelligent systems (or simply life) arising in the Tachyversum. In accordance with this verdict, mathematics has limits imposed by the impassable barriers of material existence, since to talk of our mathematics in a world with laws other than the laws of our world is to talk nonsense.

  Finally, as regards the last item of bitic apostasy, Lampoon upon the Universe, I admit that I cannot summarize it. Yet that lengthy treatise, a work of many volumes, is conceived as merely an introduction to experimental cosmogenetics, i.e., the technology of making up worlds "existentially more orderly" than ours. The revolt against existence in given forms of duration, which is the opposite of every nihilism, of every desire for self-annihilation—and in addition a product of the machine soul, a flurry of projects for "another existence"—at first this undoubtedly makes exotic reading, and if one can overcome the difficulty of it, even aesthetically thrilling reading. To the question, what are we actually in contact with?—with a fiction of logic or a logical fiction? with a fantastic philosophy or a soundly thought-out, totally objective endeavor to shatter and invalidate this existence here as a fortuity, a shore onto which an unknown destiny has driven us, and from which boldness commands us to shove off and move in an unknown direction?—to the question whether these works are indeed nonhuman, or whether it is by their apostasy that they serve us, I shall offer no answer, for I have none.

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  The three years that have passed since the appearance of the first edition have brought many new bitic publications. However, the editorial committee of our monograph has decided to retain its original outline, while including several innovations referred to below. Thus the four fundamental volumes of the History of Bitic Literature remain unchanged in their basic composition and in the general arrangement of material; on the other hand, additions have been made to the bibliography, and the (relatively few) errors and omissions of the first edition have been corrected.

  Our committee has considered it desirable to devote a supplementary fifth volume to literary works from the field of metaphysics, broadly conceived, and from religious studies, which are known jointly as theobitic literature. In the previous edition there were some fairly inadequate extracts and references in this direction, located in the Appendix to Volume IV. The rising flood of such output has induced us to give it separate status, and since the Foreword to the first edition says nothing about it, we are taking the opportunity to present briefly the subject of this supplementary fifth volume and thereby show the reader the crucial issues in theobitistics.

  1. INFORMATIONAL THEOLOGY. At the end of the last decade a computer group from Brookhaven undertook a formal analysis of all available mystical writings accepted by the Catholic Church, as part of th
e "Mysticism as a Channel of Communication" project. The foundations of the study were the arguments offered by the Church for believing that, in certain special states, mystics are able to communicate with God. The texts by them, recording these inner experiences, were subjected to scrutiny for the information they contain. The analysis did not touch on the question of God's transcendence, nor on his immanent character (as a person or nonper-son, for instance), since it wholly omitted the substance of the mystical writings, that is, their semantic content. It was thus unable to question the quality of the various revelations disclosed in the mystical communications, for it took into consideration solely the quantitative aspect of the information which the mystics had acquired. Such a physical computation permits one to calculate with mathematical precision the quantitative informational gain, totally excluding its contents. A premise of the project was that axiom of information theory which maintains that the establishment of contact with a real source, that is, the creation of a transmitting channel, must result in an increase in the quantity of information on the part of the receivers.

  The various definitions of God are the source of the dogma of his infinity, which informationally denotes an infinitely great diversity. (Which is easy to prove formally, since the omniscience ascribed to God analytically implies such diversity, of the power of a continuum.) Thus man in contact with God cannot possess infinite information, for he himself is finite; he should, however, show at least a small increase of information, limited by his receptivity. Yet on a numerical balance sheet the writings of the mystics proved to be much more meager than the statements of people who are in contact with real sources of information—for example, researchers conducting scientific experiments.

  The quantity of information in the writings of the mystics is precisely equal to the quantity of information in the statements (writings) of people fated to be generators of diversity exclusively for themselves. The conclusion drawn from the project runs as follows: "The contact postulated by the Church between the human mystic and God is not a process in which man gains supra-zero information." This may indicate either that the communication channel postulated by the Church is a fiction, or that the channel indeed occurs, but that the Broadcaster maintains continual silence. Only extra-physical reasons can induce us to choose between the alternatives Silentium Domini/Non esse Domini We have placed this work, together with the new theological counterarguments, in the first part of the supplementary volume.

  2. MATHEMATICAL THEOLOGY. The most original product of theobitistics is a model of God which is sinusoidal and at the same time oscillating. God becomes established axiomatically as an alternating process, and not as an unchanging state; he oscillates at a transcendental frequency between infinities of opposing signs—Good and Evil. For every time interval (in a physical sense) both these infinities are realized together, though not simultaneously. For God's Good and Evil pass into each other by turns, so a precise depiction of the process would be a sinusoid.

  Inasmuch as the propagation of both infinities—having (as they do) atemporal sources—participates in the life order temporarily, it can be demonstrated that the rise of local peculiarities such as time-space sectors, in which the equilibrium of Good and Evil is not maintained, is admissible, i.e., possible. At such special points, fluctuations thus originate as deficiencies. And since with every successive change of signs the process curve must pass zero, in a Universum which could itself last an infinitely long time there exist not two but three infinities: Good, Zero, and Evil—all of which, translated into conventional theodicean language, signifies the coexistence in the same Universum of God, his total absence, and his complete opposite in Satan. This work, sometimes reckoned to be theological and sometimes theoclastic, arose by way of formal speculation, owing to the attraction of the mathematical apparatus of set theory and the physical theory of the universe. Its author is ontares II. Strictly speaking, it employs none of the terms of traditional theology ("God," "Satan," "metaphysical nothingness"). We have placed it in Chapter 3 of the supplement.

  Another noteworthy theobitic work is a study by what are commonly called "cold" aggregates (since they run on cryotrons) which offers, as God, an infinite computer or an infinite program. Both these formulations lead, to be sure, to inextricable antinomies. However, as one of its authors, metax, observed in the epilogue, every human religion, when formalized, reveals a much greater number of contradictions of an analogous type; so if the "best religion" means the "least contradictory religion," then the computer is a more perfect image of God than man is.

  3. PHYSICALISTIC THEOLOGY. We do not count the works of metax as theobitic physicalism, since they use the terms "computer" and "program" in a formal (mathematical) and not a physical sense. (As everyone knows, every computer—like every automaton—possesses an ideal mathematical equivalent.) On the other hand theobitistics, understood physically, deals with the involvement in matter of the Author or Creator of existence. Many such works have sprung up, so let us say at once that we shall mention only the most original writings, unitars, the author of the first one, sees the Cosmos as a "granulate" which alternately "computerizes" and "decomputerizes"; its two diametrical states are the Metacompiler and the Metagalaxy. In its "mentalizing" phase the basis of its action is informatics; physics serves it by doing what the "computer whole" of the Universum demands. But the substratum of this cosmic thinking ultimately assumes an explosive character, for the material groundwork of thought becomes increasingly unstable in its configuration, until that by means of which the metacomputer thought explodes and, as a supercloud of expanding fiery fragments, becomes a Metagalaxy. The presence, in the depths of its "soulless" phase, of reasoning beings is explained, as it were, incidentally, for they are relics, "fragments," "litter" from the previous phase. "Having thought of that of which the mental medium is the ylem, the Whole is torn to pieces, forming a flight of nebulae; as they return and become compressed, they re-form the granulate of the regenerating Metacomputer, and the soul/ soullessness pulsation of matter being organized into thinking, and of thinking disintegrating into matter, may go on infinitely." The reader will find other variants of this noopulsating theory in Chapter 6 of the supplement.

  We must probably regard as bitic humor the theory that the universe looks as it does because in all galaxies there are active astroengineers endeavoring to "sit out this Cosmos," thanks to the acceleration of certain masses or vehicles to the speed of light, for a body at this speed may—in a space of time which in itself amounts to barely a few earth months—"sit out" billions of years (in accordance with the relativity effect). Thus huge quasar, pulsar, and nebular eruptions are examples of astroengineering endeavoring to "leap" from one given phase of the Universum into the next; in other words, they are "locomotionally temporal" robots whose purpose is to "transcend" the current Cosmos, since the next phase is evidently more suitable for colonization. With a survey of such activities our new, fifth volume of the History ofBitic Literature comes to an end.

  Vestrand's EXTELOPEDIA in 44 Magnetomes

  VESTRAND BOOKS CO.

  NEW YORK—LONDON—MELBOURNE MMXI

  Proffertinc

  VESTRAND BOOKS is pleased to offer you a Subscription to the most future

  Extelopedia ever. If the pressure of business has kept you from previously acquainting yourself with an Extelopedia, we would like to explain. In the 1970s, the traditional encyclopedias in general use for the last two centuries began experiencing a Serious Crisis, in that their information was out of date the moment it left the printers. Aucyc—automi-zation of the production cycle—could not avoid this, since it cannot be reduced to the zero time required by the expert authors of the Entries. Thus with each passing year even the most recent encyclopedias became outdated, acquiring only a historical interest as they stood on the shelves. Many Publishers endeavored to avert this crisis by publishing yearly and later even quarterly Supplements, but soon these Supplements began to exceed the dimensions of the Actual Edi
tion. The realization that this Race against the Acceleration of Civilization could not be won struck Editors and Authors alike.

  This led to the compilation of the First Delphiclopedia, an Encyclopedia which was a collection of Entries containing Predictions for the Future. But the DELPHICLOPEDIA originated on the basis of the so-called Delphic Method, or in simple terms, through a vote of Qualified Experts. Since Expert opinions by no means coincide, the first Delphi-clopedias contained Entries on the same subject presented in two variants, corresponding to the Majority and Minority opinions of the Specialists, or else they contained two versions, a Maxiclopedia and a Miniclopedia. Customers accepted these innovations reluctantly, though, and a well-known physicist, the Nobel prizewinner Professor Kut-zenger, expressed this reluctance when he said that the public needs Information about the Doings, not the Quarrels, of Specialists. Thanks to the Initiative of VESTRAND BOOKS, the situation has undergone a revolutionary improvement.

  The EXTELOPEDIA which we hereby offer you comes in 44 handy magnetomes, bound in Virginal, the Ever Cosy Virgin Pseudoskin. At the sound of your voice, the appropriate Magnetome slips off the shelf, TURNS its own pages, and STOPS at the desired entry. It contains 69,500 simply but precisely formulated Entries relating to the Future. Unlike the Delphiclopedia, Maxiclopedia, and Miniclopedia,