Supreme goals in my understanding are characteristically human. They must include the realization of one’s mortality and go beyond death, becoming supra-personal and somehow relating one’s personality to eternity. The idea of Evolution on the cosmic scale also belongs to this category; it is, essentially, a religious idea.
The creation of language by humans is a direct result of the metasystem transition to the control of associations. Once again we see that there is a borderline phenomenon: all social animals, including ants and bees, have languages for exchange of information. The difference between these and the human language is of the same kind as in the case of tools. The language of animals is instinctive; it develops as part of evolution of the species. But a human being creates a language by freely associating a name with its meaning. In a short biological time languages come into existence which contain hundreds of times as many different elements as animal languages, and allow their combination resulting in an infinite number of messages to send and to understand.
Imagine a primitive man who observes from his hiding place how members of a hostile tribe walk in and out of a cave. If three men come into the cave and two go out, he will know that one enemy is still in the cave: this is the work of a model which is built into his brain. But what if twenty enemies enter and nineteen exit? The brain model is of no use. But one can use fingers or pebbles or whatever is at hand to create a model of the enemies in the cave. The man will still use his brain models to perceive enemies as distinct objects in counting, but the representation of situations is now implemented in external material: fingers, pebbles, etc., not in the brain’s stuff. If a tool is a continuation of the human hand, then language is a continuation of the human brain.
A person, represented in the form of sentences containing the person’s name, becomes an object of his or her own thought and study. Language is a kind of second mirror in which the entire world, including each individual, is reflected, and in which each individual can see (in fact, cannot help but see!) his own self.
Social integration, the unification of human individuals into a whole unit of a new type: human society. All human history has gone forward under the banner of social integration; relations among people have been growing qualitatively and quantitatively. This process is taking place at the present time, very intensively in fact, and no one can say for sure how far it will go.
Owing to the existence of language, human society differs fundamentally from animal communities. People have contact by brain. Language is not only a continuation of each individual brain, but also a general, unitary continuation of the brains of all members of society. It is a collective model of reality on whose refinement all members of society are working, one that stores the experience of preceding generations.
Society can be viewed as a single super-being. Its ‘body’ is the body of all people plus the objects that have been and are being made by people: clothing, dwellings, machines, books, etc. Its ‘physiology’ is the physiology of all people plus the culture of society.
The emergence of the social super-being is a large-scale metasystem transition which closely parallels an earlier metasystem transition: the emergence of multicellular organisms, and especially their nervous system.
The emergence of human society is a large-scale metasystem transition, in which the subsystems being integrated are whole organisms. It may be compared with the development of multicellular organisms from unicellular ones.
The emergence of the human super-being is even more significant than the emergence of multicellular organisms. If it is to be compared with something, it is only with the emergence of life itself. For the emergence of human society signifies the emergence of a new mechanism of evolution. Before it, the development and refinement of the highest level of organization, the brain device, occurred only as a result of the struggle for existence and natural selection. This was a slow process requiring the passage of many generations. In human society the development of language and culture is a result of creative efforts of its members. The selection of variants involved in the trial-and-error method now takes place in the human head. It becomes inseparable from the willed act of a human person. This process differs fundamentally from the process of natural selection in the genotype-phenotype cycles. It is incomparably faster. Cultural evolution takes over from biological evolution. The human being becomes the point of concentration of Cosmic Creativity.
I see science as the apex of human culture. This is not an expression of my personal taste or love for science. I trace the evolution of human culture in the same terms as biological evolution, namely, as a sequence of metasystem transitions, and this sequence leads to science as the highest point in the hierarchy of control. Hence the development of science defines the future of the evolving Universe.
For human society, science is what the brain is for an individual: the instrument of knowledge, i.e. of the creation of new models of reality.
Science is a superstructure over human brains which, though created by brain, is partly independent of it, has its own hierarchical structure, and directs the work of individual human brains. Science is not simply a means to improve the human condition; it is a cosmic phenomenon of tremendous importance. It is the top of the growing three of the Universe, the leading shoot of Evolution. Immortal itself, it has as its goal the immortality for every human being.
In the future (and perhaps not too far in the future) direct exchange of information among the nervous systems of individual people will become possible. Obviously, the integration (maybe partial) of nervous systems must be accomplished by the creation of some higher system of control over the unified nerve network. How will it be perceived subjectively? One may hope that the new level of control will result in a new, higher form of consciousness, which will come into existence on top of the consciousness of the present day individual.
No one can act against the laws of nature. Ethical teachings that run counter the general trend of evolution, i.e. set goals incompatible with it, cannot bring about a constructive contribution to evolution. This means that the deeds prompted by such goals will, in the final analysis, be erased by the world’s memory. Such is the nature of evolution: that which corresponds to its general trend, or abstract ‘plan,’ is eternalized in the structure of the developing world; that which runs counter to it, is overcome and perishes.
If humanity sets itself some goals which are incompatible with further integration of individuals, the result will be an evolutionary dead end.
My idea of freedom has more to do with spontaneous synergistic co-operation over a field of unknown possibilities.
I am looking for the most general and deep aspects of the world, and one of these aspects is that the world is not completely chaotic. If the mechanistic science of the nineteenth century saw the notion of a deterministic natural law as the adequate expression of this idea, the cybernetic science of today puts the notion of control in its place, leaving freedom as a non-illusory and non-eliminable element.
Control is not the same as compulsion. Control is only a limitation of freedom, not necessarily its elimination, and this limitation is not necessarily hurting the controlled entity. It may be life-saving, as in the case when somebody takes your hand and leads you out of a maze. Indeed, every kind of problem solving is a kind of control. To solve a problem usually means to pick up one true solution from a combinatorially huge number of possible false answers.
The idea that philosophy must treat control as evil is an outdated liberal reaction to the older idea of a rigid, mechanistic control.
Hierarchy, like control, does not exclude freedom. It is opposite to chaos, not to freedom. Organized systems are hierarchies of control, this is an observable fact. We find them everywhere.
We value a free democratic society not because it is free of control hierarchies—it has at least as many as a totalitarian society—but because the character of control is different.
The Western economical and political system is much more sophisticated and includes much more intersecting hierarchies than the primitive Soviet system. In a word, it is more ‘cybernetic’ than the ‘mechanical’ Soviet system. This demonstrates that a society can be both more free and more ‘hierarchical’—in the above sense, without confusing the presence of hierarchies with the control through compulsion.
In the evolving Universe there is no standstill: all that does not develop perishes.
When cells integrate into multicellular organisms, they continue to perform their biological functions—metabolism and fission. The new quality, the life of the organism, does not appear despite the biological functions of the individual cells but because of them and through them. The creative act of free will is the ‘biological function’ of the human being. In an integrated super-being it must be preserved as an inviolable foundation, and the new qualities must appear through it and because of it. Thus the fundamental challenge that humanity faces is to achieve an organic synthesis of integration and freedom.
This is a terrible feeling, worse than pain. It comes as a shock. You feel that you are cornered, and there is no way out. Your imagination jumps over the years you have still to live through, and you find yourself on the brink of disappearance, complete annihilation. You realize that you are, essentially, on the death row.
The realization of one’s own mortal nature is one of the most fundamental distinctions between a human being and an animal. The will for immortality, a rebellion against death, is found at the source of religions, philosophies, and civilizations. People look for a way to transcend the limit put on our lives by nature. They look for a concept which would reconcile the impulse to live on, which is inherent to every healthy creature, with the inevitability of death.
I will call creative immortality the idea that a mortal human being contributes something to the ongoing universal and eternal process, which can be called Evolution or History.
The contribution to the Evolution made by an individual can be of critical importance. It can also be everlasting. The contributions made by Aristotle or Newton are written down into the history of mankind and will stay there forever, even though there are only very few people who read Aristotle or Newton now. This is because each next stage of evolution is dependent on the preceding stages. The acts contributing to evolution create structures which will outlive the actors and determine the structures that follow. In this way, they are eternal. Creative immortality may also be called evolutionary immortality; it is the immortality of deeds. The deeds of mortal men may be immortal.
The human being is a certain form of organization of matter. This form is distinguished by a very sophisticated organization, which includes a high multilevel hierarchy of control. What we call our soul, or our consciousness, is associated with the highest level of this control hierarchy.
This aspect of cybernetic immortality, integration of individuals, seems to be its inevitable component. The exchange of information between brains through the channels of sense organs is, cybernetically, extremely imperfect. More direct forms of exchange signify a much higher degree of integration than we can speak of at present. Direct exchange will give tremendous advantages in terms of intellectual strength. By the evolutionary law of survival, human conglomerates exercising such exchanges must proliferate and seize the top level of control in the world.
It is far from being evident that all people and all communities will wish to integrate into immortal super-beings. It is probably as certain that this will not happen as it is certain that some individuals, and then communities, will set this as the supreme goal. The will for immortality, as every human feature, varies widely in human populations. Since the integration we speak about can only be free, this means that only a part of mankind will be involved in integration.
From the emergence of human beings our history has been a history of surviving. Now the time is close, hopefully, when due to science and technology the whole human world is integrated, peaceful, and thriving in the bounds set by biology. Then what? What great purpose will the human being set for itself? To overstep those bounds, of course!
There is a general law of evolution: ontogenesis (the history of an individual development) roughly repeats, or recapitulates, phylogenesis (the history of the species). Evolution tends to build on the existing foundation, making only those alterations that are necessary.
The constancy of an object is always relative. It remains ‘the same’ as long as only small changes take place. An object is its history.
Man could be the last link of biological evolution and the stepping stone of “mineral” evolution through our ever more sophisticated artificial creatures.
The future belongs to man-machine combinations which will be more human beings than machines (by a machine I mean here any artificial component), because they will be “improvements” of human beings. Nothing human will be lost: there is no reason for it. Evolution is an on-going search for better and better solutions of the problem of stability. In the last analysis it is what in computer science is known as exhaustive brute-force search, whether it occurs naturally, or is set up by scientists and engineers.