Summa Technologiae [1964, 2013] by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 11764249
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press [tr EN hc, pbk, kindle, pdf]
Published: 1963-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Peripheral and Central Phantomatics

Phantomatics can be positioned in a sequence that would consist of some more or less direct ways of influencing the brain we know from history, by means of using peripheral stimuli (“peripheral prephantomatics”) or acting centrally (“central prephantomatics”).

The first set includes the rituals, mainly developed in ancient civilizations, of inducing people into a particular state of ecstasy by means of motor stimuli (e.g., dance rituals), aural stimuli (influencing emotional processes in a “rocking” manner by means of rhythmic impulses—since melody is younger than rhythm in evolutionary terms), visual stimuli, and so on. They facilitate the induction of a group of people into a trance so that their individual consciousness becomes blurred or, rather, constricted—something that always accompanies very strong emotions. Such climactic collective excitement is nowadays associated with “unbridled group behavior,” with orgies, but in ancient communities, it used to be a half-mystical, half-demonic amalgamation of individual experience in a state of general excitement—in which the sexual element was not dominant at all. Instead, such practices were considered appealing owing to their mysteriousness and the fact that they released powers in people that were unknown to them from their everyday experience.

The second set includes the ingestion of substances such as mescaline, psilocybin, hashish, alcohol, fly agaric extract, and so on. Through influencing brain chemistry, they evoke subjectively elevating and blissful experiences—which can appeal to aesthetic or emotional sides of the soul. These two kinds of practices have actually often been combined in an attempt to achieve a culmination of sensations. What links those activities with phantomatics is the active influencing of the information introduced to the brain to evoke a desired state in it—not because such a state can function as an appropriate regulator for the environment but rather because it offers delight or shock (catharsis), that is, simply a powerful and deep experience. Were those ancient practices a collective manifestation of sadism or masochism? Or were they a manifestation of a religious life? Or perhaps they constituted the early beginnings of “mass art” that does not separate creators from the audience but rather turns everyone into a coauthor of the “work”? Why is this of interest to us? This issue has some connections with the classification of phantomatics itself.

Psychoanalytic approaches tend to reduce all human activity to elementary drives. They tend to label both puritan asceticism and the most explicit debauchery as “masochism” or “sadism.” The problem is not so much that those statements are untrue as that this truth is too trivial to be of any use to science. Discussions about pansexuality, and so on, are as pointless as debates as to whether a sexual act is a manifestation of solar activity. The latter statement is probably indeed true: as life owes its emergence to solar radiation, and thus, by presenting long cause-and-effect chains that lead all the way from our star to the Earth’s crust, and then further through evolution’s developmental cycles, it is possible to demonstrate that the energetic deterioration of radiating quanta

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