The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem by Peter Swirski

Author:Peter Swirski [Swirski, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: SOC002010
Publisher: Mcgill Queens Univ Pr
Published: 2006-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

SUMMA IN CONTEXTS

We have come to the end of Summa technologiae, and it is time to ponder its meaning and value. Some read the book as a list of predictions and keep little score cards, where they note the fulfilled prophecies as well as the perceived failures (“How come he didn’t predict the internet?”). Even Lem himself felt compelled to address these issues in three books of short essays: The Mystery of the Chinese Room (1996), The Megabit Bomb (1999), and The Blink of an Eye (2000). Nevertheless, this is a misunderstanding. Summa is not a prognostication almanac, and its author is not Nostradamus or Jules Verne – the latter having been quite successful in relatively short-term extrapolations concerning science and technology. The aim of Summa was not to predict particular gadgets but rather to explore the conceptual foundations of the two evolutions and their relations to society and civilization. Individual predictions that have come true are rather byproducts of Lem’s creative thinking.

Those interested in the list of Summa’s fulfilled prophecies should refer to the three Lem books mentioned above and to the essay “Thirty Years Later” in A Stanislaw Lem Reader (1997) by Peter Swirski. Here are several examples: virtual reality, which Lem called phantomatics; biologically based computation; and the technology for automatic search of links within and between huge datasets, which Lem called ariadnology (the science of threads), is now commonly used in biology (bioinformatics) and library science (search engines).

Elsewhere Lem noted almost casually that evolution proceeds at an uneven pace, with short bursts of activity interspersed with long period of stasis. This idea seems innocuous, even obvious, and it is now an integral part of modern evolution theory under the name of punctuated equilibrium. It should be noted, however, that Lem wrote his remarks – “In general, we can say that the pace of evolution is minimal, even approaching zero, when environmental conditions remain practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years” (77) – eight years before the official introduction of punctuated equilibrium by the evolutionary biologists Eldredge and Gould (1972).10

Even if none of Lem’s visions materialized in the real world, Summa would still be a great book: an adventurous analysis of the principles of evolutionary processes, probing the limits of the possible. Needless to say, Summa is not science fiction: Lem’s speculations has always been firmly anchored in the basic laws of physics, especially the Second Law of Thermodynamics (about the impossibility of a decrease in total entropy) and Einstein’s postulate of a limit to the maximum possible speed in the universe. But apart from those two limitations he allows himself the freedom to speculate. His twin maxim is: what is not forbidden by the fundamental laws of nature is allowed; what has a finite probability, no matter how small, will surely happen sometime, somewhere.

Summa might have had a great influence on shaping new directions in science, technology, and their philosophy, had it been better known among scientists in the English-speaking world. Although the book’s significance

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