not transistors or cathode tubes. I had to provide ‘limbs.’ A poor solution, because — only because — it was a primitive one. There are other forms of danger, you see.”
He turned and went upstairs. We found ourselves on the first floor, but this time Diagoras headed in the opposite direction. He stopped in front of a copper-plated door.
“When I spoke of Corcoran, you no doubt thought that I envy him. I don’t. Corcoran wasn’t seeking knowledge; he merely wanted to create what he had planned, and since he made only what he wanted, what he could comprehend, he learned nothing and proved nothing except that he is a skillful technician. I am much less confident than Corcoran. I say: I don’t know, but I want to know. Building a manlike machine, a grotesque rival for the good things of this world, would be ordinary imitation.”
“But every construction must be what you create it to be,” I protested. “You may not know its future activity exactly, but you must have an initial plan.”
“Not at all. I told you about the first, spontaneous reaction of my kybernoids — the attacking of obstacles and limitations. Don’t think that I or anyone else will ever know where this comes from, why this is so.”
“
“Yes. I’ll prove it to you now. We ascribe mental life to other people because we possess it ourselves. The further removed an animal is from man with respect to structure and function, the less certain our assumptions about its mental life. We ascribe definite emotions to monkeys, dogs, and horses, but we know very little about the ‘experiences’ of a lizard. With insects or infusorians, analogies become futile. We shall never know whether a certain pattern of neural stimulation in the thoracic brain of an ant is accompanied by ‘joy’ or ‘anxiety,’ or whether the ant can experience such states at all. Now, what is relatively unimportant concerning animals — the problem of the existence or nonexistence of their mental life — becomes a nightmare when we deal with kybernoids. No sooner do they rise from the dead than they fight to liberate themselves, but why this happens and what subjective state accompanies these violent efforts — this we shall never know.”
“If they begin to talk…”
“Our language arose in the course of social evolution and conveys information about analogous — or similar — states, for we all resemble one another. Because our brains are alike, you suspect that when I laugh, I feel what you feel when you’re in a good mood. But you can’t say that about them. Pleasures? Feelings? Fear? What happens to the meaning of such words when they are transferred from a blood-fed human brain to a row of electrical coils? And what if even those coils are absent, if the constructional similarity is done away with completely — what then? If you want to know: the experiment has already been carried out.”
He opened the door we had been standing in front of. We entered a large, white room lit by four lamps. It was warm and close, like a greenhouse. In the middle of the tile floor rose a wide metal cylinder from which thin pipes sprouted in various directions. A large, bulging lid hermetically sealed with a screw wheel gave it the appearance of a fermentation vat. On its sides were smaller portholes, round and tightly shut. The cylinder — I noticed this now — rested not on the floor but on a platform made of sheets of cork interlaid with sponge mats.
Diagoras opened one of the side portholes and pointed; I leaned over and peeked inside. What I saw defied all description. Behind the thick round glass spread a viscous structure consisting of thick stalks and gossamer bridges and festoons. The whole mass, completely motionless, remained mysteriously suspended: to judge from the consistency of that pulp or ooze, it should have sunk to the bottom of the tank. Through the glass I felt a light pressure on my face, as if from hot, stagnant air; I even smelled — though it might have been my imagination — the delicate, sickly-sweet odor of decay. The oozy substance shone as if there were a light somewhere within it or above it, and its thinnest filaments had a silvery gleam. Suddenly I noticed a slight movement. One gray-brown tentacle covered with pustular swellings rose and glided, through the loops of others, in my direction. With peristaltic spasms, as of slimy, repulsive intestines, it came up to the glass, pressed against it opposite my face, and made several feeble crawling motions before becoming still. I had the eerie feeling that this jelly was looking at me. A thoroughly disagreeable feeling, yet I was unable to pull away, as though out of shame. At that moment I forgot about Diagoras, who was watching me from the side, and about everything I had experienced thus far. With growing bewilderment I stared at the fungous ooze, absolutely certain that what faced me was not just a living substance but a real being. Why, I cannot say.
Nor do I know how long I would have stood and stared had it not been for Diagoras, who took me gently by the arm, closed the porthole, and turned the screw wheel hard.
“What is it?” I asked, as if he had wakened me. Only now came my reaction; it was with nausea and confusion that I looked at the fat scientist and the hot copper tank.
“A fungoid,” replied Diagoras. “The dream of cyberneticists — a self-organizing substance. I had to give up traditional materials. This one proved better. It’s a polymer.”
“Is it — alive?”
“What can I tell you? It has neither protein, nor cells, nor metabolism. I accomplished this after an enormous number of tests. To put it briefly, I initiated a chemical evolution. Selection was to give rise to a substance that would react to every external stimulus with internal change, not only to neutralize the stimulus but to free itself from it. First I exposed the substance to heat, magnetic fields, and radiation. But that was just the beginning. I gave it increasingly difficult tasks; for example, I used definite patterns of electric shocks from which it could free itself only by producing a specific rhythm of currents in reply… In this way I taught it conditioned reflexes, so to speak. But that, too, was a preliminary phase. It soon began to universalize; it solved increasingly difficult problems.”
“How is that possible, if it has no senses?”
“To tell the truth, I don’t understand it fully myself. I can only give you the principle. If you put a computer on a cybernetic ‘tortoise’ and let it into a big hall, equipped with a quality-of-function regulator, you will obtain a system devoid of ‘senses’ but which reacts to any change in the environment. If there is a magnetic field somewhere in the hall exerting a negative effect on the operation of the computer, it will immediately withdraw and search for a spot where such disturbances do not occur. The constructor need not even anticipate every possible disturbance, which may be mechanical vibrations, heat, loud sounds, the presence of electrical charges — anything. The machine does not ‘perceive,’ because it has no senses, so it does not feel heat or see light, but it reacts as though it does see and feel. Now, that’s only an elementary model. The fungoid' — he put his hand on the copper cylinder, which reflected his image like a grotesquely distorting mirror — “can do that and a thousand times more. My idea was to create a liquid medium filled with ‘constructional elements,’ from which the original organization could draw and build as it wished. That’s how the fungoid arose.”
“But what is it exactly? A brain?”
“I can’t tell you that; we have no words for it. To our way of thinking it isn’t a brain, since it doesn’t belong to any living creature, nor was it constructed to solve definite problems. However, I assure you it thinks — though not like an animal or a human being.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a long story. Allow me…”
He opened a door that was metal-plated and extremely thick, almost like the door of a bank vault; the other side was covered with sheets of cork and the same spongy material that supported the copper cylinder. In the next, smaller room there was also a light; the window was blocked with black paper, and on the floor, away from the walls, stood the same type of red copper vat.
“You have two…?” I asked, stunned. “But why?”
“A variant,” he replied, closing the door. I noticed how carefully he did so.
“I didn’t know which of them would function better. There are important differences in chemical structure and so on… I did have others, but they were no good. Only these two passed through all the stages of the selection process. They developed very nicely,” he went on, putting his hand on the convex lid of the second cylinder, “but I didn’t know whether that meant anything. They became quite independent of changes in their environment; both were able to guess quickly what I demanded of them — in other words, to react in a way that freed them from harmful stimuli. Surely you’ll admit that it’s something' — he turned toward me with unexpected vehemence — “if a gelatinous paste can solve with electrical impulses an equation given it by means of other electrical impulses…?”
“Of course, but as for thinking…”
“Maybe it’s not thinking,” he replied. “Names are not important here; the facts are. After a while both began
