Contents
Translator’s Introduction. Evolution May Be Greater Than the Sum
of Its Parts, but It’s Not All That Great: On Lem’s Summa
Technnologiae
Joanna Zylinska
Summa Technologie
1. Dilemmas
2. Two Evolutions
Similarities
Differences
The First Cause
Several NaÏve Questions
3. Civilizations in the Universe
The Formulation of the Problem
The Formulation of the Method
The Statistics of Civilizations in the Universe
A Catastrophic Theory of the Universe
A Metatheory of Miracles
Man’s Uniqueness
Intelligence: An Cccident or a Necessity?
Hypotheses
Votum Separatum
Future Prospects
4. Intelectronics
Return to Earth
A Megabyte Bomb
The Big Game
Scientific Myths
The Intelligence Amplifier
The Black Box
The Morality of Homeostats
The Dangers of Electrocracy
Cybernetics and Sociology
Belief and Information
Experimental Metaphysics
The Beliefs of Electric Brains
The Ghost in the Machine
The Trouble with Information
Doubts and Antinomies
5. Prolegomena to Omnipotence
Before Chaos
Chaos and Order
Scylla and Charybdis: On Restraint
The Silence of the Designer
Methodological Madness
A New Linnaeus: About Systematics
Models and Reality
Plagiarism and Creation
On Imitology
6. Phantomology
The Fundamentals of Phantomatics
The Phantomatic Machine
Peripheral and Central Phantomatics
The Limits of Phantomatics
Cerebromatics
Teletaxy and Phantoplication
Personality and Information
7. The Creation of Worlds
Information Farming
Linguistic Engineering
The Engineering of Transcendence
Cosmogonic Engineering
8. A Lampoon of Evolution
The Reconstruction of the Species
Constructing Life
Constructing Death
Constructing Consciousness
Error-based Constructs
Bionics and Biocybernetics
In the Eyes of the Designer
Reconstructing Man
Cyborgization
The Autoevolutionary Machine
Extrasensory Phenomena
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Stanislaw Lem (19212006) was the best-known science fiction author
writing outside the English language. His books have been
translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than
27 million copies worldwide.
Joanna Zylinska is professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Bioethics in the Age of New Media and The Ethics of Cultural Studies.
"At the end of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas wrote the
Summa Theologiae, an ambitious compendium of all orthodox
philosophical and theological knowledge about the world. Seven
hundred years later, science fiction author Stanislaw Lem writes
his Summa Technologiae, an equally ambitious but unorthodox
investigation into the perplexities and enigmas of humanity and its
relationship to an equally enigmatic world in which it finds itself
embedded. In this work Lem shows us science fiction as a method of
inquiry, one that renders the future as tenuous as the past, with a
wavering, ‘phantomatic’ present always at hand." -Eugene Thacker,
author of After Life "Summa is a fantasia that follows certain
lines of speculative thought as far as Lem can take them. Lem’s
sober materialism may seem dehumanizing, but he brings back to the
frontier a question that has plagued civilization since the
beginning, and whose shifting, always insufficient answers have
always signaled revolutions in culture: what is it to be human?"
-Los Angeles Review of Books
"With Summa Technologiae, his masterwork of non-fiction which has
been translated into English for the first time, Lem has taken
Western civilisation for a spin-with spectacular consequences. "
-New Scientist
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