20–21 April. Night Walks Through Eastern Crimea

- Dear sir... just a moment. Forgive my intrusiveness... Yes, I know... my appearance... But I'm compelled to ask... no, ah, no. This is a misunderstanding. Was I following you? Yes. That's true. From the bookshop, but only because I saw through the window... you were buying "Biophysics" and "Abstracts"... And when you sat down here, I thought this was a wonderful opportunity... If you would allow me to look through... both of them. But mainly "Abstracts." For me it's a vital necessity, and I... can't afford... That's evident just by looking at me, isn't it... I'll look through it and return it right away, it won't take much time. I'm looking for only one thing... a certain notice... Will you give it to me? I don't know how to thank you... I'd better step outside... The waiter is coming, I wouldn't want... I'll leaf through it out on the street, over there, across the way, you see? There's a bench there... and I'll do it right away... What did you say? No, don't do that... You shouldn't invite me... really... all right, all right, I'll sit down. I beg your pardon? Yes, of course, coffee is fine. Anything, if it's necessary. Oh, no. That's really no. I'm not hungry.

Perhaps my face... but that's only appearance. May I look through it here... even though it's impolite?.. Thank you. This is the latest issue... no, I can already see there's nothing in "Biophysics." But here... yes, yes... aha... Crispen - Novikov - Abdergarten Sukhima, imagine, already for the second time... oh!.. No. That's not it. There's nothing here. Well then... I'm returning it with gratitude. Once again I can be at ease - for two weeks... that's all. Please, pay no attention to me... coffee? Ah, right, coffee. Yes, yes. I'll sit here, I'll be silent. I wouldn't want to impose, the intrusiveness of an individual like myself... I beg your pardon? Yes, it probably does seem strange - such interests combined with such, hm, exterieur... <External appearance - Fr.> But, for God's sake, not that. Why on earth should you be apologizing to me? Thank you very much, no, I prefer it without sugar. A habit from the years when I wasn't yet so talkative... You don't want to read? You see, I thought... Ah, that expectant look in your eyes. No, not instead. Nothing instead, with your permission, of course, I can tell you. There's nothing for me to fear. A beggar who studies the "Biophysical Journal" and "Abstracts." Amusing. I'm aware of it. From better times I still have a sense of humor left. Wonderful coffee. Does it seem as though I'm interested in biophysics? Actually, that's not quite so. My interests... I don't know whether it's worth... Only don't think I'm playing coy. What? Is that you? Did you publish last year the work on comitants of affinors with multiple curvature? I don't remember the exact title, but it's interesting. Quite different from Baum's approach. Holloway tried to do this once, but it didn't work out for him. An awkward business, these affinors... You know how unstable nonholonomic systems are... One can drown, that happens in mathematics, when a person tries to storm it in a hurry, to seize the bull by the horns... Yes. I should have said this long ago. Limfater. Ammon Limfater - that's my name. Please, don't be surprised by my disappointment. I don't hide it, why should I? This has happened to me many times already, and still, each time, in a new way... it's a little... painful. I understand everything... The last time I published something... was twenty years ago. You were probably still... well, of course. And even so? Thirty years? Well then, you had nothing to do with it then: your interests were most likely directed elsewhere... And after that? Merciful God, I see you're not insisting. You're tactful, I might even say you're trying to treat me as... a colleague. Ah, what are you saying! I'm free of false shame. I have enough of the genuine kind. Very well. The story is so incredible that you'll be disappointed... Because it's impossible to believe me... No, one can't. I assure you. I've told it more than once already. And each time I refused to disclose the details that might attest to its truthfulness. Why? You'll understand once you've heard it all. But it's a long story, forgive me, I did warn you. You wanted this yourself. It began almost thirty years ago. I had finished university and was working for Professor Haave. Well, of course, you've heard of him. He was a celebrity! A very sensible celebrity! He didn't like taking risks. He never took risks. True, he allowed us - I was his assistant - to occupy ourselves with a bit more than the program, but in principle... no! Let this be only my story. Of course, it's bound up with the fates of other people, but I have a tendency toward talkativeness, which at my age is hard for me to control. After all, I'm sixty years old, and I look even older, probably, in part because with my own hands...

Incipiam <Let us begin - Lat.>. So then, it was in the seventies. I was working for Haave, but I was interested in cybernetics. You know how it is: the fruit in someone else's garden always seems the tastiest. Cybernetics occupied me more and more. Eventually my boss could no longer tolerate this. I'm not surprised by that. I wasn't surprised then either. I had to fuss about a bit, and in the end I got a place with Daimon. Daimon - you've probably heard of him too - belonged to the McCulloch school. Unfortunately, he was dreadfully peremptory. A brilliant mathematician, he practically juggled with imaginary spaces, I found his reasoning terribly appealing. He had this funny habit - growling out the final result like a lion... but that's not important. I worked for him for a year, reading and reading... You know how it is: whenever a new book came out, I couldn't wait for it to reach our library, I ran and bought it myself. I devoured everything. Everything... Daimon, to be fair, considered me promising... and so on. I already had one rather good quality back then, a phenomenal memory. You know... I could list for you right now the titles of all the works published year by year by our institute over twelve years. Even the diploma theses... Now I only remember; back then, I memorized. This let me juxtapose different theories, different points of view - after all, in cybernetics a fierce holy war was being waged then, and the spiritual children of the great Norbert were throwing themselves at each other so that... But some kind of worm was gnawing at me... My enthusiasm lasted a day: what thrilled me today began to trouble me tomorrow. What was it about? Well, about the theory of electronic brains... ah, yes? I'll be frank: you know, it's even a good thing, I won't have to worry excessively about some carelessly mentioned detail... Oh, come now! That would be an insult on my part! I'm not afraid of any... any plagiarism, not at all, the matter is far more serious, you'll see for yourself. However, I keep speaking in hints... True, an introduction is necessary. So then: the whole theory of information appeared in the heads of several people within almost a matter of days; at first everything seemed relatively simple - feedback, homeostasis, information as the opposite of entropy - but it soon turned out that this couldn't quickly be fitted into a system, that it was a quagmire, a mathematical morass, a roadless waste. Schools began to arise, practice went its own way - they built those electronic machines for calculations, for translation, learning machines, chess-playing machines... And theory went its own way, and soon an engineer who worked with such machines found it hard to find common ground with a specialist in information theory... I myself nearly drowned in these new branches of mathematics, which sprang up like mushrooms after rain, or rather, like new tools in the hands of burglars trying to crack open the armor of a secret... But these are wonderful fields all the same, aren't they? One can possess an unattractive woman, or an ordinary one, and envy those who possess beauties, but in the end a woman is a woman; whereas people indifferent to mathematics, deaf to it, always seemed to me like cripples! They are poorer by an entire world - such a world! They don't even suspect that it exists! A mathematical construction is boundlessness itself, it leads wherever it wants, a person seems to create it, but in essence merely uncovers a Platonic idea sent down from who knows where, a rapture and an abyss, because most often it leads nowhere... One fine day I said to myself: enough. All this is wonderful, but I don't need wonders, I must arrive at everything myself, absolutely, as if there had never been a single Wiener, von Neumann, McCulloch in the world... And so, day by day, I cleared out my library, furiously cleared it out, enrolled in Professor Hyatt's lectures, and took up the study of animal neurology. You know, starting with mollusks, with invertebrates, from the very beginning... A dreadful occupation; because all of this, essentially, is descriptions - these unfortunate biologists and zoologists, at bottom, understand nothing. I saw this quite clearly. Well, and when after two years of hard labor we reached the structure of the human brain, I felt like laughing. Truly: I looked at all those papers and photograms of Ramón y Cajal, those silver-stained branchings of cortical neurons... the dendrites of the cerebellum, beautiful as black lace... and brain sections, there were thousands of them, among them old ones, still from Villiger's atlases, and I tell you: I laughed! Why, they were poets, these anatomists, just listen to how they named all these regions of the brain whose function they didn't understand at all: the horn of the hippocampus, the horn of Ammon... the pyramidal bodies... the calcarine fissure...

At first glance, this has nothing to do with my story. But only at first glance, because, you see, if I hadn't been surprised by many things that surprised absolutely no one else... didn't even catch anyone else's attention... if not for that, I would surely be a sclerotic professor by now with some two hundred papers that nobody remembers - but as it is...

I'm talking about so-called inspiration. Where I got it from, I have no idea. Instinctively - for long years, probably always - everyone imagined that there existed... that one could take into account only one type, one kind of brain - the kind with which nature endowed man. Well, after all, homo <Man - Lat.> is such a rational creature, higher, first among the higher beings, lord and king of creation... yes. And so the models - both the mathematical ones on paper, Rashevsky's, and the electronic ones of Grey Walter - all of this arose sub specie auspiciis <Under the external observation - Lat.> of the human brain - this unattainable, most perfect neural machine for thought. And they consoled themselves with the illusion, naively, that if it should ever prove possible to create a mechanical brain able to rival the human one, it would, of course, only be because structurally it would be absolutely similar to the human brain.

A minute of unbiased reflection reveals the boundless naivety of this view. "What is an elephant?" they asked an ant that had never seen an elephant. "It's a very, very big ant," the ant answered... What did you say? Even now? I know, it's still dogma, everyone continues to reason this way, that's precisely why Corvaisse refused to publish my paper - fortunately, he refused. That's how I speak of it now, but back then - back then, of course, I was beside myself with rage... ah! Well, you understand. A little more patience. So then, inspiration... I returned to birds. This, I must tell you, is a very interesting story. Do you know it? Evolution has gone down various paths - after all, it is blind, it's a blind sculptor who cannot see its own creations and doesn't know - how could it know? - what will become of them later. Speaking figuratively, it's as if nature, conducting its ceaseless experiments, kept wandering time and again into dead ends and simply abandoned there its unripe creations, these failed results of experiments, which had nothing left to do but be patient: they were destined to vegetate for hundreds of millions of years... while nature itself took up new ones. Man is man thanks to the so-called new brain, the neoencephalon, but he also has what serves as the brain in birds - the striped body, the striatum; in him it's pushed deep down, weighed under by this great helmet, this all-covering mantle of our pride and glory, the cerebral cortex... Perhaps I'm mocking a little, God knows why. So then, it went like this: birds and insects, insects and birds - this gave me no peace. Why did evolution stumble here? Why are there no intelligent birds, no thinking ants? And there very well might have been... you know, one need only weigh it: if insects had gone further in their development, humanity wouldn't hold a candle to them, it could do nothing, it wouldn't withstand the competition - not a chance! Why? Well, how could it be otherwise? After all, birds and insects, to varying degrees, of course, come into the world with ready-made knowledge, exactly what they need; to each his due. They hardly have to learn anything, but we? We waste half our lives learning, only to spend the second half discovering that three-quarters of what we've stuffed into our heads is useless ballast. Can you imagine what it would be like if a child of Hyatt's or Einstein's could come into the world with knowledge inherited from the father? Yet it's as foolish as any newborn. Learning? The plasticity of the human mind? You know, I believed in that too. Nothing strange about it. If from your school days you're endlessly told the axiom - that man is precisely man because he comes into the world like a blank page and must learn even to walk, even to grasp objects with his hand; that herein lies his strength, his distinction, his advantage, the source of his might rather than his weakness - and all around you see the grandeur of civilization - then you believe it, you accept it as a self-evident truth not worth arguing about.

I, however, kept returning in my thoughts to birds and insects. How does it happen - by what means do they inherit ready-made knowledge passed down from generation to generation? Only one thing was known. Birds have, essentially, no cortex - that is, the cortex plays no great role in their neurophysiology - and insects have none at all - and so insects come into the world with almost the entire stock of knowledge they need for life, while birds have a significant part of it. From this it follows that the cortex is the foundation of learning - this... this obstacle on the road to greatness. Because otherwise knowledge would accumulate, so that some great-great-grandson of a Leonardo da Vinci would become a thinker compared to whom Newton or Einstein would seem like cretins! Forgive me. I got carried away. So then, insects and birds... birds. Here the question was clear. They descend, as is known, from reptiles, and so could only develop that plan, that constructive premise which was already contained in the reptiles: the archistriatum, the pallidum - these parts of the brain were already given; birds, properly speaking, had no prospects whatsoever, and before the first of them ever rose into the air, the matter had already been lost. A compromise solution: a bit of nerve nuclei, a bit of cortex - neither one thing nor the other; compromises never pay off anywhere, not in evolution either. Insects - well, here the matter stood differently. They had chances: this symmetrical, parallel structure of the nervous system, the paired ventral ganglia... from which we've inherited rudiments. This inheritance has not only been squandered but also transformed. What do they do in us? They run the functioning of our intestines! But - please note, I beg you! - they know how to do this from the very moment of birth; the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems know from the very start how to govern the workings of the heart, the internal organs; yes, the vegetative system knows how to do this, it's intelligent from birth! And yet no one has ever pondered this, eh?.. So it is - so it must be, if generations appear and vanish, blinded by faith in their own false perfection. Fine, but what happened to them - to the insects? Why did they freeze so eerily in place, where does this paralysis of development and sudden end come from, which occurred almost a billion years ago and forever held them back, yet wasn't powerful enough to destroy them? Ah, what of it! Chance killed their possibilities. Absolute, the stupidest chance imaginable... The fact is that insects trace their origin to the primary tracheates. And the primary tracheates emerged from the ocean onto land already possessing a formed respiratory system; evolution cannot, like an engineer dissatisfied with his solution to a problem, take the machine apart, make a new blueprint, and reassemble the mechanism anew. Evolution is incapable of that. Its creativity is expressed only in corrections, improvements, additions... One of them is the cerebral cortex... Tracheae - that's what was the curse of insects! They had no lungs, they had tracheae, and so insects couldn't develop an actively pumping respiratory apparatus, understand? Well, after all, tracheae are simply a system of tubes open at the surface of the body, and they can supply the organism only with the amount of oxygen that passes on its own through the openings... that's the reason. Though, of course, this is by no means my own discovery. But it's spoken of vaguely: as if it were insignificant. The factor thanks to which humanity's most dangerous rival was crossed off the list... Oh, what blindness can lead to! If the body exceeds certain precisely calculable dimensions, the tracheae will no longer be able to deliver the necessary amount of air. The organism will begin to suffocate. Evolution - of course! - took measures: insects remained small. What? The enormous butterflies of the Mesozoic era? A very vivid example of a mathematical dependence... of the direct influence of the simplest laws of physics on vital processes... The amount of oxygen entering the organism through the tracheae is determined not only by the diameter of the tracheae, but also by the rate of convection... and that, in turn, by temperature; and so, in the Mesozoic era, during great warm periods, when palms and lianas filled even the outskirts of Greenland, in that tropical climate there hatched these huge, palm-sized butterflies and moths... But these were ephemeral, and the very first cold spell destroyed them, the first stretch of less scorching, rainy years... By the way, even today we encounter the largest insects in the tropics... but even these are small organisms; even the largest among them are tiny compared to an average four-legged vertebrate... The dimensions of the nervous system were minuscule, nothing could be done, evolution was powerless.

My first thought was to build an electronic brain modeled on the nervous system of an insect... which one? Well, an ant, say. But I immediately realized this was simply absurd, that I was setting out on the path of least resistance. Why should I, a constructor, repeat evolution's mistakes? I again took up the fundamental problem: learning. Do ants learn? Of course they do: conditioned reflexes can be developed in them, that's common knowledge. But I was thinking of something else entirely. Not about the knowledge they inherit from their ancestors, no. About whether ants perform actions that their parents could not have taught them and that they, nevertheless, can perform without any learning at all! The way you're looking at me... Yes, I know. My words are starting to smell of madness here, aren't they? Some sort of mysticism? A revelation granted for ants to comprehend? A priori knowledge of the world? But this is only the introduction, the beginning, only the first letters of the methodology of my madness. Let's go further. In the books, in the specialized literature, there was no answer at all to such a question, because no one in their right mind posed it or would have dared to. What was I to do? After all, I could hardly become a myrmecologist merely to answer this one preliminary question. True, it decided the "to be or not to be" of my entire concept, but myrmecology is a vast discipline, I would have had to spend another three or four years on it: I felt I couldn't afford that. Do you know what I did? I set off to see Chentarle. Well, what a name! For you it's a monument carved in stone, but even then, in my young years, he was already a legend! The professor had retired, hadn't lectured for four years already, and was gravely ill. Leukemia. His life was being extended month by month, but it was clear all the same that his end was near. I mustered my courage. I telephoned him... I'll say it plainly: I would have telephoned him even if he'd already been in his death throes. Such ruthlessness, such self-assurance, belongs only to youth. I, an utterly unknown pup, asked him to speak with me. He told me to come, and set a day and hour.