"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
Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) 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.
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 Naive 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