The Cold Reason God Doesn't Answer | Non Serviam

0:00 Professor Dobbs's book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eeno Kaiki called the cruelest science man ever created. Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral.

0:22 We are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way in the research to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one's natural instincts. And if nowhere else, it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded.

1:28 So I recently read Stanislaw Limb's short story Non-Servium, and what's interesting about it is it actually doesn't argue whether or not God exists. It has something much more uncomfortable. What if God is real? What if God is reachable and perfectly capable of explaining himself? But simply chooses not to.

1:51 This particular short story can be found in his collection of short stories titled A Perfect Vacuum, which consisted of reviews of non-existent books. Non-Servium appears towards the end. Lim presents the story as a dry fictional academic review of a book on personetics by a man named Professor James Dobb.

2:13 Personetics is the science of creating sentient beings with machines, artificial beings living inside of a purely mathematical universe. These creatures are limited by the logic and structure of their reality in the same way we are limited by atoms, light, and time. The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives, persona and genetic, genetic in the sense of formation or creation.

2:39 The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the 80s, crossbred with applied intelligents. Today everyone knows personetics. The man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings, an answer not wide of the mark to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter.

3:00 This short story was written in the 1970s, long before the advent of large language models, which are referred to widely today as AI, even though real AI doesn't actually exist yet. That being said, it is striking how relevant this story is to many of the conversations being had today, like can a machine ever truly be conscious as we are?

3:22 We know in any case that consciousness is a kind of dodge, a shift to which evolution has resorted, and resorted in keeping with its characteristic and indispensable modus operandi, opportunism, i.e., finding a quick, extempore way out of a tight corner. If, then, one were needed to build an intelligent being and proceed according to the canons of completely rational engineering and logic, applying their criteria of technological efficiency, such a being would not in general receive the gift of consciousness.

3:52 It would behave in a manner perfectly logical, always consistent, lucid, and well ordered, and it might even seem to a human observer a genius in creative action and decision making, but it could in no way be a man, for it would be bereft of his mysterious depth, his internal intricacies, his labyrinthine nature.

4:15 The short story explains that consciousness in a sense relied on irrationality, imperfection. If you want a likeness of a human mind, not just a smart system, you have to deliberately build contradictions into the informational substrate. You have to give it asymmetry, eccentric tendencies, and a psyche that is unified and discordant at the same time.

4:39 Basically, the personoids' emotions have to be at odds with their reason to some extent. They need internal tensions and even self-destructive tendencies. Dobb's creational prescription is basically that the logic of the personoid has to be disturbed. So, in that way, the personoids resemble us, but they are also very different at the same time.

5:00 Our world is physical, as I said. We are bound by the limits of physics. It is the substrate of our reality. We see because there are things to be seen. We hear and smell because there are things to be heard and smelled. Within the personoids' reality, there was no light, no distance, no physical space.

5:21 Their world was entirely logic and mathematics based, and thus their senses were born out of that. It would be impossible to come up with a one-to-one analogy expressing the nature of their senses. We cannot comprehend them, and they cannot comprehend ours. Their experience of their reality would be as innate and rudimentary and fundamental to them as ours would be to us.

5:45 As to how they see it, one can make no pronouncement, for the only way of learning the subjective quality of their sensation would be for one to shed his skin and become a personoid. Personoids, one must remember, have no eyes or ears, therefore they neither see nor hear, as we understand it. In their cosmos there is no light, no darkness, no spatial proximity, no distance, no up or down.

6:11 There are dimensions there, not tangible to us, but to them primary, elemental. They perceive, for example, as equivalents of components of human sensory awareness, certain changes in electrical potential. The reality of the personoids did, however, share a dimension of time with us, but it was not one-to-one to ours, as the flow of their time could be manipulated by the programmer.

6:37 From within the machine, they would not experience this manipulation, just as we would not experience an acceleration of our time from within the flow of time itself. The first part of the short story reviews the portion of Dobbs's book discussing the science of personetics and how it developed as well as the generalized ethics of it, and then later moves on to Dobbs' own specific personetics experiment involving a society of persons who he allowed to develop over 5,000 years from their perspective.

7:09 They reproduced by dividing, developing culture, forming history, and importantly, they wrestled with existential questions involving the nature of their existence. It is this reason that personetics was often referred to as the cruelest science mankind ever created. There was a kind of horror to confining a being to a universe it could never leave, and forcing it to consciously deal with such tormenting questions which could never be answered.

7:38 Where did we come from? Why are we made thus and not otherwise? Why is it that the world we perceive has these and not other wholly different properties? What meaning do we have for the world? What meaning does it have for us? The train of such speculations leads them ultimately, unavoidably, to the elemental questions of ontology, to the problem of whether existence came about in and of itself, or whether it was the product instead of a particular creative act, that is, whether there might be hidden behind it, invested with will and consciousness, purposefully active, master of the situation, a creator.

8:24 It is here that the whole cruelty, the immorality of personetics manifests itself. Let's talk about the title of the short story, Non-Servium. It shares the title with Dobbs' fictional book being reviewed. The Latin non-servium translates to, I will not serve. But what does it mean? And how is it relevant to this story?

8:51 I think it is relevant to the story for two reasons. One because of the words of an individual personoid named Adan, and one because of the actions at the end of the short story of Professor Daub himself. Within the person's world, many philosophical and existential discussions are had. Many of them focus on the existence and the nature of God.

9:15 Personoids communicate it through a kind of osmosis, their mental substrates start to overlap, and as they superimpose on each other, they create noise and interference. When the boundary between them is thin, some information becomes shared between the two, partially coincident personoids. It's essentially like a human hearing foreign voices in their own head.

9:38 The individual Adan is not necessarily skeptical of the existence of God, but he rejects the notion held by others that they should serve that God. Here are some of the excerpts of those conversations. Eden 197 in his line of reasoning assumes a God that requires reverence, love, and total devotion, and not simply a belief in the fact that He exists and that He created the world.

10:05 It is not enough to assent the hypothesis of God the Maker of the world in order to win one's salvation. One must, in addition, be grateful to that maker for the act of creation, and divine his will and do it. In short, one must serve God. Nod remarks that the attitude of Aden 300 towards God is not clear to him.

10:30 Adan has granted, has he not, the possibility of the existence of the Creator. What follows from it? Adan, not a thing, that is, nothing in the province of obligation. I believe, again, for all worlds, the following principle holds. A temporal ethics is always independent of an ethics that is transcendental.

10:52 That means that an ethics of the here and now can have outside itself no sanction which would substantiate it. And this means that he who does evil is in every case a scoundrel, just as he who does good is in every case righteous. If someone is prepared to serve God, judging the arguments in favor of his existence to be sufficient, he does not thereby acquire here any additional merit.

11:21 It is his business. He who is Almighty could have provided certainty, since he did not provide it, if he exist, he must have deemed it unnecessary. Why unnecessary? One begins to suspect that maybe he is not Almighty. A god not almighty would be deserving to feelings akin to pity, and indeed to love as well, but this I think none of our theodicies allow, and so we say we serve ourselves and no one else.

11:54 So it is clear that the title comes in large part from the words of Adon, but as I said, I think the actions of Professor Dobb are related to the title as well. He, of course, has chosen to never tell them that he exists, never to confirm or deny the existence of God. He does this for multiple reasons.

12:15 He mentions that he did not love them. They were an experiment. The experiment was costly to keep running, and he was only a lowly professor, and ultimately it would not be his final decision on when to pull the plug. If he told them, explained his existence, explained their existence, what good would it do?

12:37 Would it not be a disappointment? Would it not be an embarrassment? You are an experiment, one of countless. God is not all-powerful. God does not love you. So he chose never to reveal himself, and bound in their universe of mathematics and logic, they would never know. And he would not serve them by performing godhood for them.

13:03 This story might seem subversive to some people. It brings into direct scrutiny the god depicted in Abrahamic religions, the god that requires praise and worship and rewards heaven or punishes with hell. Dobbs even says, of eternal punishment, I dare not even think. That much of a monster I am not, while directly comparing himself to the God of Christianity.

13:30 Stanislaw Lim himself was not religious. He did not believe in God. He rejected divine revelation, and he was openly skeptical of the idea that morality requires a transcendent authority. That position is not hidden or ambiguous in his work, it is directly informing his work. Lim approaches God as a logical proposition under uncertainty, not as a being owed obedience or gratitude or love, and that's a key part of this particular story.

14:02 Adon's refusal to ground ethics in the fear of punishment or the hope of reward is Lim showing his own conviction that moral responsibility belongs in the here and now, as mentioned, not to a potential or imagined beyond. Thank you so much for watching, guys. A while back I covered Stanislaw Lim's book Solaris, which is one of his most famous books.

14:28 Have you guys read that one? If you've read this short story or other Stanislaw Lim books, let me know in the comment section below. Also, what are your favorite sci-fi stories dealing with these types of existential topics? Thanks so much again for watching, guys, and make sure you like and subscribe for more videos on science fiction literature.