“Hm, all right. Then where are the shoes, the suit, the pass, and the raincoat from?”
“Damn it! If it can create a person, how hard do you think it is for the computer to grow a raincoat?”
(The victorious glint in the eye, the clumsy gestures, the arrogant tone of voice. Am I really that obnoxious when I feel I'm right about something?)
“Grow?” I felt the fabric of his coat. A shudder ran through me. A raincoat wasn't like that.
Major things don't fit into the brain immediately, at least not in mine. I remember when I was in school I had to take charge of a delegate to a youth festival, a young hunter from the Siberian tundra; I showed him around Moscow. He took in the sights implacably and calmly: the bronze statues at the Economic Achievement Exhibits, the subway escalators, the heavy traffic. And when he saw the tall building of MSU, he simply said, “With poles and skin you can build a small hut — with rock, a big one.” But when we were in the lobby of the Nord Restaurant, where we had stopped off for a bite, he came face to face with a stuffed polar bear with a tray in its paws — and that amazed him! That was what happened to me. My double's raincoat resembled mine very much, down to the ink spot that I had added one day trying to get my pen to work. But the fabric was more elastic and almost greasy. The buttons were attached to flexible outgrowths, and there were no stitches in the fabric. “Listen, is it attached to you? Can you take it off?” My double was driven to a frenzy.
“That does it! It's not necessary to undress me in this cold wind to prove that I'm you! I can explain it without that. The scar over the eye — that's when you fell down when your father was teaching you to ride a horse. The torn ligament in the right knee happened during the soccer finals in high school. What else do I have to remind you of? How you used to secretly believe in God as a child? How as a freshman you used to boast that you had known many women, when actually you lost your virginity in Taganrog just before graduation?” (That son of a bitch! The examples he picked!) “Hm, all right; but you know, if you're me, I'm not so crazy about me.
“Neither am I,” he grunted. “I thought I had some smarts….” His face tensed. “Shhhh, don't turn around!” Footsteps behind me. “
“Good day, Valentin Vasilyevich,” said Harry Hilobok, assistant professor, sciences candidate, scientific secretary and institute busybody.
I didn't get a chance to open my mouth. My double grinned marvelously and nodded:
“Good day to you, Harry Haritonovich!”
A couple walked past us in the light of his smile. A plump brunette clicked her heels merrily on the pavement and Hilobok, walking in step, minced along as though he was wearing a tight skirt.
“Perhaps, I didn't quite understand you, Lyudochka,” he buzzed in his baritone, “but I, from the point of view of not understanding completely, am only expressing my opinion.”
“Harry has a new one,” my double announced. “You see, even Hilobok accepts me, and you have doubts. Let's go home!”
The only explanation I can think of for following him so quietly to Academic Town was that I was completely flabbergasted.
In the apartment, he headed straight for the bathroom. I heard the shower running, and then he stuck out his head:
“Hey, sample number one, or whatever your name is. If you want to make sure that I'm all in order, come on in. And you can soap my back while you're at it.”
So I did. It was a living person. And he had my body. By the way, I didn't expect such thick folds of fat on my stomach and sides. I have to work out with my barbells more often.
While he washed, I paced the room, smoked and tried to accustom myself to the fact that a computer had created a man. A computer had re — created me. Oh, nature, is this really possible? The ridiculous medieval ideas about a homunculus, Wiener's idea that the information in a man could be decoded into impulses, transmitted over any distance, and reordered into a man again, in the form of an image on a screen, Ashby's assertion that there was no major difference between the work of the brain and of a computer (but of course, Sechenov had maintained that earlier, too)…. all that had just been clever talk to keep the brain going. Try to do something practical with any of those ideas!
And now it looked as if it had been done? There, on the other side of the door, splashing and snorting, was no Ivanov, Petrov, or Sidorov — I would have tossed them out on their ear — but me. And those rolls with the numbers? I guess I had burned the “paper” me.
I was trying to extract short, usable truths from the combinations of numbers, but the computer went deeper than that. It stored information, combining it this way and that, compared it through feedback, picked and chose what was necessary and at some level of complexity “discovered” life!
And then the computer developed it to the level of man. But why? I wasn't trying to do that!
Now, as I think about it calmly, I can figure it out. It did exactly what I was trying to do. I wanted a machine that could understand man and that's all. “Do you understand me?” “Oh, yes!” answers the listener, and both go about their business, happy with each other. In conversation it's much easier. But in experiments with computers I shouldn't have confused understanding with agreement. That's why (better late than never) it's important to figure out what understanding is.
There is practical, or goal, understanding. You put in a program; the computer understands it and does what is expected of it. “Attack, Prince!” and Prince grabs the pants cuff of a passerby, “Gee!” and the horses turn to the right. “Haw!” and they go left. This kind of primitive understanding of the gee — haw type is accessible to many living and inanimate systems. It is controlled by achievement of the goal, and the more primitive the system, the simpler the goal must be and the more detailed the programmed task.
But there is another understanding: mutual understanding. A complete transferral of your information to another system. And for this, the system receiving the information must not be any simpler than the system giving the information. I didn't give the computer a goal. I was waiting for it to finish building itself and making itself more complex. But it never finished — and that's natural. Its goal became the complete understanding of my information, not only verbal, but all of it. (The goal of a computer — that's another loose concept that shouldn't be played with. Simply put, information systems behave according to certain laws that somewhat resemble the rudiments of thermodynamics. In my system sensors, crystal units, TsVM — 12 had to reach an informational equilibrium with the environment — just as the iron ingot in the oven must achieve temperature equilibrium with the coals. This equilibrium is mutual understanding. And it cannot be achieved on the level of circuitry nor on the level of simple organisms.)
And that's how it happened. Only man is capable of mutual understanding with man. And for good mutual understanding, a close friend. My double was the product of informational equilibrium between the computer and me. But, incidentally, the pointers on the informational scales never did match up. I wasn't in the lab then and didn't meet face to face with my newly hatched double. And later everything went differently for us anyway.
In a word, it was horrifying how poorly I had run the experiment. The only point in my favor was that I had finally thought of setting up the feedback mechanism.
An interesting thought: if I had run the experiment strictly, logically, throwing out dubious variants, would I have gotten the same results? Never in my life! I would have come up with a steady, sure — fire Ph.D. thesis, and nothing more, hi science, mostly mediocre things happen — and I was prepared for mediocrity.
So everything was all right? Why does sadness gnaw at me? Why do I keep harping on my mistakes? I succeeded. Because it didn't go by the rules? Are there any rules for discoveries? Much happens by accident that you can't put down to your scientific vision. What about Galvani's discovery, or X — rays, or radioactivity, or electronic emissions, or any discovery that is the basis of some science or other and is related to chance. I still don't understand a lot of it? That's the situation with many scientists. Nothing to be upset about. Then why this self — torture?