Translated Works
Kolmogorov’s 1961 report to Moscow State University—a founding statement of the Soviet cybernetic programme, wagering that life and mind, human consciousness included, are in principle modelable on discrete mechanisms, and that what matters in the analysis of life is “not the dialectics of the infinite but the dialectics of the large.” Delivered as the mathematician’s golden decade opened onto cybernetics and a militant materialist humanism, it moves from self-reproducing automata and a Turing-style imitation test to an outside observer puzzling over an anthill of humanity, the categories of small, medium, and large numbers, and a closing meditation replacing the fear of “soulless” machines with wonder. This complete edition gathers the authentic theses, Kolmogorov’s popular exposition of the report, and two commentaries from the Vivos Voco dossier (2000) by N. G. Khimchenko (Rychkova) and V. M. Tikhomirov.
Ervin Bauer’s 1935 treatise grounds a thermodynamic theory of life in a single principle—“stable non-equilibrium”: living systems alone continually perform work against the equilibrium that physics would otherwise impose on them. The Hungarian biologist was executed in Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938 and the book suppressed; it anticipates the non-equilibrium thermodynamics later associated with Schrödinger and Prigogine, and appears here in a complete, independent translation from the Russian.
A chapter from Paul Kraus’s landmark study of the Jabirian corpus, on takwīn—the alchemists’ project of generating living beings, even artificial humans, by mastering the hidden proportions of things. Kraus (1904–1944), among the foremost modern historians of Arabic science, reconstructs one of the earliest dreams of synthesising life—one ascribed to the 8th-century alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, though Kraus’s own work cast doubt on whether any single such figure wrote the corpus.
Twenty lectures by the Hungarian philosopher Melchior Palágyi (1859–1924), arguing against psychologism and for the intermittency of consciousness—a pulsed, rhythmic theory set against the Bergsonian stream—while developing a vitalist account of perception and imagination as active encounters with resistance. A neglected polymath later read closely by Ludwig Klages, Palágyi treats consciousness and life as a single problem.
A short late essay in which Goethe, seizing on a single word—Heinroth’s description of his thinking as “gegenständlich”, object-directed—gives his most concise account of his own way of knowing: a thinking that never detaches itself from its objects, in which “my seeing is itself a thinking, my thinking a seeing”. It is the epistemological credo behind his morphology.
A late essay by Louis Lapicque (1866–1952)—the physiologist who introduced chronaxie and the integrate-and-fire model of the neuron still used today—locating the basis of consciousness at the level of the single cell. Published in the year of his death, it is a programmatic last statement of a thoroughly cellular theory of mind.