Review of “Die Welt der ungewohnten Dimensionen” by Arnold Hildesheimer.

Excerpt: I open my paper by presenting the following thesis: “There are no such things as self-organizing systems!” In the face of the title of this conference I have to give a rather strong proof of this thesis, a task which may not be at all too difficult, if there is not a secret purpose behind this meeting to promote a conspiracy to dispose of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I shall now prove the non-existence of self-organizing systems by reductio ad absurdum of the assumption that there is such a thing as a self-organizing system.

Excerpt: The capacity of selfreproduction, although omnipresent in the animate world, is tied up with a host of other characteristics of living organisms and cannot claim to be a fundamental principle. I propose to consider as a fundamental principle of living things their capacity to form coalitions. Thus, sexual reproduction appears to be only a particular manifestation of this capacity. What I call a “coalition” is an aggregate of elements which jointly can do things which all of them separately could never achieve.

First of all, I wish to apologize for this somewhat pompous title, but I hope that at the end of my talk you will have forgiven me for having invoked Plato’s esoteric ideas in order to embellish the thoughts behind a few mundane gadgets. Perhaps you will grant me extenuating circumstances if I am going to make a confession at once, namely, that I believe the time has come when one may conceive of a happy marriage between philosophy and hardware. Since most of the functions of the hardware I am going to discuss in their concepts date back to the famous Dialogues, I felt obliged to give the proper reference.