His Master's Voice

by Stanisław Lem

the problem of understanding whether a signal bearing the hallmarks of intelligence might, in fact, be no more than the inanimate staccato from an as-yet unknown astronomical process.

one particular fragment existed only in a rough draft, which fragment was to have served—and here lies one of the principal doubts—as either a preface or an afterword to the book.

I have decided, finally, to make of this fragment, necessary for an understanding of the whole, the preface.

For the great scientists, however, the old stereotype is still mandatory. Artists we view as spirits chained to the flesh; literary critics are free to discuss the homosexuality of an Oscar Wilde, but it is hard to imagine any historian of science dealing analogously with the creators of physics. We must have them incorruptible, ideal, and the events of history are no more than local changes in the circumstances of their lives.

The shame of a genius may be his intellectual futility, the knowledge of how uncertain is all that he has accomplished. And genius is, above all, constant doubting.

clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary. No matter how much genuine strength it may contain, there is also, inevitably, a considerable part that is only the pretense of that strength.

all my effort was born of curiosity, untouched by any feeling of guilt. I wanted to understand—only to understand, nothing more.

nothing like the wisdom of evil is possible. My reason tells me that a creator cannot be a petty scoundrel, a conjurer who toys ironically with what he has brought into being. What we hold to be the result of a malign intervention could only make sense as an ordinary miscalculation, as an error, but now we find ourselves in the realm of nonexistent theologies—that is, theologies of fallible gods. But the domain of their constructional practices is nothing other than the field of my lifework, i.e., statistics.

to a child reality appears as a multitude of possibilities, where each can be taken separately and developed so easily that it seems almost spontaneous.

mathematics is independent of the world.

Whatever we do, we do in life; and, as experience has demonstrated, neither is mathematics the perfect retreat, because its habitation is language. That informational plant has its roots in the world and in us.

the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

The inheritance of both evolutions, of living matter and of the matter of informational speech, has not yet been exhausted, but already we dream of stepping beyond the boundaries of both.

the linguistic genesis of mathematical concepts, of the fact, in other words, that those concepts arose neither from the enumerability of things nor from the cleverness of reason.

In various fields one can acquire knowledge that is real, or the kind only that provides spiritual comfort, and the two need not agree.

we constantly renew our demand for nonexistent knowledge, i.e., information as to what created man, while ruling out in advance, without realizing it, the possibility of the union of pure accident with the most profound necessity.

the marks of our imperfection, which identify the species, have never been, not by any faith, recognized for what they simply are, that is, the results of uncertain processes;

the energies of our most primitive impulses never age.

Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole—like a stump that claims it is a limb.

Knowledge is irreversible; one cannot go back into the darkness of sweet ignorance.

One must make use of the knowledge one possesses.

Diversity, heterogeneity, is a given in mankind;

I respond with resistance and act contrary to myself, for the reason that I am able to do so.

The official version is the Baloyne Report,

there have been books about the Project by others who held high positions in it,

professional meaning that the thing studied is clearly separated from the one who studies it.

too many historical treatises even to mention.

In a separate category are books not factual but interpretive, ranging from the philosophical and theological even to the psychiatric.

The “well-informed” think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist’s disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties.

as a rule crammed the information they acquired into the corsets of their convictions; what did not fit they lopped off without ceremony or hesitation.

Science, from its very beginning, has been surrounded by a halo of pseudo science, which rises like steam from various half-educated heads;

ignorance, while it checks the enthusiasm of the sensible, in no way restrains the fools;

To say nothing of the swarm of sensational versions—which

I cannot for the life of me understand why, while people without driver’s licenses are not allowed on public roads, in bookstores one can find any number of books by persons without decency—let alone knowledge.

In the childhood of our civilization only select, well-educated individuals were able to read and write, and much the same criterion held after the invention of printing; and even if the works of imbeciles were published (which, I suppose, is impossible to avoid completely), their total number was not astronomical, as it is today.

pseudo plagiarism becomes inevitable—the unintentional repetition of the ideas of others who are unknown.

Since we do not understand the mystery, nothing really remains to us but those circumstances that were to have been the scaffolding—and not the edifice itself—or the process of translating—and not the content of the work.

part company as well with the versions that I called objective, beginning with the Baloyne Report, because the word “failure” does not appear in them.

when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din?

Noise. Interference. Static.

The most important works dealing with His Master’s Voice, the objective versions, with the Congressional at the head, admit that we did not learn everything; but the amount of space devoted to the achievements, with occasional footnote mentions of what remained unknown—those very proportions suggested that we had mastered the Labyrinth, with the exception of a few corridors—dead ends, no doubt, probably buried in rubble—whereas in fact we did not get as far as the entrance.

surely, one of the first duties of a scientist is to determine the extent not of the acquired knowledge, for that knowledge will explain itself, but, rather, of the ignorance, which is the invisible Atlas beneath that knowledge.

no longer are there universal authorities. The distribution—or disintegration—of specialization has advanced so far that the experts declare me unqualified whenever I encroach upon their particular territory. It has been said that a specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

Algedonic control means an oscillation between punishment and reward, as between pain and pleasure.

Evolution “chose” such a solution because it operates statistically:

Evolution is, as an engineer, an opportunist, not a perfectionist.

My work was no hypothesis but a formal—therefore irrefutable—proof demonstrating that certain human characteristics, over which a legion of thinkers through the centuries had racked their brains, were accounted for entirely by a process of statistical fluctuation, a process—whether in the construction of automata or of organisms—impossible to circumvent.

my discovery had failed to gain their recognition for the reason that none of them wanted that kind of discovery. The style of thinking that I represented was in those circles a repugnant thing, because it provided no scope for rhetorical counterargument.

Since the proof allowed no refutation, it became necessary to ignore it.

We tend to underestimate the inertia of the style of thought in different branches of science. Psychologically, of course, it is to be expected. The resistance we offer to the statistical model is much more easily overcome in atomic physics than in anthropology.

We crave an ideal—even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so long as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. And because our thinking