His Master's Voice

by Stanisław Lem

because an idea that has not entered the bloodstream of science, and does not circulate seminally in it, in practice does not exist for us. The receptivity of science, at any time in history, to a radically different interpretation of phenomena has in fact not been great.

Our civilization, in its “advanced” scientific part, is a narrow construct, a vision repeatedly constricted by a historically stiffening conglomeration of multiple factors, among which sheer coincidence, though considered to be in strict accordance with inflexible methodologies, may play a major role.

Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?

the meeting did come to pass, and the defeat we suffered in it represented a true experimentum crucis, a proof of our resourcelessness, and still the result of that proof was ignored! The myth of our cognitive universality, of our readiness to receive and comprehend information absolutely new—absolutely, since extraterrestrial—continues unimpaired, even though, receiving the message from the stars, we did with it no more than a savage who, warming himself by a fire of burning books, the writings of the wisest men, believes that he has drawn tremendous benefit from his find!

the recording of the history of our vain efforts may prove useful—if only to some later, future student of the First Contact—because the published accounts, those official reports, concentrate on the so-called successes, that is, on the pleasant warmth that emanates from the burning pages. Of the hypotheses we tried, one after another, practically nothing is said there. Such a course of action would have been permissible—I alluded to this already—had the thing investigated been kept separate, in the end, from its investigators.

the history of His Master’s Voice is the tale of a defeat: of wrong turns that were not followed by a straightened path. Thus one should not wipe away the zigzags of our journey, because those zigzags are all that is left us.

Our thinking must come up against some hard focal point of facts that sobers it and corrects it; in the absence of such a corrective, it easily turns into a projection of private flaws (or virtues, it doesn’t matter)—onto the plane of the thing studied.

Man’s quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity,

philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth.

Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to b...

The history of philosophy is the history of successive and non-identical retreats.

himself as a model for the entire species, and even for all possible sentient beings.

it has not occurred to any of our philosophers that to deduce, from the pattern of one’s own thoughts, laws that hold for the full set of people, from the eolithic until the day the suns burn out, might be, to put it mildly, imprudent.

This initial equating of oneself with the norm of the species—an unknown—was, to be plain, irresponsible.

philosophy speaks of human hopes, fears, and longings at much greater length than it does of the essence of the completely indifferent world, a world that is an eternal constant of laws only for the news media.

could respect philosophers only as people driven by curiosity, never as propounders of truth.

when did they conscientiously undertake to question, first, a large number of human subjects? No—they consulted always and only themselves. It is this repeated self-enthronement of theirs, this tacit setting up of themselves as models of Homo sapiens, that has always aggravated me and made it hard for me to read “profound” works—because in them I quickly reach the place where the author’s obvious is no longer mine, and thereafter he speaks only to himself, tells only of himself, appeals only to himself, and loses the right to deliver pronouncements that are valid for me, not to mention the rest of the bipeds that populate the planet.

EXCELLENT critique!

How many times in my life, after the revelation of a new discovery, having formulated it so solidly that it was quite indelible, unforgettable, was I obliged to wrestle for hours to find for it some verbal suit of clothes, because the thing had been born, in me, beyond the pale of all language, natural or formal? I call this phenomenon “surfacing.” It defies description, because what emerges from the unconscious with difficulty, slowly, finds nests of words for itself; it exists as an entity before it settles inside those nests; yet I can give no indication, no hint, to explain in precisely what form that non- and preverbalness appears; it is heralded only by a keen presentiment that the expectation of it will not be in vain.

What did we have to work with? A mystery and a jungle of guesses. From the mystery we chipped off a few slivers of fact, but when they did not increase, or amount to any solid edifice that could correct our hypotheses, the hypotheses began gradually to assume the upper hand, and in the end we wandered lost in a wilderness of conjectures, of conjectures based upon conjectures.

in the course of my work (it is difficult to say exactly when this occurred) I began to suspect that the “letter from the stars” was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test.

as a subject, believing he sees in the colored blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is “on his mind,” so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.

A botanist who classifies flowers has not much of a field on which to project schemata of his fantasies, illusions, and perhaps even dishonorable passions. The researcher of ancient myths runs a greater risk, because—given their abundance—the very choice he makes may testify more to what pervades his dreams and unscientific thoughts than to what constitutes the structural invariables of the myths themselves. The people of the Project were forced to take the next, reckless step—accepting a risk of the nature mentioned above but on a scale hitherto unknown. None of us knows, therefore, to what extent we were the instruments of an objective analysis, to what extent the delegates of humanity (in that we have been shaped by and are typical of our society), and to what extent, finally, each of us represented only himself, with the inspiration for his hypotheses about the contents of the “letter” being supplied by his own—possibly raving, possibly wounded—psyche in its uncontrolled regions.

The Project constituted a precedent in which, like those Russian wooden dolls-within-dolls, sat other precedents, and primarily this: that never before had physicists, engineers, chemists, nucleonicists, biologists, or information theorists held in their hands an object of research that represented not only a certain material—hence natural—puzzle, but which had been intentionally made by Someone and transmitted, and where the intent must have taken into account the potential addressee. Because scientists learn to conduct so-called games with nature, with a nature that is not—from any permissible point of view—a personal antagonist, they are unable to countenance the possibility that behind the object of investigation there indeed stands a Someone, and that to become familiar with that object will be possible only insofar as one draws near, through reasoning, to its completely anonymous creator. Therefore, though they supposedly knew and freely admitted that the Sender was a reality, their whole life’s training, the whole acquired expertise of their respective fields, worked against that knowledge.

Ties to Jakobsen's analysis

The organizational structure of the Project, with its mutual isolation of the different groups, I considered wise, because it prevented any kind of “epidemic of error.”

Circulating in this way in the lower regions of the kingdom of science, where it merges imperceptibly with the realm of psychiatry, he acquired an amount of quite useful information; he knew, with surprising accuracy, where lay the greatest demand among his crippled titans of intellect.

We really have no idea what a multitude of con men and crackpots inhabit the domain that lies halfway between contemporary science and the insane asylum.

Laserowitz, taking the “sections of silence” on the tapes for signals, was without question raving. And yet it was conceivable that at the same time the man could be right, seeing in the tapes a “communication”—if that communication was the very noise! An insane idea, but Rappaport could not rid himself of it. A stream of information—human speech, for example—does not always tell us that it is information and not a chaos of sounds.

In the case where we receive true noise, individual signals never repeat themselves in the same order. In this sense a “noise series” would be, say, a thousand numbers that show on a roulette wheel. It would be quite impossible for the next thousand turns of the wheel to repeat, in the same sequence, the results of the preceding series. This is precisely the essence of “noise,” that the order of appearance of its elements—be they sounds or other signals—is unforeseeable. If, however, the series repeats itself, it proves that the “noise” quality of the phenomenon is superficial, that in fact we have before us a transmitter acting as a channel of information.

had used sequentially the tapes that resulted from those many months of recording cosmic radiation. If the radiation was an intentional signaling, and if, in that period of time, one series of emissions of the “communication” concluded and then the transmission of the communication was resumed from the beginning, the result would be what Swanson swore to. The subsequent tapes would record the exact same series of impulses, which by their repetition would reveal that their noise aspect was only an illusion!

it is only possible to reveal such noise as information if the emissions of the message repeat themselves in a circle and one can set them side by side for comparison.

it would be a miracle indeed for them to accomplish the same thing—again by luck—a second time.

(In other words, what was the difference—if any existed—between an original recording and a copy of it?) It turned out that such a distinction could sometimes be made.

all were pronounced original by the expert; thus Swanson had committed no fraud, and thus the emission had in fact repeated itself periodically.

the “neutrino letter from the stars,” which was given then the code name—Baloyne’s half-joking suggestion—His Master’s Voice.

A top FBI legal adviser told him that the Universe, lying mainly outside the nation’s borders, did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Bureau; it was the CIA that concerned itself with foreign problems. The unfortunate consequences of this step did not show themselves at once, but the process, once begun, was irreversible.

As to why I was approached only after the Science Council had become convinced of the necessity of acquiring academic reinforcements, I was told so many different things so often, and given such weighty reasons, that probably none of it was the truth.

the whole thing was of course managed by specialists in stagecraft.

The Project, practically from the beginning, was classified—an

The scientific directors of the Project, it should be emphasized, learned of this gradually, and as a rule separately, one by one, at special meetings during which discreet appeal was made to their political wisdom and patriotic feelings.

the hermetic nature of the Project, its severance from the world, was seen purely as a stopgap, a temporary, transitional arrangement that would be changed.

first the Project had to win the trust of powerful patrons; only then would it be possible to follow what in all conscience the scientific helmsmen of HMV considered the most appropriate course.

I entered its course when many of the general concepts had already been formed;

in science, too, one’s biological presence is required, because, despite appearances, a discovery needs credentials louder than its own merit)—and,

in mathematics all that is needed is “naked ability,” because the lack of it there cannot be hidden; while in other disciplines connections, favoritism, fashion, and—most of all—the absence of that indisputability of proof which is supposed to characterize mathematics, cause a career to be the resultant vector of talents and conditions that are nonscientific.

in our mathematical paradise things are not ideal.

every man, it seems, must envy another.

Classical logic, along with Boole’s algebra, the midwives of information theory, were from the beginning burdened with a combinatorial inflexibility. Thus the mathematical tools borrowed from those domains never worked well. They are, to my taste, unwieldy, ugly, awkward; though they yield results, they do it in a graceless way.

that I intended to learn through lecturing,

one can sit and read esoteric works, but for lectures it is imperative to prepare oneself, and this I did, so I cannot say who profited more from them, I or my students.

understood that here was research under very high protection—or, if you prefer, supervision. How else could a thing of such importance not have been leaked to the press or other media channels? It was obvious that experts of the first order were engaged in keeping the lid on tight.