When there are no answers: His Master's Voice, by Stanislaw Lem

 When faced with problems of information, and the limits of knowledge, do not seek wisdom in Michel Foucault, nor any postmodern philosopher.  Rather, seek insight in Stanislaw Lem.  On several occasions lately, my comments have been bounded by the limits of observation, inference and deduction.  We are not stumbling blindly through a void, yet we will not answer every question, and some questions can never be answered, with the problem being that we cannot know the difference, in advance, between a question that cannot be answered and one that has not yet, but will be answered with sufficient effort, appropriately directed.  Such frustration always sends me, not to Foucault, but to Lem, and this morning, to His Master's Voice, which Lem published in 1968.

The premise is as follows.  "Spoilers" make little sense here, because there is not much of a plot.  The novel is not a conventional novel.  Rather, it is a fictional memoire for a mathematician-- Peter Hogarth-- that deals primarily with his involvement in a doomed research project.  There are neutrinos floating around the universe.  A particular neutrino "sequence" is discovered, which looks random, but then is found to repeat itself on a loop.  An alien transmission!

The government sends a group of scientists and mathematicians into the desert, recalling the Manhattan Project, to decode the transmission, sometimes called the "letter."  Can it even be decoded?  Is it even an alien transmission, or a natural phenomenon, rooted in the expansion and collapsing cycle of a universe?  (This was published in 1968, so let's give Lem the premise of a collapse, rather than the cold death of a universe, which seems to be current consensus.)

The "letter" is never decoded.  It is never even determined that the "letter" is a letter.  Hogarth convinces himself that it is, but many of the scientists decide otherwise.  Throughout their attempts to decode the sequence, the scientists make a few interesting observations.  The neutrino sequence increases the probability of life developing.  Using a section, they find a way to make something that looks like an organism ("Frog Eggs") that creates and feeds on its own nuclear reaction.  For a hot minute, it looks like they can cause a nuclear reaction, and send the kaboom anywhere, instantly, which would change the nature of nuclear war in some very bad ways, but that turns out not to work, so basically, the whole thing's a dud from the government/military perspective, and while there are a few interesting discoveries, the major goals remain unaccomplished.

You really should read His Master's Voice.  Some of Lem's pseudo-philosophical ramblings are just plain bullshit, yet to understand what he deduced in 1968 is to understand what a genius he was.  A couple of examples:  He noted that while censorship is a problem, consider what happens when there is so much speech, much of which is shit, that one cannot weed through the garbage to find the value.  Lem wrote that in '68, from behind the Iron Curtain, as a way to think through the complexity of speech and censorship, while trying to write subversively under the constraints of Polish censorship.  Wow.

Even cooler?  He wrote about missile defense systems, two superpowers running up the costs of the arms race, and the poorer country collapsing economically because it just couldn't keep up.  Thus ends the cold war.  Dude wrote that from behind the Iron Curtain in '68.  Along the way, he wrote about how an economically/militarily-underdeveloped country with nukes can get away with anything, by being crazy motherfuckers with nukes, thereby holding back global progress.  That wasn't even my point going back to this '68 gem, but its relevance today bears notice.

Rather, the book is a fascinating look at the process of trying to solve a problem.  Trying, because the problem is not solved, within the context of the book.  Yet you can never know if a problem is solvable before you solve it.  Hence, an unsolved problem is either unsolvable, or yet-to-be-solved, and the process of distinguishing between them is challenging.  In a limited set of cases, you can prove the nonexistence of a mathematical solution, but whether or not that's an edge case in the interesting set of questions critical to the modern world is itself debatable.  The fundamental point is that you often cannot discover an answer.  In the context of His Master's Voice (the government code name for the project), the stakes of learning the answer may not be that high.  Yet they can be higher in the realm of what we may melodramatically call international intrigue or even complex domestic political phenomena.  There are high-stakes games, and complex informational challenges with stakes higher than figuring out whether or not a neutrino sequence came from aliens.  When choices must be made, when lives are at stake.  Yet the stakes do not determine the answerability of a question.  That is a function of the question itself, as frustrating as that can be.

These days, I have been posting alternately about Ukraine, because it is the serious thing on my scholarly mind, and I am continuing to do science fiction Sunday posts, because I enjoy writing them, and yes, I really do think that Stanislaw Lem has things to teach us.  Yet I am nominally an elections scholar, and I remember the days after the 2016 election.  Yeah, we got that wrong.  Technically, the polls were wrong, but our forecasting models were right.  Whatever.  I told people Clinton would win, so I fucked up.  Yet, somehow we get no credit for all the House races we called correctly.  Why?  Those were invisible, partly because they were too easy.  "The incumbent wins" may not be a flashy prediction, but it is a very accurate prediction.  We just don't get any credit for that one anymore.  It's a little more complicated than that, but not much.  The basic point is that there are a lot of questions I can answer.  They just might not be the interesting or important questions right now.  In His Master's Voice, Hogarth asserts that the mathematicians and scientists may have actually gotten too much credit for a few minor observations without any big answers.

Funny, that.  I guess Hogarth had better PR than scholars do these days, and he supposedly has fuckloads of biographies/hagiographies about him, so there's that.  Over here/now, it doesn't work that way.  Yet the real lesson, the vital lesson, is not the acceptance of what cannot be known, but to treat every problem as solvable, knowing individually that any one attempt can fail.  It is when stakes are real that we must have decision-making processes based on uncertainty, but hey.  Economic analysis can handle that.  Just don't delude yourself.

Bluesiana Triangle, "For All We Know," from their first, self-titled album.  This was when it was a trio consisting of Dr. John, Art Blakey and David Fathead Newman.