Episode 336: That Oceanic Feeling (Stanisław Lem's "Solaris")

0:00Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. Learn how to keep your family and your community safe, and help take a bite out of crime. I'm a very bad man.

0:46I'm a very good man. Good man.

0:53And with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:02Anybody can have a brain.

1:06You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, in two days I will embark on a long voyage to Ithaca. What can I expect when I get there? Well, first thing to ask you is, have you been like fucking Calypso for the last 10 years?

1:32It wasn't my choice, you know. Like, it was non-consensual. You're going to definitely encounter a cyclops on the way. When you arrive, I definitely will have just a random bow and arrow and some axe heads. I haven't figured out what exactly you're competing for, but we're going to have you. Yeah, maybe Nikki. I can string a bow with the best of them.

1:57I'll just go eat all your stores. Of, like, go through your entire herd. Of veggie meat. Veggie meat. That sucks.

2:07I took all his tofu. I just stay there. I won't leave. I eat all their tofu. You can smoke all of Bella's weed. Oh, does Bella have weed in the house? That's good. Yes. So does Nikki. Is Bella going to be there? Yeah, she will. Oh, cool. Yeah, so you can smoke with them, and I'll be, like, looking out the window with, like, the rain falling. I was thinking you should smoke for the AUA. On record right now, Dave has just, with that pause, he has committed to, for the first

2:39time, getting stoned on this podcast during an AUA that we record when I'm there. I've mastered the art of pretending. I'm like an undercover cop. I've mastered the art of pretending. That's what I can expect is, like, to be immediately arrested. All right. So, today, we are going to be talking about the novel Solaris by Stanislaw. How do you pronounce that? Stanislaw? I think Stanislaw. I think so. Yeah. I should have looked that up.

3:10Out of basic respect. This will be the first half of our obligation to the VBW Patreon community who voted in VBW Madness, our Tournament of Topics. Yeah. Solaris novel and film, because the second half will be about Tarkovsky's movie Solaris. That was a winner. And it just, much like France, just went right through the tournament. Although, unlike France, I don't know that I would have predicted it.

3:41But, yes. But it's time had come. I mean, I'm glad I'd never read Solaris, and I think it's great. Like, I'm really excited to talk to you about it. Yeah. We haven't talked about it at all, so this is exciting. Do we want to talk at all about the World Cup? Do you have any, like, hot takes on the Balagin, like, getting reinstated? Reinstated, or... Oh, I guess we can talk about that a little bit, because that's an evergreen topic. Like, it's like when your mom goes to your coach and says, like, he's not playing enough.

4:11Put him in. But your mom happens to be, like, you know, a donor. Like, imagine feeling that way about Trump making a phone call to reinstate. On your behalf. Yeah. You know, I have the slightly contrarian position on this, which is, it was a fucking bullshit red card. And VAR is really, like, not ruining, because it's so awesome, but it's marring, like, this great tournament with all these incredible games. And that was a bullshit VAR red card, which they slowed it down in slow motion.

4:43And then, of course, it looked bad. They have appeals processes in other leagues. Like, Premier League, you can appeal a red card. Like, why can't you just frickin' appeal a bullshit red card? It's bad if they only do it because Trump calls and asks you, but I'm not even sure that's what happened. Like, I think that they wanted to do it anyway, for the same reason they, you know, fucked over Egypt so that your team could advance. They didn't fuck over Egypt at all. That's such bullshit narrative right now.

5:14It's pissing me off so much. So, two things. One, like, it's just not at all uncommon to get an overturned goal. Like, it happened to Argentina in the qualifiers. Like, they got an overturned goal because the play that initiated the game, like, the goal play, had a foul in it. That just happens all the time. The VAR on the red card, like, I don't know. I mean, contact was made on his fuckin' Achilles. That could have been a career-slowing injury. But that's fine. Like, if you want to complain about the red card, they didn't rescind the red, though. They suspended it. No, they suspended the suspension.

5:45He still gets the red. So, like, they didn't say we made a mistake in the call. Right. Well, they suspended the red. Like, that's the same thing as saying I made a mistake. No, but it's not. The difference is one is saying, oh, the rule that when you get a red leads to a suspension, we're going to ignore that rule. It's not saying that was an unjust red card or it was given inappropriately or it violated anything. If that was the case, they should turn around the red card. He didn't get the red card taken away. Well, that's because, though, there's no rule that allows them to do that.

6:16Unlike the Premier League, unlike most leagues, they just have this all-purpose rule that they can kind of do whatever they want because it's fuckin' FIFA and they're corrupt. So, what do you expect? And what people don't, like, talk about enough, I think, is that this has already happened in the tournament. Ronaldo, your boy, he also got a red card. This was in the qualifying, but he would have missed the first two group stage events for Portugal. And they just said, no, he doesn't have to do it. It was suspended, too.

6:47And there was someone else that it happened to as well. So, like, I don't totally see why everyone is so upset. Well, because that's the corruption. Like, that's what everybody's upset about. That's exactly the corruption that you're talking about. But it's just, like, I don't know what Ronaldo's thing was. Probably he did, actually, deserve the red card. But in any case, it was so moot because they laid the biggest, fattest egg that you could possibly imagine. And that's the thing. All it did was motivate those Belgians. Like, they were just on fire. They have not played like that the whole tournament.

7:19All of a sudden, they look like fuckin' France, dude. They're like... And we just, like, laid down and played dead. Like, they never showed the least bit of fight in that. No. Like, nothing. Balogun was the best, like, still. His attitude throughout the whole thing was amazing. Totally. Total match. Yeah. It's because he's British. That's the other irony, is that he's a birthright citizen. And one of the ones that they are, like, panicking about. Like, someone comes to, like, they get a flight to America and just arrange for the birth to happen there. And, like, yes, we planted another citizen.

7:52Dude, here's what I want to ask you, though. Why do we have... Birthright citizenship? Are you, like... Oh, yeah. Bitch-ass-edness. Just in our... The DNA of our, like, soccer teams. Like, Pulisic is just soft as could be. Like, no show. It's unbelievable. And, you know, finally when they went out, it feels like, okay, we can find... People can finally say what they think about. But the subtext of every single, like, soccer-associated, like, professional talking about him was he is a giant pussy.

8:25Like, he makes Landon Donovan look like the fucking hardest motherfucker that ever played the game. Like, yeah, the manufacturer, like, let's make him the face of the, like, American soccer team. It's just so embarrassing in retrospect. Because he also kind of sucks. Certainly in any big games, he sucks. Yeah. And he seems like a terrible leader. He's always... He gets hurt constantly. Yeah. Like, what's Messi? 39? And he's playing at this level. And Pulisic is, like, in his prime.

8:56He's, like, 27, 28, something like that. Yeah. The, like, most apt thing that somebody said was when he, like, got injured or whatever and had to go out, he was crying on the bench. Yeah. And one of the commentators was, like, you're not allowed to cry if you didn't do anything the whole game. If all you did was, like, turn them all over. Yeah. If you didn't show up and then you get hurt and you want to come out, like, you don't get to cry. You cry when, like, you left your everything on the field and, you know, and you just can't go on.

9:26Right. The doctors are telling you you can't. Anyway, exciting. I think this has been, like, such a fun World Cup. Like, extending it to 48 teams, I was, like, suspicious about it. But it's gotten the world involved. And, like, as much as we're bitching, the, like, good stories, like, these good sports, like, after Argentina, Cabo Verde, like, they're just friends now, you know? Like, it was amazing. That was the sport at its best, I think, that game. Also, Mexico in the Aztec, Mexico, England. I don't think there's the mutual respect thing going on there.

9:58Yeah. But, like, it was just so intense. That whole game was just so complete. And this probably is the greatest sporting event we have. And I say that not being a huge soccer fan. But the level of intensity on the field and then also in, like, the fans. It's, like, it has no pier. I was in France when France played Paraguay. Yeah. And, you know, it was, like, a shit game. France wins 1-0 with a penalty. And in this, like, very German town on the border of France and Germany.

10:30And it was 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning. They're honking their horns down the street. They got the flags out driving by. And I told Nikki, and she's like, that's weird. The French are normally so reserved. And I was like, no, but the World Cup, man, it doesn't. All those rules go out the door. Like, there's nothing like it. And they don't just do it in their country. They do it, like, they've been doing it all across the United States and Canada and Mexico. And, like, everybody has been so into it. And it's, yeah, it should be celebrated. But in the end, it's still soccer and we suck.

11:01Not the women. Not the women. Not the women. Speaking of women. Speaking of women. What an incredible segue. Anyway, we are going to do the opening segment on just a great piece of work by Mehmetoglue. This is called Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features.

11:31So how did you come across this? You put this one in the slur. I did. I went to, I realized we needed an opening. And so I went to Blue Sky and all that that entails. And I just honed right in on Neuroskeptic. And, you know, I had to get, like, a month in the past. But there it was. And, you know. Going into Blue Sky is like, it's like walking into a public restroom where you, like, have to hold your breath. And get your shit done.

12:01Yeah. Okay. So this is Evolutionary Psychology. April 2026. This is a hilarious article. This is really funny. It's not intended to be, I don't think. No. No. This is, like, real. God, the things that it published. First of all, like, the review of the literature cracked me up because it's, like, reviewing, like, all this evolutionary psychology saying, like, you know, a lot of work has shown that, like, appearance matters. To men. To men. To men. When they're picking women to mate with. And so, you know, he talks about, like, oh, look, there's work on waist to hip ratio.

12:35There's eyelashes, hair length, brow thickness. All this stuff. But, you know, understudied is that among the many physical traits that function as secondary sexual characteristics, breasts and buttocks are visually conspicuous cues relevant to reproductive value. Why didn't anyone think breast and buttocks, you know? Yeah. And then there's, like, a Kant researcher, but, like, with a C, not with a K, but it makes it funny to say. As Kant notes, humans have been interested in breasts and buttocks in one way or another

13:07for a long time, as evidenced by the Venus figurines from Upper Paleolithic Europe. I love having to justify, like, scholarly. I guess it's the oldest thing they could think of. It's, like, one of the oldest, like, depictions of women. But even then, you know, there are these, like, you know, they're large women with, like, boobs. But that doesn't mean that they're, like, reflecting that somebody likes tits and ass. It's just a statue of a woman. Yeah. I love those things.

13:37These are my favorite things about these kinds of articles, is when they just have to, like, justify it. Like, the first sentence of this, mate choice is typically a lifelong and future-shaping decision, making it one of the most critical choices an individual can make.

13:55I just love that. Like, that's, you know what's really important choice? Is who you decide to spend the rest of your life with. So, let's look at how guys like tits and ass. Just tits and ass. It's just all, that's all. Okay. I guess to summarize the article, because it's really simple. It's not asking just, like, do guys prefer tits or ass? It's asking, can we come up with a profile of guys where there's, like, a cluster of things that they like, and you fit into one cluster or another?

14:27So, what he ends up doing is tossing in a couple of other measures that we'll talk about, because I don't know why the fuck they're in there. The egalitarian. The egalitarian. The materialistic. And the materialism that's just so random. So, he's like, yeah, it does this, like, latent profile analysis where he's basically saying, like, let's take a look at how these people seem to, like, categorize into groups. And you kind of let the data tell you, and you look, and you're like, okay, it looks like there are some guys who like both tits and ass. Interesting. And they're high on the materialism scale.

15:00And then there's some guys who only like ass, but they don't care as much about tits. That's you. That's the you category. Well, it's true. Those people tend to be highest in egalitarianism. So, thank you. I'll take that. You're a communist. By the way, the way they measured egalitarianism is one question. Everyone should have an equal chance and an equal say, one to five. Don't worry. He talks about it in the discussion. Maybe that's like a, that was a weakness. A mild limitation of the say.

15:30They're all one item, five point scales. So, there is just, how important would you consider these physical qualities, buttocks in one, or breasts in another, in a partner? And then you rate the importance on a five point scale ranging from one, not at all important to five, very important. Just the one item. And then the egalitarian orientation and the materialistic orientation, which is a terrible double barreled item. I would like to possess things slash achievements that impress others.

16:01I would like to possess achievements. And then two items that ask you how important is sexiness in a mate and how important is intellectual, intellectuality, intellectuality, intellectuality is very important to me. I mean, to be fair, this is being conducted in Norway, but one of my favorite things about this is the justification for what is obviously a convenient sample.

16:31The guy does research in Norway, so he's studying Norwegian men. And he says, the present study aims to address this gap, the gap being, we're not quite sure what the profile of guys liking tits and asses. We conduct the analysis in Norway, a Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, aka weird, society, which according to Mariansky, 2010 is particularly well suited for evolutionary psychology research. Norway represents a social context characterized by high gender equality, strong welfare provisions, and relatively high mate choice autonomy.

17:02These conditions may reduce some of the material constraints that can influence mate preference in more resource constrained environments. As a result, the variation in preferences may be more readily observable as individual differences within a shared cultural context. Wait, so is the idea that our, like, what do they call it? The environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, like, that that was egalitarian and there was a lot of gender equality in those? No, I think the idea is that whatever that was, like, that's where our brains evolved.

17:33Okay? So, like, maybe that was a fucked up situation. So now, whatever, we like tits or ass. But what happens is in some places, say, for instance, in a place where resources are super constrained, it's hard to get food, men, due to environment, those environmental constraints might seek out women with, like, big ass or, like, big boobs because that's, like, the kind of thing that you need to make sure that your, like, child survives in a resource constrained environment. Oh, I see. But remove that and now we have, like, your pure. Yes. That devolves mine.

18:03Right. It's just crazy because it's, like, oh, yeah, Norway is where we're, like, the purest and, like, evolutionary whatever. Like, just say you had access to Norwegian dudes. Yeah. You have, like, they're all in their 20s because they were in, like, this university that you work at. Yeah. But it really is just those, like, they got, like, this is an easy study to participate in. Yes. You got, like, four questions, one to five. That's it. Yes. You're done. Exactly. That's it. Yeah.

18:34All variables were assessed on five-point scale. So, whatever, five items, five-point scale. Is this, like, is this, are they even going to pretend the scale has been validated? Like. No, it even says at the end, like, well, maybe we should use a validated scale. What are we fucking doing? Dude. What the heck? Like, what is this? I do not know. Okay. So, there's something interesting here. Like, the people who say they like boobs also like butts. That's correlated positively at R.41. Yeah. But the materialistic orientation was positively associated with ratings of both buttocks and

19:07breasts, as well as with the general preference for sexiness as a mate choice criterion. And then people who are, like, into sexiness like boobs and butts. Like boobs and butts. Yeah. Yeah. Counterintuitive, but I guess. And then materialistic and egalitarian orientations were negatively correlated, they say. And it's, like, barely. It's, like, minus 0.1. And it's not even statistically significant. So, no, they weren't. Right. Right. If you want to build a narrative, it could be, like, these woke egalitarians.

19:38Like, they see a question like that and they're, like, oh, they're trying to get me to say that I objectify women. That's probably it. That's probably exactly what happened. Like, I could see that happening to me where I'm, like, I don't know, man. I'm not going to, like, you're asking me literally two questions about women. Yeah. Like, do I like their butts or do I like their boobs? And just how important is it to you? Yeah, how important, right, right. It's not even do you like it. It's how important is it and important. So, the main result, as I understand it, I'm sure I'm wrong, so you can correct me, is that there's very few people who just like breasts.

20:15And they don't care about the other stuff or that that's, like, if you, like, if you're a breast guy, you also care about this other stuff. Whereas, the same isn't true for buttocks. Buttocks, you can, like, that can just be your thing. There is no pure T. There's only the T and the A and the A, but there's no pure T. Yeah, that's right. Like, so they use this whatever latent profile analysis, which I don't know much about anyway, but to create these groups with these latent profiles. So, you can kind of say, you know, you've got to make some judgment calls here.

20:48But he's like, look, it looks like there's four groups and he has a little chart. So, there's moderately body-oriented people who are, like, they like boobs and butts, kind of, like, in the middle of the pack. Like, there's the highly body-oriented people who like boobs and butts. There's the high. And then there's, like, the people who, like you just said, like butts, but they don't care that much for boobs. And then he looks at the correlation between these groups and egalitarianism. And as you were saying before, no surprise, people who are really into saying they love boobs and butts are just less likely to say they're egalitarian and more likely to say that they're materialistic and they like sexiness.

21:27So, I couldn't even find him talking about what this means for any theory. Like, why pick the egalitarianism and materialism? Like, what larger theory are they testing out? Do they even say? I also was kind of looking for that. Like, why choose it? Was it like the porpoises in the South Park Family Guy episode where it's like they just randomly put things to the top? Yes. There was no justification. It's just so weird. Yeah.

21:57So, here's some of his conclusions. What do these findings reveal? Well, it is well established that men place greater emphasis on physical features when evaluating potential mates, presumably compared to women. We have lacked clarity regarding which specific features drive this preference. The current study provides compelling evidence that breasts and buttocks significantly shape men's perceptions of female physical attractiveness, doing so for over 90% of the Norwegian men in our sample. Because that's all you asked them to raise, though. Like, if you're saying, like, what is it about the physicality of women that men like?

22:29Weirdly, mostly butts and boobs. But, like, that's all you asked? That's all you asked. That's not so weird. Like, if it's a Quentin Tarantino, like, you didn't ask him about feet. So, like... That should have been in the discussion section. Like, what? Future research. Yeah.

22:45Should immediately explore. Like, we're wasting time here. Like, this study should already be, like, the mediating factor of feet. Okay. This one is my favorite. Equally interesting is that our study highlights a subtle yet important point. Colon, buttocks function as a more central cue than breasts in structuring male preference patterns in this sample. While the evolutionary psychology literature often gives the impression that these two features are equally valued, our findings challenge this assumption.

23:16Specifically, we identified a distinct subgroup of men, parentheses, buttocks-oriented, who showed a marked preference for buttocks, but no corresponding subgroup that prioritized breasts exclusively. This asymmetry supports an earlier observation by Dagnino et al., 2012, who also reported a stronger preference for buttocks. One possible explanation is that buttocks may have had a longer evolutionary history in influencing male mating psychology there by leaving a deeper imprint on male preferences.

23:47It's so funny.

23:50You think, like, the reason they did it in Norway is, like, where you would really expect to find this result is in the black community. So, they just picked the whitest possible people to do it on. Oh, to, like, give it, like, the most conservative test of the hypothesis. Exactly. Like, it's like the Popperian, like, strict test or whatever. The severe test. The severe test. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. But, you know, future research warrants further investigation. So, he says, you know, one of the things we could do is have them rate female figures based on systematically varied combinations of breast and buttock images, differing in symmetry, size, curvature, shape, and other relevant features.

24:30Relevant to who? It is, I think, it sheds light on what is a question that has been asked, not just among evolutionary psychologists, but in film and literature, you know. Are you a tit man or an ass man, right? That's eastbound and down. In fact, like, it might be an unrealistic character, but Kenny Powers ends the show as a pure tit man.

25:06It is a pigment of the Western imagination. As I go on eastbound and down Reddit and be like, this is actually unrealistic and I have the scientific proof. By the way, I was trying to look. It's not at all clear to me that he, like, that he even asked whether they were heterosexual men. Like, right? Because, like, yeah, obviously if you're a gay guy, you're not going to be like, oh, I love the tits. I love the big, perfectly curved, symmetrical.

25:37I love what's so funny about these is with all, like, literally even just measuring how attracted you are to these things is just one question on a, like, five-point scale. Like, which obviously, like, what you put on it doesn't necessarily reflect how much you're actually attracted to real-life people with these features. But then, like, the sophistication of the math here is just so funny. Like, it's like, to capture the anticipated heterogeneity in the data, specifically the presence of latent profiles or classes, an LPA was conducted using M-Plus version 8.10 LK facilitated through the M-Plus automation package.

26:21As we say, it's polishing a turd. It's lipstick on a pig. But, like you said, it was easy to run, you know? It really was. For those who are curious, the mean values here are if on a scale of one to five, you ask men in Norway, these men, how important are buttocks to you? The average is 3.91. How important are breasts to you? 3.37. How egalitarian are you? 3.97. How materialistic are you? 2.8. How important is sexiness?

26:513.84. Intellectuality. 3.78. So, you know. Well, it is a study. And what would you answer to these questions? Let's close this out with that question.

27:05How important are these in your partner? I mean, I would put ass above boobs. Right. That's the difference between us. Yeah. But I'm, like, being erased from history by this paper. Although, of course, like, I do. I'm sure you also care about other things as well. I mean, that's, you know, maybe, like, their eyes. Maybe their eyes. You're trying to figure it. Like, what? I know I'm supposed to care about something other than tits or ass.

27:37I don't know. Maybe the eyes. I don't like chicks with split ends, you know, in their hair. Let's see. What else am I supposed to like? Like, you know, it's pretty much just those two, actually.

27:50Oh, my gosh. If only we lived in a place like Norway where culture wouldn't matter. We'd just be pure evolutionary mind. Which show.

28:02All right. We'll be right back to talk about another, you know, longstanding scientific quandary. But one that is fictionalized in Stanislaw Len's Solaris.

28:39We'll be right back.

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33:07So thank you to everybody. We really appreciate it. And now, on to the episode. Okay, let's get to our main segment, Stanislav Lem's 1961 novel, Solaris, originally written in Polish. The story is about a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, who travels to a space station that's orbiting a planet. The planet's name is Solaris. Apparently, the planet was discovered about 100 years ago, and it's just covered by a vast ocean that scientists over time have come to believe is living, is shown signs of intelligence.

33:37When he gets to that space station, though, there's been some shit that went down. There's only two researchers left at the station, and some weird stuff starts happening. He realizes after a day that one of the researchers, his former mentor, had just killed himself. So something is going on in the space station connected to the planet that is making apparitions appear to these researchers. Now, the book kind of goes between telling the story, like the history of the scientific endeavors

34:09to understand Solaris and what the planet is, what this vast ocean is made of. Is it living? Is it conscious? Is it intelligent? Can we communicate with it? And the personal story of Kelvin, whose apparition is an ex-wife who herself committed suicide 10 years before. When she was 19. When she was 19. When did Kelvin marry her? Like, how old was she when he got married? You know, I feel like Poland in 2026 might have different standards, let alone Poland in

34:421961.

34:46So what did you think? Like, I'd read it once before, but what were your... I thought it was terrific. And I'm not a big science fiction fan, certainly when it comes to novels. I definitely love some great science fiction films, including the one that we'll talk about next episode by Tarkovsky on Solaris. But, you know, like, for whatever reason, like Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, like, I respect it more than I really like it. But this kind of blew me away in that it raises a ton of philosophical questions, of questions

35:21about science and scientific methodology, of questions about whether we can actually know the world and whether we can't. And, you know, just trying to figure out, like, what that ocean could be a metaphor for. You know, is it a metaphor for consciousness? Is it conscious? Is it a metaphor for art? Is it a metaphor for the universe? Like, I think it could be all of these things, but it can't be just one of them. Like, it doesn't allow you to give a reductive explanation.

35:54And in that sense, it's a really rich text. Like, we could talk about this. I feel like we could do six episodes on all the stuff that's going on in this book. Right. And you didn't even... Right there, you didn't even mention, like, the rich sort of psychology of the researchers themselves and what's going on and how that thing, whatever it is, the plasmic ocean is connected to the psychology of the researchers. There's, like, this weird intimacy. So, at the same time, this real separation between whatever that alien monster other thing

36:24is that we can't even comprehend, our concepts, our science has failed for a hundred years to make sense of what's going on there. And yet, it forms an intimacy with these researchers. And that seems purposeful, but there's always the question of whether it is purposeful or not. And it's unknowable. It seems like, you know, I think it ends on the note that it's unknowable. And he is undulating to a point where he feels optimistic that, well, I don't even know what

36:56he expects at the end. But he does end on a slightly optimistic note, given how kind of dour he is in the last third of the book, but it raises these questions that we've talked about a lot, I think, especially with regards to consciousness, but with regard to so many things of what can we understand with our limitations, our epistemological limitations, our conceptual limitations, like, does that close us off from understanding something like Solaris?

37:28Yeah. And it explores that terrain really well, but it's also, and then it's also fairly moving without being in any way sentimental. Right. Yeah. I don't think like a Cold War era Polish author could be too sentimental. It's as sentimental as it gets. Science fiction writer, yeah. Right. That's true. Yeah. So what you were saying about sci-fi, I was a little worried when I started rereading it. I was like, oh man, this is jumping right into like the sci-fi elements. And I was like, I was worried that you might hate it. But then as I started reading more and remembering how rich it is in all of the stuff that exactly

38:03the notes that we hit and like some of the stuff that you really care about, I was like, yeah, no, this will be. Yeah. It has that real kind of science studies critique of science. It's so good. It's so layered and all of these things connect. So you were mentioning some already, like our epistemic limits. Can we ever know everything that we want to know about the natural universe through our methods and with our brains? Then there's the, can we ever know the mind of an alien that is so different from ours that

38:36we, even if we got into their head, we would be like completely confused because there's no common ground. This thing evolved on a planet that has completely different conditions. It's made of different stuff than we're made of. It's whatever the mechanisms that are making it be able to, one of the things it does is create these great physical structures just sort of out of the blue. No one knows why and how. Like it's not made of the same stuff as us. And I think that Lem is really trying to nail home like this thing that, you know, like the hardcore anthropologists, especially around that time would say things like you can't ever

39:13know somebody from another culture. Like it's like a, you're closed off from truly knowing the experience of somebody else in a culture so different. And as humans, we have a lot of common ground to rely on. Like we, we share the same physiology by and large, you know, some of us like boobs, some of us like butts, but yeah, but we can get past that as a difference. Yeah. I can't really understand an ass person. Like I'm closed off epistemically, you know? So you're gay, you don't like, are you just trying to have anal?

39:47Like what's going on? So there is like the not knowing how the universe works because the scientific, like the human mind is limited. There's the like total otherness of this creature. And over and over again, he has these, um, the history of the science that he, in a very Borgesian way, you know, makes up like this whole intellectual history that he's guiding you through of like the hundred years of studying. And Lem goes out of his way, I think to say, and then some people thought that it was like the very first thing he says was like a relative of the electric eel, which is a ridiculous

40:20comparison, but it was the only thing people could think of as analogous. And every analogy that we tried to come up with as humans for understanding that planet and that intelligence, that thing completely fails because there is no analogy that can be had because analogies rely on a con some common understanding. And so even asking if it's purposeful doesn't make sense because maybe purpose isn't a thing that it has. That's the thing that I think it highlights the, even the, the problem with determining

40:50whether it has a purpose, nevermind whether like what that purpose is, but even whether it has a purpose. So like one of the things that this thing does is like some sort of look into your consciousness, your subconscious, and it creates a character that will then, uh, be, or look exactly like a person. And as you said, in the narrator's case, in Kelvin's case, it's his ex-wife who killed herself that he feels kind of guilty for the fact that she killed herself.

41:22And he probably should feel guilty because he, he, she was threatening to, and he says, I don't think you have the guts. And then he kind of walks out on her and now all of a sudden to put her here, that seems so purposeful, right? Like that seems like, of course, if you've been bombarding it with radiation, it is trying to fuck with you. It's trying to make you kill yourself or go crazy or question reality or something. But I think as they point out at the end, you don't know that it might have absolutely

41:52no idea like how this makes you feel or what it even means that it makes you feel a certain way. It's not like there are those meanings in your head. That's the only thing it has access to is your like neurology and, you know, I guess anything that relates to your body, but like those things don't have meaning in them. So it can just be playing and it could just put this thing out and it might think that it's doing, I think he says this at one point, he might think he's doing me a favor. He might think he's punishing me, but probably it's something that I can't even imagine.

42:25Or maybe there's nothing at all. Like, and there, and how there's no way to get to the bottom of that. Like, there's not some perfect experiment that it's going to do. That's right. And they've tried over and over again. Yeah. It could be completely epiphenomenal. Like it could just be that that's what happens when a human with our particular brain waves gets close to the ocean. That just happens, you know, because the thing that it creates has no idea that it's been created. Yeah. And it's kind of tragic in that sense. Yeah. And fucking, there are some horror scenes in this.

42:56Absolutely. Man. Like the scene where, so there are stories over the years of the things that people have seen. So there are these structures that are predictable in the sense that they occur every once in a while, not predictable in any sense of like knowing what it's going to make, but it will make these kinds of structures here and there. But then when like the first humans came, one of them fell in and from that point on, like this guy who was looking at the water and he saw like a massive baby. Yeah. Which just creeped, creeped me out so much.

43:27There's like a massive baby, like 30, you know, stories high or something. This massive baby that, yeah, he says it looked like something in a museum, like a doll, but a living doll. It was opening and closing its mouth and making different movements. Disgusting because they weren't its own movements. It's so interesting. It's just trying out movements and the people interviewing that guy who saw it, they're like, do you mean like convulsing? Like he was, like he was having a seizure. He's like, no, no. Like it doesn't know how arms are supposed to work. And so it's trying to move its arms the way that like a baby would move its arms.

44:00It's like, it's just discovered that it's had this body, but it's a movement that no actual baby would ever make. And so because of that, it's like horrifying. Yeah. It's like the uncanny valley, but it's more that it's just off. It's something wrong with it. And I think that this is such an interesting scene, this with this guy Burton, because then he stops them and he says, hold on, are you going to just think that I'm crazy and I'm hallucinating because that's going to affect how I want to talk to you about this?

44:33And they say, well, we can't say we haven't made that determination. He says, well, I would like you to make that determination because the content of my hallucinations, however ghastly they might be as my private matter, whereas the content of my experiences on Solaris is not. So what he's saying is, I will tell you this if you think that this has some scientific purpose. But if you think I'm just crazy and this is like me just window into my head, then no, that's a personal thing. I love that. And so there's like also this problem, not just of communicating with Solaris, but even

45:08people who have encountered Solaris communicating with other people. Exactly. And also I was going to say like in a similar point, the problem of even understanding each other, these researchers who have their own apparitions and you never see who their quote unquote guests are, like they're completely hidden from you. And just the divide between two minds is strong. It's all just about our limits. It's just these limits of knowing and the sort of the optimism or the arrogance that we could

45:40even know. Yeah. It's super interesting how, what is it called? Solaristics. That was this huge field where everyone was so excited and you could see that the top, it's like AI, right? Like the top researchers are going into this and then they're just stymied by this thing. They're stymied by these limitations. And so you see it go through like all the stages of a science that just kind of doesn't go anywhere.

46:10And it's like all of the contributions are just versions of cataloging, you know, not explaining because nobody can figure out an explanation. So they're just like sending people to classify things. It's a very like medieval scholastic, I think he even says it makes medieval scholastics look like clear. Or like the amateur, on the positive side, like the amateur scientists who are cataloging the stars, you know, like without coming up with some great theory, they're just cataloging. That's all they can do with it. But in some ways, those are the best ones.

46:40The ones who try to come up with like a whole theory or try to systematize it or try to figure it out, those are much more distorting than the people who just give you and like fascinating information about it. Yes. So I guess I'll bring this up now because this is one of the things that I think is central to the book. But first, let me start by saying I love the thing that he does at the beginning. So Solaris, I didn't say, is a planet that has two suns. And when it was discovered, they just said, well, that planet's just going to, you know,

47:13slowly fall into the gravity of one of them because there's no stable, there can't be a stable orbit when you have two stars. You know, it's like this three body problem kind of thing. But they measure it precisely and they realize its orbit isn't decaying. Like it should have moved like this little bit in this many years and it didn't. And so they realize that it is somehow the ocean is correcting the orbit. They don't know the mechanism, but they know that it is doing something actively to correct

47:44its own orbit and keep it orbiting, which is a huge task, right? And that, I love that it starts that way because figuring that out does give you the optimism that like, oh, like let's keep going. Now there's a mystery that's like we solved scientifically by doing math. Basically, we solved that the orbit isn't decaying, that there's something there. Let's go and apply the same kinds of scientific mathematical analysis and we'll soon, shortly, figure out exactly what it's doing to do this.

48:14Yeah, but of course they don't have any way of coming up with like some new theory because they don't have the physical theory that would allow them to understand how that's possible, right? But it has this kind of epicycle quality, which is, no, it's just violating the laws of gravity as you have it. And so you're saying, oh, it's doing this without actually like having any idea like what that means. It's just like we want to keep our theory, but just say that it, that Solaris can self-correct

48:46its orbit. Yeah, and I love how at some point somebody raises the possibility that whatever this intelligence is, it's near the end, it's decayed like so much that what we're seeing is like almost the death throes of this intelligent creature. Yeah. Whereas other people are like, no, no, this is like we're getting it sort of at the beginning of its evolution. It's a child. It's experimenting with things. Yeah. And there's just no way to tease apart those hypotheses. And so the thing that I was going to say when you were talking about like our methods are limited, that the people who are doing the pure observation are the ones who are

49:19giving the most interesting stuff. That struck me on this reading that so much of the study, even with the scientists here that are on the station, the station is floating above the water. It's hermetically sealed and they are, you know, doing things like blasting it, as you were saying, with x-ray radiation, among other things that they've done. They're not really coming into contact with it. Like all of the real serious people who are attempting to study it are only doing so at

49:50a safe distance to be analytical. Yeah. And at the very end, it's striking when he says, I want to go down to the ocean. Imagine me being a solarist expert and never having actually gone down there. And you get the sense that like probably most of them have. It was shocking to snout. Yeah. Like that he wanted to go down. Yeah. Right. And then you get, like you said, at the end, you get like what might be the beginnings of an insight, a true insight from him. Or at least he has the optimism that he's getting somewhere that he wouldn't ever have

50:22gotten before with all his equations. Because he had the guts to go down and try to experience it. Yeah. Like physically be there, be on the little island that it created, make contact with the water. And that is something that all these scientists, for all their arrogance about how they're going to make progress, they just weren't willing to do. It was only like the suicidal ones, you know, the crazy ones. The apocrypha, like the, he even calls it like a pseudoscience. Yeah. And that's some of the most interesting stuff that comes out on it. Yeah. Is just these people who go down there and they report what they see.

50:56And you see that with Burton or who was the guy that we were talking about before that The pilot. In describing what he saw, they don't believe him. They think it's a hallucination. This is why you have to stay up in the ship is because then we can be objective. Then we can see it for what it really is. But, you know, then we're just projecting a different set of things on it and we run into a different set of insoluble problems. At least when you go down in there, you're actually making contact with the thing itself.

51:26However mediated that might be by your, you know, senses and your interpretation of what you're seeing is, at least you're in contact with it and not just looking at it from above. And meanwhile, getting these visitations from these guests, as they call them, or at one point they want to make it sound scientific. So they call them like G somethings. Yeah. G apparitions, maybe. G formations. G formations. Yeah. And one of the first things Calvin says when he finally convinces, what's his name?

51:59Snout. Snout. Snout. To open the hatch and let him go down into the ocean. The first thing that he says is that he notices how different the ocean looks from the outside. Like a station that's like literally right above the water with windows. Yeah. But it's not until he's actually out there, right? Even just being next to it looks completely different. So the method that they've been using to observe while they think it's like this, you know, like you're safely hermetically sealed, but you have windows.

52:30So that's okay. But even then it looks completely different. Yeah. So there's this guy, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's Gies, G-I-E-S-E. Here's how he describes him. He says, Gies had not been especially inspired, but such a quality can only hinder a scholar of Solaris. It may well be that the imagination and the ability to formulate rapid hypotheses is nowhere more harmful. After all, on a planet that anything is possible, far-fetched descriptions of configurations formed by plasma are in all likelihood true, though usually unconfirmable since the ocean

53:06rarely repeats itself. So he divides this with geniuses and mediocre minds, and he says about Gies, he was neither one nor the other. He was simply a pedantic classifier, one of those whose outer calm concealed an unflagging passion that consumed his whole life. And it does seem like that's kind of the best you can do is just be a pedantic classifier, you know? Right, right. Not try to figure out what it all means, because that's unanswerable. If there's one thing this novel tries to hammer into you, it's that that's unanswerable.

53:40Right. I like that you brought up the, it doesn't repeat itself. That's obviously like one of the most difficult aspects of it, if you're trying to study it scientifically, because if it won't, it's failing to replicate. Like there was a point at which they described that they would toss instruments in to the ocean and it would like, you know, it would do things and then it just stopped responding. Yeah. Right. So you can't even reproduce the experiments that you started with. And man, if that's not, you know, among the various metaphors that this might be pointing

54:15to is just the human mind, like the human mind, you poke and prod it and it doesn't always give you the same thing, you know, as they know, and maybe they had a little bit of insight in the process of this book that like, oh, maybe it's like this neutrino structure that's like these smaller particles are doing the work. So you might know that, but it doesn't really allow you to predict any of its behavior or understand why it's doing like that doesn't really get you anywhere. Maybe if you did that study another time, people would say it's actually breasts that

54:46are the thing that I don't need any other factor, you know, like. They need to find the Norway of Solaris. But like the idea of Solaris being a metaphor for the human mind certainly occurred to me and it's not maybe coincidental that our main character is a psychologist, you know, like. Exactly. And again, yeah, the problems with replication, the problems that it's so easy project our own kind of concerns onto it. It's obviously like the same problem with AI, like maybe like serves in the same way as just

55:22a mirror for us and it's mimicking us, but in a way that we can't understand what it's doing, you know, like it's so rich like this and it's you don't want to be reductive about it. But that was one that really occurred to me is the mind consciousness, you know, like trying to figure that out from the inside. I mean, in that sense, like it's not a great analogy in that the mind isn't alien to us. Like that doesn't even really make sense to say that the mind is alien to us.

55:53But maybe it is in the sense of we can't approach it. We can't understand it. Not because of the we're so far away from it, but because we're too close to it or something. Yeah. Well, and that's the whole other layer of stuff that's going on with the guests. Yeah. Which, as you were saying before, you get a very clear sense that what what is being projected to each individual is the presence of somebody who they have, like some very like guilt or shame or whatever, like a very unconscious relationship to the emotions that this person

56:28caused in them. And the idea that these things are a result of your own unconscious mind, you know, there's a lot of Freudian readings. I don't know that Lem himself was trying to be Freudian. But there is at least this thought that even our own minds to us are a mystery. Like we can't help but be completely oblivious to what is going on in the depths of our psyche. Yeah. So that part of, I don't know, how I understand Freudianism, I think is, you know, I get that

57:01interpretation. But the difference is he thought that you could uncover it, right? Like, and then you would be released. And that's clearly not the case. I mean, as I read it, I mean, you get the sense maybe at the end, the possibility is still there. But I was so convinced by the skepticism that runs through most of the book. Yeah. I mean, I think he's pointing to like maybe the idea that our own mind, you know, that we are, we don't have access to our own motivations, our own desires.

57:34These like, it's a mystery to them. Why did this person show up? Other than like that, this, you know, maybe I'm feeling really guilty about it. Yeah. I don't think he was relying on Freud for any of that, but it's so intriguing to me that the guest, like in this case, Harry, the woman that he was married to is on her own journey at some point. Like at first she's just sort of like a, you know, a ditzy, very minimal sort of thin apparition, but it starts learning and it starts asking questions about what it is.

58:04And it can tell that she's being treated weirdly, that he's distant from her, that she's maybe not who she thinks she is. And at the very beginning, she will not leave his side. And he's so freaked out that the first version of her, that we know really creepy, this, the way in which he kills that first one is crazy, right? He's just like so freaked out. He locks her in a rocket and launches the rocket into orbit.

58:35And she's basically destroying the rocket as it's going up. Like they're freakishly strong, right? Because they're not made of the same stuff as we are. And she's yelling in a human and inhuman way at the same time and busting open the rocket as it seems. And he's like in horror that this thing that looks like his dead wife, he just launched in a rocket. And then she shows up again the next morning or a different version of her. But that one he starts loving or at least caring about. And by the end, he wants nothing but to stay with her.

59:06But because she's her and not his dead ex-wife, which he makes very clear, like, I love you for you. I wouldn't love you if you were her. Like, and she makes some sacrifice. It would seem like a sacrifice because she was convinced that he would be happier if she were gone. She lets herself be killed. It's not clear how that happens or why they don't come back or anything like that. But it at least it mimics empathy and caring and sacrifice.

59:39Yeah. Because he was like, he was committed to having, he was like, I'm just going to be with her forever. Maybe I'll try taking her home. And now it's like, dude, we don't even know if this thing's going to survive. Like once you take off, like you're being crazy right now. But he, but at that point, it seems like he loves her. Yeah. But then the irony, which like, I guess I hadn't clocked it, but I wasn't really thinking about it the way I am now. The irony that she also kills herself. Yes. I know. You know, like for whatever reason, you know, I think I got caught up in the caring part.

1:00:11Like, oh, she's really horrified at not knowing what she truly is. And two, she cares enough for him that she doesn't want him to be encumbered by her. But whatever the reasons, like two versions of this have killed themselves because of him. Yeah. You're bad news, Calvin. Maybe it's you. Yeah. Maybe it's you. Did you ever think of that? Kill yourself once. Shame on me. So you're saying that it chooses your guest based on something you feel guilty about or shame or someone, but. Something. Do we know any other examples of this besides Harry with.

1:00:43No. Because like the one we get for the dead person is a random black woman, a huge black woman was coming towards me with an unhurried, waddling gait. She had massive pendulous breasts and her black arms were as thick as a normal, it's a normal person's thigh. So it's like the guy who killed himself, this was his visitor, but we have no idea why you get the sense. What's the other guy's name? Not now. Sartorius. Sartorius, that his as a kid, because you hear, and I kind of remember this from the

1:01:18movie, like you just hear this like flittering footsteps that did seem, again, like they're footsteps, but not really, they couldn't actually be. Right. And we have no idea, like at one point Snout is like holding his locker like shut. So like we think that the thing is in its locker, but like we really don't know what theirs are and I don't think they describe the other ones from the histories, right? Nope. So even that is like, he has a limitation of not even knowing, like if there is a purpose, is it a shared purpose?

1:01:50Like that would be one way of doing it, but like he's the only one that's willing to share who this person was. That's right. You get the sense, at least you get the sense that Calvin thinks that there must be deep shame or trauma associated with everybody's guest because the way that's now like completely hides whatever his is and that Sartorius has a kid. Like I think they mentioned a straw hat at some point. We don't, is it his kid? Is it a random kid? No. Yeah.

1:02:20Is it like, is he a molester? Yeah. Like we have zero idea, but like the black woman description is a little... Again, Poland, 1960. 1961. It's like a Tom and Jerry, like made, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Um, yeah. And I think that the appearance of these guests is triggered by the radiation that they're throwing down into the ocean. Yeah. That like not everybody had a guest before, but there is something that it's like you were

1:02:51saying earlier, it's clearly able to read their mind. Yeah. Get in there. And so one of the experiments that they're trying to do at some point, they're like, well, right now we have no control over the guests, like what form they take, because it seems as if it's reading our unconscious mind. So, you know, it's like the stay puffed marshmallow, man. Like you're trying not to think of something it's going to like, but they try to do an experiment where they take basically whole brain recordings of Kelvin so that they have like a, you know,

1:03:21like an EEG or something more detailed than that of him thinking explicitly. Yeah. And then they blast that down into the ocean because I guess if he can control his thoughts while he's being scanned, then maybe the apparitions will be things that he is like explicitly wanting or thinking about. Or maybe he could, it could convey that they don't want these guests. Yeah, right. That's right. Because one thing you do know is they all try to kill their guests.

1:03:51Yeah, they've all tried to kill them. They've all tried. And in fact, like much more violently than Kelvin has. Totally. He does such a good job, Lem, here of making the horror by not telling you. All you know is that Snout has like blood on his hands. Yeah. When he tries to kill her with poison, he's like, oh, you're like a humanitarian. You know? Like my first kill, I tried to do that. You get the sense that he's like chopping off heads. Oh, this is your first tour.

1:04:20Totally. And that he's done it a lot. So like they were going crazy. Like he just kept killing. They're like in Sicario. They're like Josh Brolin. He's like Emily Blunt. By the way, did you? So one of the thoughts I had was, all right, so he's intimate. They're sleeping together. So are they fucking? Yeah. And there's only like he never explicitly says it, but there's a phrase in the book where Kelvin is talking about being up all night with her because he doesn't want to sleep.

1:04:51He sensed in her little deaths a consciousness of unrelenting humiliation, and there was nothing I could do about it. That little death is a euphemism for orgasm. Right? It's like le petit mot, like in French. So I was like, is he saying that that night they were like fucking? But her orgasm sent like a humiliation. Yeah. But again, it's like maybe he thought that about like his 15-year-old like girlfriend before he married her or whatever. Yeah.

1:05:21Like, so like he might be projecting that. That could be the thing that he feels like, you know, she's really young and then she fell in love with me and then I left her. And then so I'm projecting that on her as I have sex with her. Absolutely. Right. Because that's the other thing is like, so one of the things that he goes out of his way to point out is that she had knowledge, you know, she died 10 years ago, but in talking to her, she had knowledge of things that had happened in the last 10 years. So it's very clear that this is nothing but the reconstruction from his mind.

1:05:51Yeah. And so it is all him. So in some weird way, like they are dealing with themselves. They're just somehow coming to terms with themselves in this very explicit way where in therapy you might work through this, like by thinking and talking about it there, you're just like, oh, okay. Like you are my guilt personified. Yes. You are interacting with it. Yeah. Why do you think they can't be away from them and that they start doing horrifying things

1:06:22when you leave the room? God, man. When she breaks open the door unwittingly, she's just like tears it open and her hands all bloody. And she's like, I don't, did I do that? Yeah. So how do you interpret, you know, what is Lem getting at with that? Yeah. I don't know. The way that I think I interpreted it, at least originally, was that you've created somebody who A, really wants you. So like you've made a person who is just like desiring to be with you in like in whatever

1:06:54way. But then I was like, is there some sci-fi reason like that they can't be away from the like the brainwaves of the person that generated them? Like is there, will they crumble into non-existence if they're too far a distance from them? Yeah. They depend on the person. On the host. Yeah. And they have like some kind of survival instinct that they don't understand themselves. Yes. And they seem to like black out. Yeah. And there's a point where snout is like, look, there's an answer to this, that rocket

1:07:26that you sent up in orbit with the original version, like we could go see it. We could see if she's still alive. And, and he says, we don't even need to do that. We could just radio it and see if she's still alive. So like, it would be at least a test of the hypothesis that they die if they're too separated from you. And he doesn't want to do it. But he doesn't want to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I, that occurred to me, but it doesn't totally make sense. You know, if you think of it as kind of a projection of the self, but not an other self, but like a projection of your own self.

1:07:56Yeah. You know, like sometimes if the sense of self is fading, it starts fighting to come back. To keep you there. To keep you there. The voice inside your head. Yeah. The sense of no, no, no, no, no. Like I need to still be here because if I'm gone, I might be gone forever. You know, it's like this fear of extinguishing. Yeah. I think there's something really there about that because I think it's not coincidental that the metaphor of being a drop in the ocean, you know, of the ocean being the thing that

1:08:29we think about when you're one with everything. And I think that at the very end, he's let her go and he's going to basically fuse with the ocean. I think he's experiencing the oceanic feeling. Right. Or he's going to try to open himself to it. Exactly. You know, like he may still try to ward it off. He might fight it. He might fight it, but at least. But he's doing the initial steps, right? He's putting his arm out and it's like the water is looping over him and he's like raising it to try to like get closer to it.

1:09:00And his dreams are very much becoming an ocean, you know, like the sense of self collapsing and getting stretched out. Yeah. And he doesn't know if he's the thing being stretched out or the thing observing the thing being stretched out. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there is something about that oneness that he's giving into. And the only other people that have landed in the ocean, I think are either suicidal or it's been an accident. Yeah. And I think that he's might be the first one to just like willingly. Surrender to it.

1:09:31Surrender to the ocean. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And people are on various stages of it. But like you said earlier, the people on the ship, they are keeping this very sharp divide. It's hermetically sealed. Like, you know, the kind of dualism that is the object that we are studying and I am the subject that is studying it. And he is trying to break down that barrier a little bit. Yeah. And how the fuck did these guests get into our hermetically sealed chamber? They don't even question that or ask that question, right?

1:10:06They do once. They say like what, or maybe in his narration, he says like, what possibly would be the mechanism for them getting inside? Like this is hermetically sealed. Yeah. But it's like, it's still made of something. Yeah. You know? It's like still has to get there. They even like dissect it, right? Like it's, that's where they come up with the neutrinos idea. Yeah, that part was cool because like, it's like on the surface, it looks human. You start zooming in, the skin looks human, the cells look human, the molecules or whatever the proteins. And it's only when they, he zooms in all the way that it's completely a different thing.

1:10:40Yeah. Which is, you know, again, like the AI analogy also, like it seems so much like it. There's a Chinese room. This is like a proto Chinese room thing that happens at one point. And I think it's when Snout is talking to him at the end and saying like, they don't know what a person that you feel guilty about, like, they don't know what that means. Like they don't have the sense on the concept of guilt, that those things aren't written into your brain in, you know, ocean solaris language, like if it even has that, like, so

1:11:12there is this question of like understanding that gets raised too of they are just going through, it's not an algorithmic process, but it's a process that doesn't seem like it could have the categories of understanding that it would allow it to go, oh, I'm, I am going to bring back this person that will make him feel shame. And, you know, like those things can't occur to an ocean, you know, like just from looking at neurons or at least we don't think.

1:11:42Whatever it is has no conception of individuals. You know, might think that the station orbiting is just one thing, you know, it's just looking at some neural representation that's distributed across the thing. And I like how Lem, in the description of the scientists having these discussions about what it could be, one of them proposes that this just skipped the stages of evolution that we would have to go through because it's not adapting to its environment. It is its environment, you know, and then, you know, in a very hand wavy way of doing

1:12:15it, they're just like, yeah. And then it just might've sped through like some evolutionary process that led to intelligence. Like the hand waving that you do to try to say how consciousness evolved. Yeah, exactly. And the otherness of a thing that's not only just not embodied in the way that we are, its intelligence didn't have to adapt to any of the things that we adapted to. So of course it doesn't have emotions. Of course, it's unclear whether it needs intentionality because what is the thing that is the planet itself? Like, what does that need intentionality for? There's no goals that it can have.

1:12:46And so much of our evolution is social and it has, there's nothing social about it. It's the only thing. Yeah. And so we are just as strange to it as it is to us. I love the reminder of what it would really be. Like in this sci-fi way, it's always frustrating to just say like, watch Star Trek say, and the aliens are all like what we call forehead aliens. This is like a humanoid thing with like different shit on its face. And you don't often get the truly other, like you wouldn't understand.

1:13:22And sometimes they do. And in fact, there is a deep space nine thing that I looked it up because I was like, this has to have been inspired by Solaris. There is some creatures that live in a great ocean. And when they're in the great ocean, they are one. They don't have individual consciousness. And I was like, oh, that is just straight up from Solaris. But in a sci-fi show, it's not going to be interesting because we can't understand them. So like we have to have aliens that like talk to us and look like us because you can only go so far with an ocean that has no idea what a goal is, let alone what language is.

1:13:56Well, that's what he does so brilliantly. It's so good. Like he honors that. And that's clearly important to him. You know, it feels like almost like his mission statement is this is not going to be something that you can wrap your head around. We cannot know. The arrogance to think that you could know. It's satire. It's satire over science. Like all of the anthropomorphic ways in which people have tried to explain it. He's having a like a go at that. Like, isn't it stupid that you would think, oh, maybe this is like its arms.

1:14:28Maybe it's having a seizure. It's like, wait, are you so little minded that you think that it's an electric eel? No, it's exactly. And like there's one point in this history where the scientists are talking to each other and exchanging theories, but they don't even know if they're talking about the same thing anymore, like they don't even know if the concept they're using is the concept the other person is using. Like, how much does that happen in just regular science where it's like we're using the same word, but we're not talking about the same thing. And you only realize that in retrospect when the thing fades, if it does, you know?

1:15:04Yeah. It's such a cool device to try to communicate that because the unreliability of the ocean in producing the same thing over and over again. And like, at best, you're getting these hints that keep humans like trying where they they've like identified the like symmetric and the asymmetric, whatever they call them. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, like we could do all episode on these things.

1:15:27Symmetriads that have like math, they seem like they're like mathematical equations. Yeah. Like that have manifested themselves somehow. Yeah. So it tantalizes the people. Yes. Um, by the way, like Piranesi vibes. Totally. I marked down two things that this reminded me of. Piranesi was one of them and the library of Babel. Uh, the library of Babel, especially not just in themes, because it is that same kind of like trying to find order and trying to find like some kind of theory to explain the library

1:16:02when it's, you know, there it's more manifestly random, but, uh, also tone. Like it has that same kind of melancholy that library of Babel has that just like weariness. Like I, we've devoted our lives to probably nothing kind of feeling. Totally. I love, I love it. By the way, at the end, when Snout, who's like really resilient, but probably because he's kind of a Philistine about what's going on. Whereas, uh, what's the name? Uh, Kelvin is, I think maybe because his apparition was this person that he loved.

1:16:37Like, I think he's now just more involved. Well, maybe he was more curious to begin with, like, you know, he does go at length about his mentor and, you know, this attempt to understand things. He was bright and bushy tailed when he got there. Exactly. Exactly. His dissertation made a splash. Yeah. And I think that toward the end, when Snout sees that he's not shaving, he knows that like the other guy right before he killed himself, stopped shaving as well. Yeah. And you get this bleakness that maybe that's going the same way, but I was kind of surprised

1:17:11that Lem ends with this note of mild, cautious optimism, not about knowing, but about experiencing maybe. And the moment when Snout's like, shit, this guy's just wants me to help him kill himself. He wants to open the hatches so he can, you know, drown himself or whatever. And he says, no, like, I promise you that's not it. And you believe him. Like I believe him. And that it ended with that note, I found kind of interesting given how the whole book

1:17:41had gone. I don't know. What did you think about that? You know, if I have a criticism, at least a tentative criticism of it, I didn't have a great sense of Snout and Sartorius, their motives. And maybe that's part of the theme that other people are unknowable too, in the same way that like the ocean is unknowable. It's hard to even judge the sort of contrast between Snout. Like I found Snout kind of weirdly sympathetic as a character under the circumstances.

1:18:12He's like a survivor. He's a survivor. He's a drunk. Maybe that's why like he's. And like, you know, I think that's a legitimate response to this is, you know, like we're kind of fucked. So let's try. Like at best, let's try to like keep our funding. Yeah. That's like the other part of the interesting part of the sociology of science. But why does Kelvin have that transformation at the end? I think like it might be maybe that he is finally, he no longer believes that this is

1:18:43something that they can get to the bottom of, but he hasn't descended into this kind of cynical despair that the other two have. And so that is a kind of the point that you can, the only point really that you can be hopeful is when your expectations of understanding it have been shed, but you're not drowning in the abyss of meaninglessness that they seem to be. Right. You open your mind to another possibility. Yeah. I agree with you as you said it.

1:19:13And I was like thinking, yeah, I think you're right about that mild criticism, which is you can play your characters mysterious and that adds something. And I think he does that very well. But if they're too mysterious, then they're not adding to like the story or the vibe or whatever. And I think we could have known a little bit more, especially about Sartorius other than just being, like you said, the archetype of the scientist who's like more utilitarian, more cold, you know, cold hearted.

1:19:44He's, he's the one who's like, fuck the ethics board. We're going to bombard this with like the x-rays that they say we can't because like we've been outlawed by some commission or something. I think it highlights the isolation of the Kelvin character because you could imagine that they were on the same team. Like we got to figure out what to do. And instead they just get occasional video calls and like notes that are left. And it's like immediately they are excluded from collaborating, it seems like.

1:20:16And so in that sense, I think it gives up the mood of like, and given that we, our window is Kelvin, it's like the fact that these people are just kind of blipping in and out and we don't know what they're up to and we don't know what they think we're up to. Like, I guess that adds to the feel of it. Yeah. So this conversation has made me think that here's one, like without endorsement yet, but the optimistic take, you were kind of saying this already, but let me see if you agree with this possibility. What happens with Kelvin that is unique is that whatever apparition that was created for

1:20:53him, the combination of his being like accepting of her, like for who she is rather than trying to kill her, like he does with the first one and the kind of evolution that she goes through and the act of true caring and sacrifice that she seems to genuinely have at the end there, that that moment represents the first true communication between the ocean and the human. Like up until then, it's been met with nothing but resistance and horror or cold analysis.

1:21:27And this, for whatever reason, that the guest that was created for Kelvin did the trick. Maybe it's being bombarded with x-rays and it's like, this is my last ditch attempt at trying to like connect with these people. And I, I'm going to create these guests for each of them. But for, you know, for one of them, it's just like random stereotypical black maid from the 1960s. Yeah. But for Kelvin, something different happens and he's touched by that thing at the end and it's touched by him and he's the one to decide to go try to get a little closer.

1:22:00I think that's super interesting and it's a cool reading, but it still seems like it's anthropomorphizing the planet more than I would be comfortable given how much we're told that that's the temptation is to anthropomorphize it. So like the idea that the planet had, it was just trying things out and it finally hit on something that allowed it so it's like, finally, I can communicate with these people. That just seems like. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, you're right. Like there, I think that there's a reading where you don't have to like think that it's

1:22:33trying things or whatever. It's that whatever happened there, whatever it's throwing out, whatever it's like even maybe automatically producing created a connection that was just different than the other ones that happened. Even if this was all just like a reflex action of this, you know, vast being with no goals, like something happened to like, even if it only happened in the mind of Calvin. Yeah. You know? Exactly. Because he has, I don't know, like accepted the mystery of it at the end.

1:23:04Yeah. Whereas everyone else is trying to unravel it and get to the bottom of it and explain it. But he, at the end, is done with all of that. Really, like not even just at the end. Like he seems to abandon that aspect of it pretty early on. But like at the end, he's decided that doesn't, I don't need to understand it to experience it and to even maybe have a kind of personal relationship with it. Like I don't need to know why Harry was what it's made of or what the goal behind Harry,

1:23:37like Harry is Harry. Yeah. That's the thing that I think he realizes. That's why he mourns her loss so much, I think, is like he didn't realize it's just her. Like, and I don't need to know like what that means. And so when he goes down into the ocean, it's kind of like, I'm willing to accept you as you are, you know? That's right. And I think one way, this sounds so cheesy, I'm reluctant to say it, but one of the things that he does that the other ones don't do is like works through like that traumatic thing

1:24:09that happened, he's not letting it just like be, he's not fighting against it. No, he even is very honest about it with them. Like what happened? Yeah. Right. He's the only one that actually shares it. He just psychologically is, whatever this is that's happening, he deals with it. And because he deals with it, he's now open. So, but then one thing I don't understand then about the end is why he's so miserable before, you know, in those, is it just because he's having those terrible dreams about merging

1:24:41with the ocean and losing his self? Because, you know, the idea, the whole way you can understand her as making a sacrifice or mimicking a sacrifice is she realized that she was making him deeply unhappy. And I think it seems like he is very unhappy. He seems completely miserable in the last days. Is it because he's struggling so much trying to like wrap his head around, I love this thing,

1:25:11this neutrino made manifestation of, and I don't know what it is. Is it that? And then only at the end he realizes that's okay. Yeah. That's a good question because he is also hurting because she's withdrawing in those last whatever days, weeks, she's just stopped caring. And that I think is, is affecting him. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it is, it seems that that was like an important step that he made to say, no, no, I love you.

1:25:42Like you're not her. Yeah. You're this and I love you. And then has to let go of her in this, I think in a better way that happened the first time. Yep. Definitely. Than her. Yeah. You know, one real possibility is that this is all just fucked up shit that's going on in this guy's head. And then at the end he jumps into the ocean. Yeah. You know, like, I mean, I think there's always this question throughout the book of whether people are crazy or not, whether they've gone insane. Like he has to come up with some like ingenious experiment at the beginning to prove that he's

1:26:13not experiencing psychosis. Yeah. And, and, and then you realize that other people have done that too, you know, like, so he absolutely could be at the end. Yeah. That's the thing. You never know. I like to think that he had more than anybody who's been next to the planet. He had a, whatever it was doing to his mind, he was able to like work through it and whether there was intention or not, what it was doing to his mind destroyed kind of the other people, but it didn't to him.

1:26:44He ended it with a real desire to say, fuck the way, fuck the other ways that we've been trying to know this. Let me know this. Yeah. Let me, let me give it my best shot, which is to be there. And let me be open to whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like, it's so interesting. The book itself is a metaphor for the ocean, you know, like you can try to understand what it is, but like, if you try to get too theoretical about it, you're going to be missing the point. And there's no way to know, you know, like.

1:27:14And there's no way to know. It's a vibe. Like it's, he's giving us a vibe, like a very complex vibe, but a vibe nonetheless. You know, there's just so many touches. There's like the little girl that he remembers at one point in a classroom where they're talking about the symmetry ads and he's going into all the like details of like the mathematical equations that it somehow is manifesting as. And then this little girl, well, I guess she's not little, she's 15, but she raises her hand

1:27:44and says like, well, what's it all for? And like the teacher gives her a stern look. And then it's like, but that's the question. Like, that's the key question at the heart of it is what's this all for? And the answer is in a very kind of Camus myth of Sisyphus type way. You can't know. And it's so perfectly distilled in some innocent girl just asking a question that you're not supposed to ask in solaristics. Like, yeah, but why?

1:28:14Dude, I love just the like boring shit that is like there, well, there's the foundation and there's the Institute and they need funding. And like that stuff is like such a perfect satire of, of like the institutions that you're relying on and how they are self propagating. Yeah. Like they exist so that they can keep existing. They're not making progress. And so that moment is like an emperor has no clothes, even though she's not trying to point out the emperor has no clothes. It's just like, like we're doing, don't ask that question.

1:28:45Yeah. Don't ask that question. We don't want to get our funding pulled and that they're even concerned with like writing a report at the end, you know, and submitting their report. Yeah. That's very funny. That's like, that could be in a, like a cop, like, you know, like one of these like noir things where at the end they just got to write the report. Like this whole thing is so fucked up, but they just got to write their report because that's their job. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, at some point they're alluding to they, they want to at least get the funding to keep going. Like, I'm just like, why?

1:29:15Yeah. Why do you want to be there? Yeah. Because it's not like the world has moved on. It seems like for the most part, they're like, all right, well, we don't understand that. So let's move on to other stuff. There was some descriptions of the science that I have in my notes. Solaristics wrote, Montius is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science. Contact, the goal for which we are striving is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints of the coming of the Messiah.

1:29:46Exploration is a liturgy couched in methodological formulas. The humble work of researchers is the expectation of consummation, of enunciation, for there are not, nor can there be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. Yeah. Now that the religious impulse is looked down upon, we have to find other things to express those spiritual. And we just kind of falsely think that, oh no, this is objective. This is science. But it's that same kind of spiritual impulse. And then there's other parts where it's just like, oh fuck, I feel like he's talking about

1:30:19us or he's talking about the solaristic sciences. He says, a confusion of hypotheses, the reviving of old ones, the introduction of trivial changes, rendering them more precise or on the contrary, more ambiguous. All this began to turn the field of solaristics, which despite its breadth had been rather straightforward up to this point, into an ever more entangled labyrinth full of blind alleys. In an atmosphere of general indifference, stagnation, and discouragement, a second ocean of futile print seemed in time to be accompanying the ocean of Solaris. So good. So good.

1:30:50And it's from 1961. So you just realize how much this stuff has always been going on, you know? Totally. It's great. A second ocean. Yeah, so when they're talking about the metamorpha and the, you know, the memoids or whatever, they said the ocean played an active part in the design of the devices, though all this happened in complete darkness. What does it mean to say it played an active part? It modified certain components of the equipment lowered into it as a result of which the discharges

1:31:20registered would change and the devices record a multitude of signals that were like fragments of some advanced analysis. But what did it all mean? Perhaps these data captured a temporary state of excitation of the ocean. Perhaps they were impulses that gave rise to its immense creations somewhere thousands of miles from the researchers. Perhaps they were expressions of the ocean's eternal truths. Perhaps they were its works of art. Who could know since it was never possible to produce the same reaction to a stimulus twice? So this is the replication problem.

1:31:52Since one time the response would be the explosion of impulses that almost blew the apparatus up, the next time profound silence. Since no experiments could ever be replicated, it always seemed as if we were on the brink of deciphering this constantly accumulated sea of readings. So it always seemed like you're on the brink, but you never can know because like we don't even know what it means to say like it played an active part. Like we're so far. We have so many like semantic obstacles and yeah.

1:32:24Yeah. So good. Well, the good news is we can continue to talk about it, but this time in relation to the movie next time. Do you remember the movie well enough to like consciously compare them in your mind already? There are certain things that I remember. I remember I'm pretty sure he does put her in the rocket ship to try to kill her, you know, in the movie. Yeah, I have a vague memory of that too. I have a vague memory of that and that being very, the little pitter patter of the feet. Like I remember that for whatever reason. You know, of course, I remember that it was this woman that was there.

1:32:57I know Lem didn't like the movie. Yeah. Well, I'm also now curious. Jeffrey Watermelon, friend, patron, has said that we should watch the newer Solaris, the Soderbergh version. And I was, honestly, I wasn't tempted until just recently. I'm tempted too. I had the same exact. I went through the same process and it's also like 90 minutes or something. Isn't it really short? So maybe we should do that. Maybe we'll do a bonus episode on that one at some point.

1:33:27For Jeffrey. For Jeffrey. God, no.

1:33:31Isn't reading his AUA questions enough? All right. Great book. Really just exceeded my expectations. I did not expect to like this as much as I did. Yeah. I knew I liked it, but it's just, as always, like reading in order to talk, like the richness really came through even more. It's a good translation and I'm glad that it exists. It's, you know, if you read a little secondary stuff, you can tell the difference. You know, some of them have only read the older one. The names are different.

1:34:01But also, yeah, like I just think the prose style and I know the family was very happy with this translation as well. Yeah. All right. Good job, Stanislav. Good job. You finally get what you've always wanted. The approval of two random podcasters. That was very bad. 50 years later. I'm excited to talk about this in relation to the movie. And it's just, you get to watch a Tarkovsky movie. That's fun. Exactly. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. Who are you?

1:34:44Who are you? I'm a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man.

1:34:53They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man.

1:35:03Anybody can have a brain.

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