His Master's Voice by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Signal as Noise

As is typical with much of his other work, Lem explores a perennial philosophical issue in His Master’s Voice: How can we know that what we think we know has any claim to reality? Lem’s use of a very Borgesian pseudo-factual account of a mathematician’s encounter with a cosmic intelligence is brilliantly apt. Plato knew the problem well; Kant re-stated it ad nauseam; and Trump confirms its significance on a daily basis. Don Delillo‘s Ratner’s Star has a similar theme (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). HMV is, therefore, in a sense timeless and a persistent literary trope; it deserves a place in every thoughtful person’s bibliography.

Here is a sequence of numbers: 1415926535. Could you say with certainty what the next number in the sequence will be? It is in fact 9. But unless you already knew that the sequence is composed of the decimal units of the transcendental number pi, it is unlikely you would have a greater than 10% chance of getting the right answer. As an irrational number, pi can be expanded to an infinite number of decimal places without ever repeating the sequence. But obviously if one knows that pi can be calculated to any degree of precision required, the number in any decimal place is known with little effort.

This trivial exercise summarises a fundamental problem in information theory: how does one know that apparently random noise isn’t really a communicative signal? The sequence above, for example, could be analysed endlessly and yet no pattern, no meaning would emerge from its very real randomness. Unless of course one already has the key to the code, namely pi. The discovery of meaning, in other words, requires the presumption that there is meaning to be found. All of science, actually any inquiry from the interpretation of literature to forensic investigation, must start there. Put another way, meaning depends on a receptivity to communication, which means a high tolerance for listening to nonsensical noise in order to find the signal buried within.

The rub is that it is very difficult to prevent a hopeful presumption of meaning from transforming into an article of faith. When that happens, the result is... well, the X-Files, a mad obsession which cannot be satisfied until the presumption is ‘fulfilled’. So, the Kabbalist finds hidden patterns in the sequence of letters in scripture; the believer sees clear signs of the end times in natural disasters; the conspiracy theorists prove their presumptions about the Kennedy assassination or Area 51 or the Deep State; and geniuses like Immanuel Kant come up with wildly erroneous conclusions about the invariable ‘categories’ of which the world is constituted. The human need to find meaning seems insatiable, even when - especially when - there is no equivalent to pi to be found, no key except that which we impose without sufficient reason in line with our obsession.

Lem doesn’t solve the paradox of meaning of course; he merely documents it in a particularly interesting way. Perhaps there is no way out of the paradox, which makes the contradictions of quantum physics, for example, seem like a walk in the park. But that hardly matters when the writing is as intriguing as Lem’s. And he does provide a handy pocket-guide to dealing with the problem: “genius,” he says, “is, above all, constant doubting.” This, I suggest, includes maintaining doubt even about the meaning of meaning.

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