the seventh sally
Died yesterday, Stanisław Lem, the Polish science-fiction writer best known for his book 'Solaris' and its film adaptations by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh, was really a philosopher in sci-fi disguise.
Take his short story 'The Seventh Sally', published in 1974. An anthropomorphic and very vain robot named Trurl designs a miniature kingdom as a gift to an exiled, despotic king. When Trurl's friend Klapaucius learns of this, he is horrified:
"Trurl, how could you have done such a thing?"
"You must be joking!" Trurl exclaimed. "Really, the whole kingdom fits into a box three feet by two by two and a half... it's only a model..."
"A model of what?"
"What do you mean, of what? Of a civilization, obviously, except that it's a hundred million times smaller."
"And how do you know there aren't civilizations a hundred million times larger than our own? And if there were, would ours then be a model? And what importance do dimensions have anyway? In that box kingdom, doesn't a journey from the capital to one of the corners take months - for those inhabitants? And don't they suffer, don't they know the burden of work, don't they die?"
Trurl defends himself by arguing his creation is just a simulation, a programmed model. But Klapaucius insists it's real:
"Prove to me here and now, once and for all, that they do not feel, that they do not think, that they do not in any way exist as being conscious of their enclosure between the two abysses of oblivion - the abyss before birth and the abyss that follows death - prove this to me, Trurl, and I'll leave you be! Prove that you only imitated suffering, and did not create it!"
This, of course, Trurl is unable to do. In fact, this was the whole aim of his design:
"Try to understand, there was no other way to do it! Anything that would have destroyed in the littlest way the illusion of complete reality would have also destroyed the importance, the dignity of governing, and turned it into nothing but a mechanical game..."
When Trurl and Klapaucius finally set out to save the kingdom, they find the miniature civilization has already evolved, grown out of its box and killed their tyrant king, whose head now orbits their tiny planet...
(From the collection 'The Cyberiad'. Reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett's book 'The Mind's I'.)
bas , 30-03-’06 16:05