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.

29:09Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the predictable time of the episode where we like to take a moment to thank everybody for reaching out, for supporting us, for being our audience for all of these years. We appreciate it. We wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for you. If you want to get a hold of us, you can reach us. It's verybadwizards at gmail.com.

29:39We read all the emails. We don't always answer them. But we like getting your messages. You can tweet to us at Tamler, at Pease, or at verybadwizards. If you want to get in some arguments with some like-minded contrarians, you can join our subreddit or go to reddit.com slash r slash verybadwizards. You can follow us on Instagram at verybadwizards. You can listen to us and comment on Spotify and rate us there and on Apple Podcasts if you so desire. Five-star review. Five-star review.

30:09Tamler's next to me commenting. Five-star review, please. Yes. And if you want to help us in more tangible ways, you can always join our Patreon. You will not just be supporting us out of altruism, though you'll get some stuff back.

30:24And if you join at $2 a month and up, you get a bunch of ad-free episodes, our entire back catalog ad-free, and you get access to the beat compilations that I've put together over the years, and I'm currently working on number 10. So that should be out soon. At $5 a month and up, you get all of our bonus content. This includes not only what I just said about ad-free episodes, but you get to listen to our monthly Ask Us Anything episodes. You get to listen to a rich, rich back catalog of episodes that we've been doing for, what,

30:57the last 12 years or something ridiculous, including things like our Ambulators podcast about Deadwood. The Ambulators. Our Reintegrators podcast with Paul Bloom. A bunch of random episodes, like Tamler has done a bunch of David Lynch episodes with some guests. I've done a couple of Star Trek episodes. You know, one-off movie episodes. It's like hours and hours. I don't think you could... Noir Summer. Noir Summer. Right. You could probably... You'll probably die before you finish listening to all this, is what we're saying, for only $5

31:30a month. You might want... Noir Summer. You might want to die by the end. But at $10 and up, you get all of that, plus you get to vote on an episode topic that we're talking about today. That is a direct result of our listeners who suggested and voted on episode topics. Good choice, listeners. Good choice. Yeah. We got milked two. We're going to milk two of these. You get access to our five-part Brothers Karamazov series. You get some lectures from Tamler on Plato's Symposium, some intro psych lectures from me.

32:05And they hear that. I bring them up every time. And finally, at $20 and up per month, you get all of that, plus you get to be part of a small group of people who get to ask us questions. Not only ask us questions, but watch us answer them. And if you are part of that tier, you'll have seen our very awkward Ask Us Anything that we filmed in person, where we can't seem to figure out whether to look at each other or the screen or our screens.

32:36And I keep putting the chairs falling down. The chairs falling down. I spill some shit on myself. It's just gold. Gold. And finally, if you want to pick up some swag, you can go to our Very Bad Wizards support page. Really, it's now just a link to Cotton Bureau, where you can get shirts, all kinds of clothing items. But now you can also get mugs, glassware, a few other items with our Very Bad Wizards logo.

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