Science fiction at the limits of rationality

Will we ever fully understand the universe?

Hello all and welcome to The Science Fictional Now!

For those of you joining us for the first time, an introduction is in order. My name is Evan DeTurk - I’m a biologist (and occasional musician) with strong interests in the history of science, bioethics, biosecurity, and science fiction, which constitute the core interests of this Substack. If you haven’t already read my first post on this Substack, which explores the ethics of an interesting sporting event called the Enhanced Games, you can do so here. If you’re a returning reader, I appreciate that you weren’t immediately turned off by a lengthy essay on the rather thorny topic of performance enhancing drugs.

Today’s piece, in contrast, deals with an interesting tradition of thought within philosophical science fiction. It’s much shorter that last month’s post and better reflects what you can expect on a month-to-month basis from this Substack. I hope to space out longer works similar to the Enhanced Games essay to give myself sufficient time to research and write them.

Today, we’ll take a look at four science fiction novels united by the questions they ask about the limits of human rationality. Collectively, these books explore the factors that limits humans’ abilities to assemble complete theories of reality, and how individuals might react to this knowledge of their own limits. I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers, but in order to sufficiently analyze each work I’ve included certain plot details. Each novel is discussed in its own section, so consider skipping those focusing on any works you’re hoping to avoid spoilers for.

So without further ado, let’s get into the meat of today’s post. As always, I hope you find the piece informative and entertaining; please feel free to comment or reach out directly with any questions, suggestions, or other thoughts. In particular, I’m hoping that you’ll have at least one good book recommendation by the end of this post. Enjoy!

Setting the stage

“The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.” Thus spoke Neil DeGrasse Tyson, possibly the world’s most famous scientist, on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2011…and again via X in 2021. Trained as an astrophysicist, Tyson has become highly visible over the last three decades as a science communicator, establishing himself as a staunch defender of science’s virtues along the way. The above statement is trademark Tyson: a great sound bite with a definite sense of scientific optimism. It even gives us a glimpse into how Tyson thinks: that science is true regardless of any individual’s opinion belies a belief that the universe operates according to the same set of laws everywhere. There’s only one truth to the way anything works and it’s up to us to figure it out.

At the risk of nitpicking Tyson’s punchy wording, I do want to note that science is not precisely what’s made correct by such a universe. Science is both a way of thinking and a body of knowledge filled with the information that this mode of inquiry reveals. But the sum of scientific knowledge is not synonymous with the ‘ground truths’ of how the universe really works. What Tyson seems to mean then, is that science produces a unique type of knowledge, making it the best way to uncover the unchanging nature of the universe. Tyson is what we might call a scientific skeptic: one who believes that empirical evidence is necessary to substantiate claims about how things work. This school of thought is widespread today and can trace its roots to earlier philosophical movements, most notably Auguste Comte’s positivism, which similarly argued for the uniqueness of empirically-derived knowledge.

The astronomer Carl Sagan espoused such ideas in his 1995 bookThe Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, writing that “Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance of skepticism and openness, an ability to reject ideas without rejecting people, and a willingness to recognize uncertainty and admit when we are wrong” (30). Throughout the book, Sagan explicitly argues that the scientific method represents the best path to knowledge. In fact, he’s so invested in this way of thinking that he even argues for its importance for improving the world beyond science, such as in the maintenance of a democratic society. If Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the leading science evangelist of the 21st century, then Sagan played a similar role in the latter third of the 20th century.

Sagan was, however, careful not to overstate the explanatory of science even as he lauded it. He called science “by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans” but flatly stated that “the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us” (31). Sagan thus rejected outright the notion that humanity could ever achieve a complete understanding of the universe. It may come as a surprise then that others who came before Sagan were more optimistic about achieving such a level of knowledge. 

In the late 18th century, natural historians began writing ‘scientific epics’: works attempting to chronicle the entire natural history of the universe. For some authors, such narratives were stepping stones on the path to a utopian future made possible by scientific knowledge. In his book The Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginning, historian of science Nasser Zakariya sums up the views of such thinkers, writing that “an understanding of nature, including species nature, could ameliorate humanity’s present condition…and offer hope for humanity’s future condition” (28). 

The French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace endorsed such a view, “arguing that from the initial conditions of a physical system, the future development of such a system might be fully decided and understood” (29-30). Laplace’s optimism about the possibilities of totalizing natural history, then, can be interpreted as a belief in the fundamental intelligibility of the universe. But not all who attempted to formulate such ‘histories of everything’ shared this point of view. The British natural philosopher Herbert Spencer for instance, maintained that “an impenetrable mystery that underlies everything” (83). Thus for Spencer, whatever the precise cause of such a mystery, the pursuit of a definitive understanding of the universe is to be never-ending.

Science fiction too has been the venue for a diversity of opinions on the feasibility of a final story. The four novels that we’ll dive into in the remaining sections of this piece are united in their skepticism of such a narrative, and they explore a range of possible causes for its impossibility, including the lack of suitable methods for uncovering certain types of information, limits on the ultimate perceptual ability of humans, and a universe that truly is inscrutable.

Three of the four novels - Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959), Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961), and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1971) - were written during the middle decades of the 20th century, while the fourth - Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranqulity (2022), was published just over two years ago¹. Two were written by Eastern European authors (Solaris and Roadside Picnic), while two sprung from the pens of North Americans (The Sirens of Titan and Sea of Tranquility). These novels are far from the only works² in science fiction that question the possibility of a final story or the uniqueness of scientific knowledge, but I’ve chosen them for the variety of approaches to the topic they take and their overall high quality. These are all high-caliber novels containing interesting narrative characters, as well as themes beyond those discussed here. To start, let’s dive into the most recent novel we’ll be discussing - Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility - and move through the novels thematically.

Sea of Tranqulity

Spanning hundreds of years and the 238,000 miles between the Earth and the Moon, Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility follows four characters who in various times and places encounter an ‘anomaly’. Experienced as a moment of darkness that transmits sensory information across time and space, the anomaly leaves those who encounter it physically dazed and prompts them to reflect on their own metaphysics. Initially the characters’ stories are told separately: young English nobleman Edwin St. John St. Andrew moves to the wilds of Canada while Mirella Kessler searches for her lost friend Vincent in 2020³. Novelist Olive Llewellyn returns to her home in a Moon colony before an early 23rd century pandemic, while Gaspery-Jacques Roberts lives out an uneventful life there as a hotel detective two hundred years later.

AI rendition of the anomaly, made with GPT-4o.

Gaspery-Jacques’ sister Zoey works as a physicist at the government-run Time Institute, conducting research into reports of the anomaly made by the other characters. She has come to regard it as a proverbial ‘glitch in the matrix’ Zoey and sees it as potential evidence that the universe is in fact a simulation. Gaspery-Jacques becomes curious, training as a time traveler to collect further evidence by interacting with the other characters in their native times; it gradually becomes clear that he is the character that connects the other three.

Made famous by the 1999 science fiction-action film The Matrix, the simulation hypothesis was first discussed in an academic context by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in a now-famous 2003 paper. Bostrom’s core argument relies on the observation that based on our own technological progress, it’s quite likely that future humans will have sufficient computing power to run vast numbers of simulations of past humans. Thus, unless humans are either extremely likely to go extinct before reaching this level of technology or extremely unlikely to run such simulations, it’s highly probable that our world is a simulation. Bostrom uses the phrase “simulations of their evolutionary history” in his first paragraph, giving the impression that such projects would be for historical or sociological research. But I think it’s possible to imagine a wide variety of potential uses - future humans might just be playing video games with extremely thoroughly-generated worlds⁴.

The simulation hypothesis is a provocative idea that has led to spirited debates in the realms of both philosophy and science. In Sea of Tranquility, the hypothesis gains traction in the latter arena through the appearance of the anomaly, which might constitute empirical evidence. In the novel, time travel has already passed from the realm of science fiction into science fact with the simulation hypothesis potentially following close behind; both events upend prior scientific consensuses and thus have a sort of destabilizing effect. Time travel has made it impossible to ignore all of the paradoxes generated by such activities, and anomalies supporting the simulation hypothesis have led to doubts about fundamental metaphysics. These scientific advances have actually driven humans away further from an unencumbered understanding of the universe. 

For many, the idea of living in a simulation might be distressful; it means that we do not experience ‘true’ reality and strips us of any agency to impact the world directly. Moreover, the escape from such a simulation (be it to the physical world as in The Matrix or the virtual world as in Black Mirror’s “USS Callister”) that has become a science fiction trope may not even be possible under many simulation parameters. Sea of Tranquility questions the notion of scientifically testing whether our world is a simulation; affirming the hypothesis would be difficult and falsifying it impossible. Rather, it asks us to consider how we might live with the metaphysical uncertainty that it brings. While the novel does seem to put stock in the “impenetrable mystery” theory of the universe, it also suggests that we might actually take solace in the world being a simulation. If the universe is just a very sophisticated computer program, then the anomalies we observe and the paradoxes we contemplate may just be bugs. Even if we can’t have our own theory of everything, we can at least hope that one exists in the base universe.

Solaris

If Sea of Tranquility asks how individuals might choose to live while recognizing that the universe is fundamentally unknowable, Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris asks how they might react to the realization that their own shortcomings will inevitably lead the universe to appear illogical. Solaris is perhaps Lem’s most famous work, having been adapted for the screen three separate times, most notably in 1972 by Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky and Lem were both quick to point out the differences between their respective versions of the story, but I honestly feel that both versions work quite well for our purposes. For this reason, while I refer to the novel throughout this piece, I will typically be describing aspects shared between book and film.

Solaris follows psychologist Kris Kelvin as he travels to a station orbiting the titular world. The planet consists of a single sentient ocean; human scientists have studied the planet and attempted contact for decades to no avail. Seeking answers, the station’s scientists bombarded the planet with X-rays just prior to Kelvin’s arrival, prompting the appearance of various ‘visitors’ aboard the station. These visitors include humans and inanimate objects that constitute physical manifestations of the scientists’ consciences. Shortly after his arrival, Kelvin encounters his own visitor, a manifestation of his deceased wife Harey. It is revealed that the original Harey committed suicide when Kris abandoned their relationship; her reappearance forces him to finally confront the horror borne of his own actions.

The Solarian ocean, as depicted in Tarkovsky’s film. Source.

Kelvin lures the phantom Harey, who has no recollection of her death on Earth, into a shuttle that he promptly ejects from the station. After being confronted with his most traumatic memories, Kelvin has only doubled down on his destructive behavior. Harey reappears soon after the incident, now with no memory of either of her previous deaths. This twice-resurrected version of Harey gradually becomes aware that she is not flesh and blood but rather a Solarian creation with a body made of neutrinos. Unable to cope with the fact that she is simply the tool of a being that neither she nor any other human can understand, she ultimately commits suicide a second time, enlisting one of the station’s scientists to kill her with a device that disrupts elementary particles.

Prior to the usage of X-rays, the scientists had observed the surface of Solaris extensively but such efforts had failed to produce insights about the purpose of the observed phenomena. The visitors represent a clear response to the X-rays, suggesting some sort of intentional action from the planet. But the visitors don’t prove any easier to understand than the Solarian surface phenomena and the scientists become worse off than they were before. Thus in Solaris, the scientific pursuit of knowledge leads not only to further confusion, but engenders highly detrimental psychological side effects. They have made no progress towards communicating with the ocean even gathering interpretable experimental results but have instead become emotionally distressed and aware of their own ineptitude. The universe of Solaris may well be logical, but will never be comprehensible to humans, especially not the deeply flawed men who inhabit the station and don’t even understand themselves. If anything, the planet appears to be conducting its own manner of scientific experiment, but in a manner completely impenetrable to the book’s characters.

At its core, Solaris is a deconstruction of the first contact story, an archetypal form in science fiction. Such stories often center on the difficulty of communication between profoundly different groups, but Lem takes this idea to its limit, asserting that entities exist that we will never be able to communicate with, much less understand.

Roadside Picnic

Solaris also bears a number of similarities to Arkady and Boris Strugatky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. Both are Eastern Bloc SF novels from the mid-20th century, both were adapted into films by Andrei Tarkovsky (Roadside Picnic was the basis for 1979’s Stalker), and both include strange instances of first contact that lead central characters into philosophical distress. Indeed, Roadside Picnic deconstructs first contact even further than Solaris: humans never meet any aliens directly but instead discover objects left over from a brief alien ‘visitation’. Areas called ‘Zones’ appear around the earth, marked by the presence of physical anomalies and rife with mysterious alien artifacts. While the Solarian ocean appeared to be operating by the rules of its own obscure logic, the extraterrestrial picnickers don’t seem to have noticed humanity at all. They’ve effectively littered across the Earth, leading to detrimental effects on its human inhabitants. The phenomena in the Zones upend established concepts in physics and create immediate danger for those who venture into these abject areas - the ‘stalkers’.

Roadside Picnic’s main character Red Schuhart is one such stalker; Red earns his living by smuggling alien objects out of the Zone that has appeared in his fictitious hometown, called Harmont. Red is a hard-living man prone to drunkenness and angry outbursts, but in an attempt to break with his checkered past he takes a steady job as a lab assistant at the International Institute, which studies the Zone. Given this lingering proximity, it comes as no surprise that Red is lured back into the Zone before long. This initial trip is an officially sanctioned one-off expedition but Red soon lapses back into old habits after learning that his girlfriend Guta is pregnant. They decide to marry and raise the child, even in the face of the genetic mutations said to plague stalkers’ offspring. Red has already contended with the legal risks of his profession, but now he must also consider the biological hazards, which affect not only him but those he cares about. Red’s life has focused heavily on survival, and the imminence of his daughter’s birth forces him to ruminate more intensely on the effects of the Zone.

As Red’s life moves forward, he must choose how to live in the face of the unknown. As a stalker, his livelihood depends on exploring a place that he doesn’t understand, looking for similarly mysterious objects to sell. To succeed in this game, he learns to sweep his doubts and uncertainties under the rug. Most of Harmont’s other residents have similar incentives to ignore the philosophical implications of the Zone. Red contracts with various characters to retrieve certain items from the Zone; these individuals hope to profit or create weapons using the alien technology. Others hope to regulate the Zone to further their own ends.

Concept art by Montenegrin artist Alex Andreev for the unproduced AMC TV adaptation of Roadside Picnic. Source.

In the novel’s final section, Red journeys back into the Zone a final time to search for a wish-granting artifact known as the Golden Sphere. Upon discovering the object, he realizes that he cannot articulate what he truly desires; like the scientists of Solaris station, Red’s recognition of his own metaphysical ineptitude has led him to the realization that he doesn’t understand himself either. Face-to-face with the unknown, Red laments his lack of agency, realizing that his life has been a continuous process of defamiliarization, brought about by aging, the appearance of the Zone, and his overriding need to survive. He ultimately makes a leap of faith, asking the Sphere itself to peer into his soul and discern his wish. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes the “absurd man” as one who accepts the conflict between an irrational universe and the human need to rationalize and accordingly acts without the need to achieve purpose. Red, in contrast, becomes what we might call an ‘existentialist hero’ in the novel’s final pages. Likewise accepting reality as undecipherable, he instead refuses to give up hope that good lies somewhere within his own soul.

The Sirens of Titan

Several of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels incorporate elements of science fiction, but his 1959 effort The Sirens of Titan is perhaps his most ‘conventional’ take on the genre. Ultimately centered around a Martian Invasion of Earth, the book’s winding plot follows Malachi Constant - the world’s richest man - on an interstellar journey ending on the moon of Titan. Constant attributes his wealth completely to luck; he feels that his good fortune is not random but is a result of ‘divine favor’, an opinion that conveniently provides a justification for his enormous wealth. 

Constant meets an East Coast aristocrat named Winston Niles Rumfoord, who produces a prophecy of Constant’s future. Constant does everything he can to avoid the strange events of the prophecy, embarking on a wild interstellar journey. Upon his eventual return to Earth, Constant finds himself a pariah; figuratively crucified for his wealth and indifference by a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Returning to the stars in exile, Constant ultimately finds himself on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. There, he encounters Rumfoord once again, learning that the man has manipulated him every step of the way; the Church was Rumfoord’s creation and Constant was but a pawn in a larger scheme.

Rumfoord was himself a rich man who became a self-funded space explorer and eventually entered a physical anomaly known as a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum”. This induced him to exist as a spiraling waveform, materializing on planets when their orbits passed through the space the anomaly occupied. Rumfoord’s new form allows him to see all moments of his life simultaneously, even as his physical form manifests at disparate points in time and space. It is this ability that allows him to manipulate Constant through prophecy and publicly predict other events in terrestrial history. Malachi’s manipulation highlights the classic science fiction question of free will, suggesting our autonomy might be an illusion, overshadowed by unseen forces. Vonnegut’s satire is matched by a comic tone; he shirks the realism of the other novels discussed in this piece, instead opting to emphasize the most outlandish elements of science fiction and illustrate a sort of ‘cosmic unimportance’ for humanity.

My vintage paperback copy of The Sirens of Titan.

But as it turns out, the manipulation does not end with Rumfoord either. On Titan, Rumfoord has met a robot named Salo, who has been stranded for more than 200,000 years while waiting for a replacement part for his ship. Salo comes from a world known as Tralfamadore⁵, and his attempts to contact the alien inhabitants of the planet spur them to manipulate human history such that humans will eventually be able to build the part necessary for Salo to continue. Beyond the manipulation of certain individuals, even the broad strokes of human evolution and history have actually been part of an outside agenda. Have the Tralfamadorians in turn been manipulated by an even more powerful entity? Who’s to say?

Vonnegut himself was an atheist and The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent is clearly intended to be a didactic piece of commentary on the nature of false prophets, controlling religions, and human gullibility. It’s unquestionably “the opiate of the masses”, but it also contains the key to living in a world where everyone is subject to external manipulation. Even if human evolution has been the product of Tralfamadorian influence, it has been nurtured with a single goal in mind: advancing technology to the point where Salo’s ship can be repaired. The Tralfamadorians have no interest in how humans feel about their manipulation or anything else; they are in large part indifferent to our condition. Even if humans lack absolute free will, there are still things that we can choose about the way we live. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent is still a Church, but it’s one that tells us we shouldn’t waste our time worshiping unfathomable entities and should instead focus on our responsibilities to each other.

Final Thoughts

While the four novels I’ve discussed today all have their own unique approaches to the question of rationality’s limits, they all seem to believe that some way or another, humans will ultimately be barred from ever assembling a theory of everything. Even if the universe operates rationally, these works cast doubt on Pierre-Simon Laplace’s idea of a completed, predictive set of knowledge, as well as any similar notions. Of course, discussions of the universe’s knowability naturally suggest other questions, many of which have been pondered by the philosophers, scientists, and science fiction writers mentioned in this post. Even in light of its imperfections, might science still be the best way to approximate the ground truths of the universe? If the universe does have a set of universal laws, are they deterministic? 

Science and philosophy have become siloed over time, but the authors of many early scientific epics were, like Laplace, natural philosophers who bridged the gap between the two disciplines. Over the past century or so, science fiction has emerged as a critical venue for the connection of these two branches of knowledge. But while the authors of early scientific epics illustrated their theories through academic papers and historical narratives, science fiction authors utilize fictional narratives with a deliberate distance from reality. While science fiction does not replace the need for nonfiction syntheses of science and philosophy, its speculative elements make the way it merges different forms of knowledge unique. 

Ultimately, the strength of the novels discussed today comes from their ability to, as Ted Chiang would say, “make philosophical questions storyable.” We as readers are not better suited to understand a simulated world or a sentient ocean than the characters in these novels, but we can at least understand the regret, uncertainty, contentment, and amusement that they feel. These works of fiction help bridge the gap between philosophy and emotion, helping us reflect on our own circumstances by considering them in relation to speculative settings. Almost by definition, works that eschew notions of a complete understanding of the universe can’t tell us definitively how to live. But they can help us decide which questions to ask, what dissonances to accept, and how to continue on living all the while.

Thanks to Sakura Price for providing comments on a draft of this post and to Diego Ayala-McCormick and Hannah Karp for helpful discussions of the material.

1. While my focus in this post is not literary history, it’s interesting to think about the historical circumstances that prompted each author’s reflection on the limits of rationality. Roadside Picnic has been analyzed in the light of Soviet economics, and the impossibility of communication in Solaris seems to suggest the influence of Cold War politics. The Sirens of Titan and Sea of Tranquility are more difficult to place, but my guess is that Mandel was inspired by the ever-increasing prominence of the theory, which has been endorsed by such scientifically-minded celebrities as Elon Musk and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

2. For fun, here’s a list of a few additional works that I think are broadly relevant to this question.
”The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” - Ted Chiang (2013)
”Nightfall” - Isaac Asimov (1941) and Nightfall - Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg (1990)
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

3. If these names sound familiar, it’s because these characters appear in Mandel’s previous novel, The Glass Hotel (2020).

4. I don’t want to enumerate all the simulation use cases I can think of, so I’ll just mention that the often-but-not-exclusively-science fiction anthology TV show Black Mirror features a number of interesting scenarios, including in the episodes “USS Callister”, “Hang the DJ”, and “White Christmas”.

5. Some of you might recognize Tralfamadore from elsewhere in Vonnegut’s body of work; the planet at its inhabitants appear in several of his novels but with varying depictions.