Bayesian realism

But what happened? I found myself asking, a couple of days ago, after I finished Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Investigation. I think this is a natural if philistine question. The book presents itself as a detective novel, after all. The opening scene even takes place at Scotland Yard, in an office that seems like an archetype of the genre. Here’s how the hero, a novice detective named Gregory, describes the room:

Gregory noticed Queen Victoria eyeing them from a small portrait on the wall behind the desk. The Chief Inspector looked at each of the men in turn as if counting them or trying to memorize their faces. One of the side walls was covered by a huge map of southern England; on the wall opposite there was a dark shelf lined with books.

One of the pleasures of Lem’s novel is that instead of being set in a realist London, it seems to take place in a postwar Polish novelist’s idea of detective-novel London, into which elements of a 1950s Eastern European city keep inadvertently seeping (arcades, overgilded hotel lobbies, city-periphery rabbit-hutch apartment buildings).

The Platonic ideal of a detective novel, however, always ends with a dénouement, in which the culprit is nabbed, and an éclaircissement, in which the detective explains what gave the culprit’s diabolical plot away. The Investigation has neither. The only explanation offered of its central mystery fits the evidence so poorly that for it to work, one incident has to be omitted. And no one even tries to explain some of the most disturbing phenomena. It is left up to the reader, for example, to come up with a theory for why a corpse left in a mortuary in winter would spontaneously return to a living person’s body temperature.

The Investigation, in other words, is one of those detective novels that break the rules because they are to some extent about detective novels—and about the philosophical implications of detection, as a way of seeing the world—like The Crying of Lot 49 or Twin Peaks. (A side note: Like Albert in Twin Peaks, one of the minor characters in The Investigation is a forensic medical examiner with a rebarbative personality, whose name is Sorensen: “It suddenly occurred to Gregory that Sorensen had done well in choosing a profession in which he associated mainly with the dead.” I feel like at some point in Twin Peaks, more or less the same thing gets said about Albert.)

The “crime” at the heart of The Investigation is resurrection. Across London, dead bodies are going missing or being discovered in altered positions that suggest that they briefly came back to life. Scotland Yard’s chief inspector assigns the case to Gregory somewhat reluctantly. “I would prefer not to give this case to you . . . but I have no one else,” the chief says. Maybe he’s reluctant because Gregory is only a junior officer, a “beginner,” but maybe it’s because the chief doubts the case will be congenial to someone with Gregory’s mindset. “You might not like the solution,” the chief warns. Gregory’s mindset is resolutely empirical and focused on finding an individual human culprit, as befits a detective. As Gregory himself puts it, “I absolutely refuse to believe in miracles, and nothing is going to make me, even if I go crazy.” Behind any event in the world, Gregory expects to find a person, acting out an intention. Crimes, according to his way of thinking, are the expressive activity of criminals; society is the sum of the acted-out intentions of the people who comprise it.

As a habit of mind, always needing to find a culprit is a little like always seeing the world as God’s creation, and there are hints that the supernatural is what Gregory has come up against. When the chief agrees with Gregory, half-heartedly, that it would be unprofessional to chalk the events up to a miracle, he makes a religious allusion: “We all have to be doubting Thomases in this case . . . It’s one of the unfortunate requirements of our profession.” And when the chief tries to suggest to Gregory that at the end of the day there might not be any resurrectionists behind the resurrections, he makes his point by asking, “Who makes day and night?” The two men even discuss the possibility that they’re living through a recurrence of circumstances that last obtained “about two thousand years ago.” As Gregory reminds the chief inspector, “there was a series of alleged resurrections then also—you know, Lazarus, and . . . the other one.” Gregory worries that he’s being asked to catch “the creator of some new religion.”

An irruption of the divine would explain the novel’s mysteries neatly, but it’s hardly an option that a novel published in a totalitarian Communist nation was able to consider at much length (per the copyright page, Investigation came out in Poland in 1959). Within the novel, what deranges Gregory’s intentionalist view of the world isn’t faith but a statistical view of things taken by a colleague of his named Dr. Sciss. Sciss doesn’t see any need to explain why a particular corpse has crawled out of its coffin. He’s content if he’s able to calculate that there’s a numerical constant in “the product obtained by multiplying the time elapsed between any two incidents, and the distance separating any two consecutive disappearing-body sites from the center, when multiplied by the differential between the prevailing temperatures at both sites.” Like a researcher working in artificial intelligence today, Sciss doesn’t feel any compulsion to look inside the black box of his algorithm. It suffices to him if the algorithm is capable of making Bayesian (or Bayesian-like) predictions reasonably well. He forecasts that the next reanimation will occur in a circular strip in the London suburbs “no more than twenty-one miles wide.” If it occurs at all.

This is pretty broad, as predictions go. Even as Lem casts statistics as his novel’s uncanny other, he may be making a little fun of the science. Gregory is impressed by Sciss’s talk, however, and resolves to read up on statistics. Only to discover that as a way of understanding the world, it doesn’t satisfy him—much as it’s unlikely to satisfy anyone looking to read a detective novel. From the perspective of statistics, Sciss tries to argue, resurrections aren’t any more remarkable than the fact that in some London neighborhoods, people happen to be more resistant to cancer than they are in other neighborhoods. Coming back to life, considered mathematically, is more or less the same as not-dying-of-cancer transposed from above zero to below it; in the aggregate, a pattern of corpses moving around is a lot like a pattern of living people not dying of cancer shifted on the axis of aliveness. Gregory acknowledges that this might work on graph paper but insists nonetheless on knowing the specifics of how the reanimations are happening. Sciss sneers: “You’re acting like a child who is shown Maxwell’s theorem and a diagram of a radio receiver and then asks, ‘How does this box talk?'” Sciss himself doesn’t care what the mechanism is. Maybe it’s flying saucers, he says, or maybe it has to do with the dead cats and dogs that have been found near some of the moved corpses. Why would any scientifically minded person feel he needs to know? Any intuitive sense of the world is just an illusion. “So-called common sense,” Sciss lectures Gregory and a few friends, a few nights later, over dinner, “relies on programmed nonperception, concealment, or ridicule of everything that doesn’t fit into the conventional nineteenth century vision of a world that can be explained down to the last detail.”

By the end of the book, Gregory is trying to make this language his own:

>What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle—what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? . . . Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup.

It’s at this point—at the end of a long ramble that Gregory makes while staring at one of the pictures of dead people that the chief for some reason keeps on his walls at home—that the chief, recognizing that Gregory has exhausted his intellectual resources, offers the explanation that doesn’t really explain anything but allows them to close the case, at least as a matter of bureaucratic procedure.

It doesn’t feel right, of course—not to Gregory, not to the reader. Understanding the world as a sequence of shifting patterns is inimical to the way detectives understand the world, and to the way most other humans do, as well. In his extremity, Gregory seizes for a while on Sciss as the likeliest suspect, since he seems to understand what’s going on better than anyone else, but Gregory loses his nerve; he’s unable to trick himself into believing that Sciss is really guilty. Along the way, in his intellectual desperation, he elaborates Sciss’s casual mention of flying saucers into an intriguing, completely bonkers theory: maybe the agent spreading the not-dying-of-cancer isn’t something like a virus but rather a set of microscopic “information-gathering instruments” sent to Earth by an intelligent alien civilization:

Once on Earth they ignore living organisms and are directed—programmed would be a better word—only to the dead. Why? First, so they won’t hurt anyone—this proves that the star people are humane. Second, ask yourself this. How does a mechanic learn about a machine? He starts it up and watches it in operation. The information-collectors do exactly the same thing.

It’s natural that we humans don’t understand what’s going on, Gregory theorizes, because we don’t have a native information-collecting device like this on Earth: “The information-collector seems to act rationally; therefore, it isn’t a device or tool in our sense of the word. It’s probably more comparable to a hunting dog.” More than half a century ago, in other words, Lem was predicting AI search agents.

In the same novel, he also predicted universal artificial-intelligence surveillance. Sciss comes up with it. Demoralized by the then-incipient nuclear arms race, Sciss foresees an accompanying race in command-and-control systems, as they are perfected and expanded.

There must be more and more improvements in weaponry, but after a certain point weapons reach their limit. What can be improved next? Brains. The brains that issue the commands. . . The next stage will be a fully automated headquarters equipped with electronic strategy machines. . . . Strategic considerations dictate the construction of bigger and bigger machines, and, whether we like it or not, this inevitably means an increase in the amount of information stored in the brains. This in turns means that the brain will steadily increase its control over all of society’s collective processes.

A prediction that seems to have come true, though Lem was slightly wrong about the inciting force. The motive, in the event, wasn’t binary but multipolar: rather than being driven by the rivalry of just America versus the Soviet Union, the digitization of everything was driven by the rivalry of thousands of capitalist firms jockeying for market share.

So what happens in The Investigation? A novel isn’t a set of falsifiable hypotheses, but my sense is that Lem was imagining, by means of a deliberately broken detective story, what it was going to feel like when, instead of seeing the world as a field for intentions and actions, either ours or God’s, we began to see it as merely information in flux, subject to collection and to some extent prediction by artificial intelligence.