Read Online Memoirs of a Space Traveler by Stanislaw Lem - Free Book Online

keep sending telegrams about their condition to your brain—all this represents your soul, to use the language of the theologians. You and I would say, rather, the active state of your mind. Yes, I admit I use the term ‘soul’ out of a certain perversity. The term, however, is simple and enjoys universal recognition: everyone thinks he knows what is meant when he hears it.
    “Our materialist viewpoint, of course, reduces to fiction not only the immortal, incorporeal soul, but also the soul as an invariable, timeless, and eternal thing. Such a soul, you will agree, has never existed; none of us possesses it. The soul of a young man and that of an old man, though there may be points in common when we speak of the same person—his soul when he is a child and at the moment when he lies at death’s door—these are extremely different states of consciousness. In speaking of a person’s soul, we automatically think of his mental state when he is in his prime and in the best of health. It was this state, therefore, that I chose for my purpose. My synthetic soul is the permanently recorded cross section of the awareness of a normal, vigorous individual. How do I do this? I take a substance well suited for the purpose and reproduce in it the configuration of the living brain with the utmost fidelity, atom for atom, vibration for vibration. The copy is reduced on a scale of fifteen to one. That is why the box you see is so small. With a little effort the soul could be further reduced in size, but I see no reason to do so; besides, the cost of production would become exorbitant. Now, then, the soul remains recorded in this material; it is not a model, not an immobile, inert network of nerves, as I first thought, when I was still conducting experiments on animals. Here I came up against the greatest, the only, obstacle. You see, I wished to preserve a living, alert consciousness in this material, a consciousness capable of the freest thought, of dreaming and waking, of flights of imagination, a consciousness ever changing, ever sensible of the passage of time—but I wished also to keep it ageless, to prevent the material from tiring, cracking, or crumbling. There was a time, Mr. Tichy, when this task seemed impossible to me, as it must seem impossible now to you. The one ace up my sleeve was persistence. Because I am persistent, Mr. Tichy. That is why I succeeded…”
    “One moment,” I said, slightly confused. “What are you saying? Here, in this box, there is a material object, yes? Which contains the consciousness of a living person? But how does it communicate with the outside world? And see? And hear?…” I broke off, for an indescribable smile appeared on Decanter’s face. He looked at me out of his screwed-up green eye.
    “Mr. Tichy,” he said, “you fail to understand. What communication, what contact can there be between partners when the lot of one of them is eternity? Mankind, after all, will cease to exist in fifteen billion years at the most. Whom, then, would that immortal soul hear, to whom would it speak? Did I not say that it was eternal? The time that will have elapsed when Earth freezes, when the youngest and most powerful of today’s stars collapse, when the laws governing the Universe change to such an extent that it will take on a form completely unimaginable to us—that time does not constitute even the tiniest fraction of this soul’s duration, because this soul will last forever. Religions are quite right to ignore the body, for what use would a nose be, or legs, in eternity? What good, after Earth and flowers have disappeared, after the suns have burned out? But let’s skip this trivial aspect of the problem. You said ‘communicate with the outside world.’ Even if this soul made contact with the outer world only once every hundred years, then after a billion centuries, in order to contain the memories of those contacts, it would have to grow to the size of a continent … and after a