I was somewhat disappointed by some descriptions I found on the Internet as to the nature of the visitors. The overwhelming view that people seemed to have was that Solaris was intentionally dredging up the worst repressed memories the researchers had. In truth Lem never really reveals to us just what Solaris is doing but I think that underscores his point about communication with alien life forms (that it wouldn’t be comprehensible). Even though the experiences seemed traumatic for the crew members it cannot be said that that was the ocean’s intentions. Snow even suggests at the end of the book that the visitors might have been “presents” of a sort.

Returning to the two scientific reviews in the book I want to discuss a second although lesser theme in the book. Lem is not only describing the frustrations he predicts will come with contact with alien life but he is also making fun to some extent of academia and in particular scientific experimentation and its limits. After all, the first passage describes thousands of pages and numerous volumes of theories about whether Solaris is alive or not and what is the end result of all that? They don’t know! Likewise in the second review of literature the history of Solaristics has managed to document and categorize the complex formations Solaris makes but yet in the end all that categorization really says nothing.

Let’s think about the state of research currently and ask ourselves a question. What do we really know about anything? For example, in the topic of neuroscience we map out different brain activities, neural patterns associated with different modes of thinking, different types of behavior, correlations between patterning and different chemical states, and so on. But in the end of billions of dollars and countless hours of research what do we really know? Have we really explained anything or have we just made more and more categorizations and descriptions of phenomena that we will never really understand?

In many ways our own subjective intelligence and how it works is as alien to us as Solaris is to Kelvin and company. We know it is there and that it displays “forms” if you will but we really know very little about it or what it is. And though it is highly unlikely that we will ever really know what our consciousness “is” we will continue to want to research and categorize it no matter what traumatic or disturbing things are dredged up in response to our probing. I find it telling that at the end of the book after everything that has happened with the visitors Snow is ready to continue probing Solaris with more experiments!