"It would seem that an overabundance of thinking beings is a dangerous thing, if it reduces them to the status of sand."
Trurl and friends soon realize that producing so many robots leads to a devaluing of life. With so many conflicting ideas running around according to their disparate programmings, they begin to have massive conflicts. Most importantly nobody's idea seems to hold more weight than the next guy. The very process of thought becomes devalued and insignificant.
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
Klapaucius asks the poet robot of Trurl's to write him a love poem, but he's got a tall order. He wants the robot to write a love poem in algebra which can appeal to both man and robot. In this strange world of androids, even the concept of love can be replicated through multiple mediums and genres.
“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
In the fantastic world in which the stories are set, even the ridiculous is considered possible. Trurl and Klapaucius argue about whether or no dragons are real. Eventually it's decided that they didn't ever exist in a physical sense, but they are real nonetheless. In fact there are three classes of dragons about which much documentation exists.
“Suppose that which is taking place here and now is not reality, but only a tale, a tale of some higher order that contains within it the tale of the machine: a reader might well wonder why you and your companions are shaped like spheres, inasmuch as that sphericality serves no purpose in the narration and would appear to be a wholly superfluous embellishment...”
As soon as the main characters begin questioning the nature of reality and existence, they start to posit that other worlds may exist which they cannot access. They may be living inside a simulation, you might say. This is a little humor on Stanislaw's part because the stories of Trurl and Klapaucius often are nested one inside another so that yes, actually, they are living in a story simulated within another story within another one, etc.
