ConFusion Recap: SF and Philosophy

SF has been called the literature of ideas, and the ideas explored in SF have become increasingly philosophical throughout the history of the genre. What are the most illuminating thought experiments in recent and classic SF? Which philosophical questions do they raise? And how are philosophers in today’s universities employing SF in their teaching and research?

Dyrk Ashton

Andrea Johnson

Nathan Rockweed

Ken Schrader

Ashton: Floats the idea that everything post-Hegel is just a footnote.

Johnson: Philosophy as journey, not destination

Ashton: The only philosophies that have answers are religions.

Johnson: Brings up SF that deals with extreme alien-ness as a vein that is particularly philosophically significant.

Ashton: Floats the idea that everything post-Hegel is just a footnote.

Johnson: Philosophy as journey, not destination

Ashton: The only philosophies that have answers are religions.

Johnson: Brings up SF that deals with extreme alien-ness as a vein that is particularly philosophically significant.

Schrader: SF also noted for dealing with big basic questions like “what does it mean to be human” or “what is reality”.

Rockweed: Brings up teaching Camus' The Stranger to 12th graders and how they engage with big existential questions for the first time.

Johnson: How will uploading minds change how we think about thinking & reality?

Ashton: Lots of this kind of question in Dick's work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for example.

Rockweed: Augmented reality (even just augmented by carrying smartphones) as an unexpectedly smooth transition to virtual reality.

Ashton: Talks about his chapter in Investigating Alias and different models of time, contrasting Hegel with Bergson/Deleuze.

Johnson: Brings up Simak's Ogre, with its vegetable intelligence, as an example of different mind presentation.

Schrader: The Matrix as the big one, “reality is nothing more than an MMO”, how to think about whether interactions are real or not when virtually mediated.

Rockweed: Brings up Leckie's Ancillary books and how the AI viewpoint character brings up lots of philosophical questions, the use of language to critique gender assumptions.

Ashton: Derridean power of language, language as a colonizing force.

Johnson: Examples in SF of how different languages change what can work; prefers/recommends Lee's Machineries of Empire for some similar explorations.

Open question of examples of SF engaging with philosophical ideas:

Ashton: Cixin's Three Body Problem, Stephenson's Anathem; there's a lot of stuff going on in Tolkien but hard to pin down what exactly his stances are.

Johnson: Watts' Blindsight, all of Watts work really, Delany's Babel-17, all of PKD's work.

Rockweed: Pratchett's work “making me think hard about things”, the kind of gender-work being done in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and even Brown's Red Rising.

Schrader: Lafferty's Six Wakes, Cline's Ready Player One for those virtual/real questions. Also brings up Star Trek transporter identity questions.

Johnson: Brin's Existence touches on a lot of these; also references Steinmetz's The Uploaded.

Rockweed: Also Zelazny's Islands of the Damned.

Ashton: Genre writing's ability to push at ethics boundaries, as in Grimdark. References Anna Smith Sparks, Anna Stevens, Martin & Abercrombie, and Lawrence's Prince of Thieves. It's easy to read these wrong, as glorifications rather than critiques.

Johnson: In talking about life & identity questions, have to talk about robots & AI. Recommends Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

Rockweed: Lauds the Mass Effect games for their investigation of these issues, particularly the geth and created consciouness. Looks forward to being able to teach these games somehow in the classroom.

Schrader: On the topic of games, brings up ethics choices in things like Black and White.

Rockweed: Wonders about genre fiction in upholding simplistic good/evil morality, Dark/Light side of the Force for instance.

Schrader: “Only the Sith deal in absolutes”.

Rockweed: Examples of more complicated breakdowns?

None immediately posed.

Audience question-that's-a-comment: actually all philosophy is a footnote since Plato.

Audience question that somehow leads us into quantum superposition discussion, Ashton mentions the way ancient Hindu etc. philosophies match up with modern quantum mechanics. We get into some questionable interpretations of the observer paradox, and in general sounding a bit like Capra's The Tao of Physics or Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Schrader: Philosophy focii are also cyclicalm things come back to the forefront of societal attention periodically. For instance, our current zombie fascination. Raise questions of individuality, also focuses on monstrousness of “survival over everything” mentality.

Ashton: Zombies just the Nietschean scorpion that kills the frog.

Johnson: Brings up Sawyer's Quantum Night for grappling with some of these issues.

Audience question about grimdark, things like The Handmaid's Tale, the trend towards showing what happens to people in disaster/survival situations.

Panel first brings up salability as main factor in these kinds of trends.

Rockweed: It's a basic kind of fantasy to imagine survival in the face of danger, but we also need to see more portrayals of how extreme situations bring out the best (rather than worst) aspects of people, which seems to be at least as realistic.

Johnson: There's also the fact of “grimdark asshole burnout”, there's only so much of that you can take before you want different stories.

Audience comment: Goodness itself being punished by the constructed narrative is problematic.

Audience question: Is the relationship in Blade Runner 2049 (between a replicant and a virtual girlfriend) real?

Johnson: No, or rather it's one-way...

And we're out of time.