Jake Casella
Other intelligences are what made me fall in love with science
fiction—really different, new, unusual creatures and characters.
These different kinds of thinking beings—superhumans, robots,
aliens—are a central feature in a lot of SF/F. What I'm hoping to
show today is two ways of thinking about that intelligence. I'm going
to call the one way the “Chained” model, after the Great Chain of
Being, and the other way the “Radiant” model, which has a more
diverse and pluralistic approach. The “Chained” model intersects
with Cartesian Dualism, so we'll look at that as well—both tend to
disembody intelligence, with some unfortunate consequences.
As a kind of framing
thought here, I like looking at science fiction and these ideas as a
two-way street. On the one hand, these ideas are pulled from
elsewhere in society. But on the other hand, fleshing out abstract
ideas in stories gives them a lot of weight in society, more than
they might have had as dry theory. That's great when it makes
difficult concepts comprehensible, or scary new ideas less so—but
it's troublesome when it allows problematic ideas to live past their
expiration date.
