The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Imagine a chip in your brain to help you think…
Written by philosophers, these science fiction stories take the art of the ‘thought experiment’ to some wild and weird places
PHILOSOPHY THROUGH SCIENCE FICTION STORIES ed De Cruz, De Smedt, Schwitzgebel 264pp, Bloomsbury, T £21.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £21.99, ebook £19.79 ÌÌÌÌÌ
If the soul of Heliogabalus, the wicked Roman Emperor, were reincarnated in a hog, would we, asked John Locke, say that the hog was Heliogabalus? Probably not, but we might be more inclined to say so if the hog had Heliogabalus’s memories, as well as his soul. Would you want to live in a virtual reality “experience machine” that ensured perpetual happiness, asked Robert Nozick. No? Then doesn’t your uncertainty suggest that happiness may not, after all, be the ultimate human desire?
Philosophical “thought experiments” help us discover what we think, and what we could more sensibly think. They pursue truth through fiction – often science fiction, in which actual technologies are stretched to their conceptual limits, and reconfigured humans mix with extravagantly alien beings. But philosophy’s imaginary societies, as pictured and proselytised by Plato, Thomas Moore, Rousseau, Marx and Rawls, have typically been optimistic; science fiction, on the other hand, tends to shrink from the very futurism it flaunts, and laments our hubris.
Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories, a new collection, brings these two traditions together. Each of the authors is a philosopher. Some of the stories are question-begging or predictable. But at their best, they revivify well-worn philosophical problems and graphically pose new ones.
Keon, in David John Baker’s “The Intended”, has, like everyone else on the planet Eudaimonia, been surgically modified to fit the Plan that best furthers his happiness, and provides the partner perfect for him. What the Planners are doing is redirecting the forces that mould us all – genes, environment and chance – to beneficial ends. Keon acknowledges that, but after his Plan is accidentally skewed, he refuses to be redesigned for some new “personal sex android”. His original
(and embittered) other half, whom he tracks down, also insists on being “her own person”. Why do we feel that the love they develop, despite being “off the path”, is more real than if they were on it?
Ted Chiang’s story takes the immemorial “problem of evil” – how, given natural disasters and moral frightfulness, the Creator God can qualify as good – and turns it on its head. In Chiang’s imagined cosmos, angelic visitations distribute both miracle cures and mutilations; people are randomly assigned to Heaven or Hell, mostly the latter, however good or bad their lives have been. Brilliantly deadpan, it makes us wonder why, after all, we should expect the world to be logical, rational or fair.
Several stories deal with “transhumanism”, the philosophical (and now practical) issue of how far humans should evolve beyond their current limits. Ken Liu reminds us that technologies enhancing our cognitive powers were, from the outset, disturbing. The god Thamus, in ancient Egyptian legend, warned that the new invention of writing would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls” because “they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves”. But, pace Thamus, that legend would not now be remembered had Plato not written it down. Writing releases us from the burden of remembering. By being externalised in visible symbols, thought can be extended through time.
Yet Liu suggests that writing was indeed a slippery slope. He imagines that the externalisation of memory and information-storage could, in its turn, be implanted in the brain, still further accelerating thinking and learning. His protagonist’s “cognitive enhancement device” is initially exhilarating. But he has nightmares, is tense with the “booster” on, groggy with it off. Having it taken out, he then discovers, would remove all the data and skills it had enabled him to gain; they belong, not to him, but to his company. What he thought would empower him has enslaved him. “You don’t know what you think you know,” says a potential employer as she refuses his application. And suddenly the question “What does it mean to know something?”, so endlessly discussed in epistemology, feels vital. Previously, it had seemed to me dry as dust.