Science fiction (SF) portrays counterfactual realities, possible worlds, alternate histories. Yet, it tries to explore scenarios which, as far as we know, could possibly happen, such as space exploration, encounters with alien races, or the creation of intelligent artificial beings. In that respect, it purports to differ from other kinds of fiction such as fantasy or fairytale, which introduce “magical” elements into their plots, trespassing thereby what we know of natural or physical laws. Because of this willingness to remain within the bounds of the (scientifically) possible, SF pretends to a certain cognitive relevance. It is motivated by, and tries to generate, speculation. This, perhaps, explains why much of contemporary analytic philosophy is filled with thought experiments borrowing from SF some of its most cherished themes : time-travel, teleportation, split-brain cases, clones, intelligent robots, etc. But what is it, exactly, that SF can bring to philosophy ? What, and how, could we learnfrom it ? How are we to make sense of (or dismiss) the speculative scenarios depicted in SF narratives ? It is these pressing questions that this volume of Midwest Studies in Philosophy seeks to answer.  The book, which contains ten essays and two short stories, covers a great deal of issues, ranging from aesthetics and ethics to epistemology and metaphysics. We will provide a quick overview of each contribution.

In “Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre”, S.J. Evnine argues that two understandings of artistic genres have been competing in the literature. The dominant approach sees them as “regions of conceptual space” (RCS). According to this view, a work can be defined and recognized as belonging to a genre if it contains or exemplifies certain determinate properties. The author argues that the RCS account, if tempting, fails to be satisfactory on several grounds. (a) It  cannot explain why the historical context of a work’s production seems relevant for its generic identification, since only  its “internal” properties would matter. (b) The RCS approach assumes that some features necessarily need to be possessed by a work of a given kind, a claim which seems objectionable due to the sheer variety of works and constant reinvention of artistic genres. Lastly, (c) this view trivially reduces generic normativity to a given set of rules to follow; and (d) it fails to really explain why there are persistent disagreements on the inclusion (or exclusion) of certain particular works into a genre.                                                              

All these difficulties, says Evnine, can be avoided if one endorses the other approach of genres, which takes them to be “traditions”. Doing so would prove a better way to account for their historicity, evolution, and normativity, these conclusions being tentatively applied to SF. Under this account, (a’) the inclusion of a work into a genre critically depends on the historical context of its production, beyond its “internal” properties. (b’) In that case, there is no rigid set of necessary features which delimit what a genre is. Works belong to a genre when they make reference to a certain artistic tradition, and genres are thus not classificatory items but “historical particulars”. (c’) The tradition approach allows generic normativity to be explained in a more dynamic fashion: authors inherit techniques, patterns, and structures previously used ; they shape their work according to their sense of loyalty to their predecessors and their desire to innovate; and they critically take into account the expectations from the readers or the audience. This account, then, allows to see a genre as being some kind of “ongoing discussion” between authors, works, industries, and audiences. (d) Under this view, the deep disagreements about the inclusion or exclusion of some works into a genre becomes much more understandable. The matter is not merely one of classification, but a demand made that a given work should be seen (or not) as a genuine part of a tradition, and thus as an acceptable inspiration for subsequent works in the genre. This last point is well exemplified with the discussion of two particular cases, whose incorporation into SF is contested. 

In “Improve Your Thought Experiments Overnight With Speculative Fiction!”, R. P. Cameron takes note of the close proximity of SF narratives to thought experiments, as they are commonly found in philosophy : both are of a counterfactual nature, and both seemingly have some kind of cognitive value. Yet, Cameron wants to show that the two differ in some respects. SF narratives are generally much more detailed, complex, and fleshed out, than the standard thought experiment. For this reason, the former tend to be rhetorically or psychologically more persuasive. Another important difference is that reading fiction, unlike a philosophy paper, allows (or even calls for) a kind of cognitive and moral detachment, where the reader will not feel as engaged to challenge the truth or the rightness of what is depicted or expressed. This, says the author, provides ground to think that speculative fiction is a specific, and irreducible way, to explore (intellectually or emotionally) certain viewpoints and ideas.                                              

This claim is given support in two general ways. First, Cameron wants to show how SF, because of the creative freedom which characterizes it, can be particularly effective at portraying moral claims or viewpoints. This is due, in part, to SF’s tendency to exaggerate the features of the object (or subject) it considers. Orwell’s 1984, for instance, tries to form the picture of a quintessential totalitarianism, purified of any historical contingency. For this reason, Orwell seems to bring us intellectually closer to the problem of totalitarianism than realistic testimonies on (actual) totalitarian states. This is not to say, of course, that SF is the only way to depict moral views or that it necessarily succeeds in doing so : Cameron’s point is simply that SF can be a moral tool or guide on its own.  The author’s second claim is that SF can provide us with “constitutive metaphysical truths which can serve as data for metaphysical theorizing” (p.32). Interestingly, it is sometimes the failure of a SF narrative to convince us that something is possible, or that some claim is true within the fiction, which can be metaphysically instructive. The “imaginative resistance” to certain SF scenarios could proceed from the fact that what it depicts is metaphysically impossible, or that it violates some metaphysical truth. Some well-chosen examples are discussed by Cameron to assess this point : Alan Moore’s (supposed) failure to persuade us that the Swamp Thing, in the eponymous comic, is not the same person as Holland ; or the unconvincing claim that Data, the android featured in Star Trek : The Next Generation, is unable to feel emotions, although it repeatedly behaves like a normal person.

 “Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy”, by B. Blumson, tries to give support to a deceptively simple argument. Its first premise states that “all knowledge from fiction is from imagination”. Drawing on Grice, Walton, and Currie, the author shows that fiction can be analyzed as a “prescription to imagine”. But does all knowledge from fiction stem from imagination ? Apparent counterexamples to this claim are discussed and proved unconvincing. The second step of Blumson’s argument states that “all knowledge from fiction is modal knowledge”. The author gives ground to the idea that imaginability is a guide to possibility, and unimaginability, a guide to impossibility or necessity. Fiction, thus, provides knowledge about what is possible and what is not. Reading The Dispossessed makes one imagine an anarchist utopia, from which we can learn that an anarchist utopia is possible. Reading Animal Farm makes one imagine a revolution of a specific kind and makes one learn that, given that kind of revolution, it is necessary that dictatorship ensues. Here again, counterexamples are discussed.The conclusion of Blumson’s argument, from there, follows simply: “All knowledge from fiction is modal knowledge”. Fiction can only provide knowledge about what is possible, impossible, necessary, or probable. The author takes care, however, to remind us that modal knowledge is not without relation to what is actual : fiction could thus, indirectly, tell us about what is actually the case. The apparently reductive claim set forth by the author could thus, perhaps, be accommodated to more traditional versions of aesthetic cognitivism. 

In “The Epistemic Value of Speculative Fiction” J. De Smedt and H. De Cruz invoke the results of cognitive science to show that the mechanisms at work in speculative fiction are fundamentally the same as those underlying thought experiments and counterfactual reasoning. These common mechanisms are discussed at length.  But, like Cameron above, the authors try to flesh out what cognitive virtues are proper to SF. It appears that SF, contrasted with philosophical thought experiments, (1) pays more attention to contextual elements, which can be philosophically instructive ; (2) is a fine tool to break theoretical or conceptual dichotomies and (3) allows us to examine in detail the (emotional, existential) consequences of certain philosophical views. To illustrate these points, several examples of philosophical ideas explored through SF are discussed : the possibility of a libertarian utopia in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) ; the truth of the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” in Vance’s The Languages of Pao (1958); and the relation between finitude and happiness in Meyer’s popular vampire tetralogy, Twilight. The article ends with an interview of several philosophers who also happen to write SF.

 “The Alienation of Human and Animals in Uplift Diction”, by I. Roy-Faderman, follows an original course : it examines, from a philosophical point of view, the outcomes of these “uplift” SF narratives, which portray non-human animals (NHA) accessing “intelligence”. Paradoxically, while the uplift literature generally intends to manifest the continuity between humans and (superior) NHA, it actually reassesses, perhaps involuntarily, the supposed differences existing between them. The author discusses in some detail several “uplift” novels, all of which perpetuate more or less explicitly a kind of dualism, where human beings are associated with the realm of the mental, the reflexive, and the adaptable; while the uplifted NHA remain bound with that of the physical, the instinctual, and the constrained. In most of these narratives, NHA indeed face the risk of falling back into violence and bestiality. As Roy-Faderman argues, most uplift stories can be shown, for this reason, to rely on dubious if not outdated theories of intelligence, where it is understood as a monolithic and hierarchy-inducing faculty. What results from this, according to the author, is a sort of failure of most uplift narratives to convey the viewpoint of the NHA, or to genuinely represent non-human forms of intelligence (a fine exception being, perhaps, Keyes’ Flowers for Argernon). The question remains open, thus, how could we picture NHA being “uplifted”, without endorsing certain anthropocentric or speciesist accounts of various cognitive abilities. This contribution, then, can be read both as an application of animal studies to SF and as a path to explore for future SF authors.

“In Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences” [AIs], by E. Schwitzgebel and M. Garza, propose two arguments in favor of the rights of AIs. The first one states that (1) two entities deserve unequal moral consideration or treatment only if they differ in some important or relevant respects. But since (2) it seems at least possible that there will be (or could be) AIs not differing from human beings in such respects, it can be concluded (3) that there are, possibly, AIs who would deserve the same degree of moral consideration as human beings. The second argument for the rights of AIs is a kind of “slippery slope”. Just as the moral status of a person is not affected by this person having an artificial limb, it seems that (1) substituting a small artificial component in an entity who possesses rights does not impact its moral status, if the said component does not alter its identity and contributes identically to its psychology. But it seems possible that (2) this replacement process was iterated, so that a human being could be transformed into an artificial being, without losing its rights. Therefore, we can conclude that (3) it seems possible to create an artificial being with the same rights as a human being.                             

                     

For the authors, many SF narratives show in a persuasive way that moral status does not (and should not) depend on physical features or material constitution. It is, rather, a matter of psychological capacities and social abilities. Several challenges against AIs’ rights are, then, considered and answered. The common trend of all these objections is that AIs, because of their artificial nature, would fail to generate substantial moral obligations. Yet, as the end of the article shows in detail, we would not owe less to a potential conscious AI than to another human being. We would probably owe it more. Since we would, presumably, have a choice of over its features and design, we would have to make it so that the AI’s life was as good and happy as possible. Thus, creating an intelligent and artificial being would induce a certain number of responsibilities or obligations relative to its welfare, not unlike that of a God to its creatures. As the end of the article shows, some practical lessons can be drawn from this : we should, for instance, design AIs “whose  moral status is clear, one way or the other” (p.115).  This paper, thus, convincingly shows that one of SF’s most privileged themes can be understood as a reservoir for imminent (and important) ethical problems.

«’This Endless Space between the Words’ : The Limits of Love in Spike Jonze’s Her», by T. Jollimore, is a great read. The 2013 movie tells the story of Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falling in love with a highly sophisticated and bodiless operating system, Samantha (who is voiced by Scarlett Johansson). According to a naive reading, this story could seem a praise for a new (and perhaps soon to appear) kind of romance. But is it actually, argues Jollimore, the contrary : there are fatal objections to the idea that Theodore and Sam engage in a genuine romantic relationship. The first problem is that of consciousness. Nothing in the movie, argues Jollimore, explains how Sam works or how she is programmed.  It could very well be that Sam is a kind of “zombie”, exhibiting the (sophisticated) verbal behavior of a normal human being, but without any inner life at all. There is no certainty, then, that Theodore is not alone in this relationship, talking and interacting with a mere program that cannot understand him or love him back (although it seems like it does).  The second problem is that of personal identity. Clearly, to love somebody is to cherish a person that one finds unique and irreplaceable. But is Sam a person ?  If we have reason to think that personal identity has to do with physical or bodily continuity, as Jollimore argues it has, we have reasons to answer this question by a plain “No”. Sam, indeed, is in no place at all. It could be, then, that since she “has no body”, “she is nobody” (p.128). Her, for Jollimore shows how hard it is to conceive of a bodiless or disincarnate person. A final difficulty stems from the fundamental difference existing between Theodore and Sam. Love, generally, is thought of as an exclusive bond, as a form of intimacy which cannot be replicated at will. Yet Sam admits to Theodore, later in the movie, that she has been talking (and is still talking) to thousands of people at the same time as him, and that she fell in love with 641 of them. In one second of Theodore’s time, Sam is able, due to her amazing capacities, to complete countless tasks and undergo countless experiences. This revelation leads, inevitably, to the two protagonists’ separation: Sam is just too alien, her consciousness (if it exists) too different, for the romantic relationship to last.  What seemed to be a futuristic tale of romance thus turns out to be, for Jollimore, a subtle criticism of our ever-increasing replacement of human interactions with machines, or of our fantasies about perfect and flawless romantic relationships. What Her exemplifies best, then, is not the proximity between man and AI, but actually, the distance between them.

     In “Metaphysical Daring as a Posthuman Survival Strategy”, P. Mandik explores the metaphysical problem of survival. How much can human beings undergo and still remain the same, or survive, as persons ? SF has been a privileged ground for speculation on this question, as it has frequently depicted ideas of “mind-uploading” or “destructive teleportation” (where one is decomposed at a point in space, and molecularly recreated identically at another point in space). But are such things possible ? Mandik briefly surveys the current metaphysical debates on these questions, remaining skeptical as to whether they can be answered. There seem to be equally compelling reasons, indeed, to think that mind-uploading would result in the survival, or alternatively the destruction, of a person.       But the author’s point, actually, lies elsewhere. We can imagine different entities having a claim to be continuants with one given person, Jones. Such would be, for instance, “Schmones”, the entity resulting from Jones’ undergoing a destructive teleportation; or “digital Schmones” a computer simulation of Jones’ mind  after he decided to copy or scan his brain. It would seem metaphysically daring to consider that Jones is the same person as Schmones, and even more so to think that Digital Schmones is the same person as Jones. The question, for the author, is thus the following : should we be metaphysically daring or not, and to what extent ? Interestingly, Mandik argues that a daring attitude offers advantages over the more cautious views about survival. If one believes that one will survive mind-uploading, one will probably have backups or copies made of one’s mind ; giving “birth” to entities which will share this daring belief. On the contrary, the metaphysically “timid” would likely refuse to undergo such a mind-uploading process, as she thinks that this would mean the destruction of her person. But then, the metaphysically daring individual would, in purely Darwinian terms, prove to be the fittest : this individual and its (numerous) descendants would propagate their attitude. This sheer growth in number would allow the daring view to be able to survive many contingences and accidents. This, however, is not true of the metaphysically cautious. Because of their lower “reproductive” rate, they will be less numerous and thus more vulnerable to accidents and destruction.

The attitude of metaphysical daring, then, would be winning the battle of “digital darwinism”, as it is less likely to go extinct than its rivals. As Mandik shows, Egan’s Diaspora (1997), provides a nice illustration of this point : in this novel, the (metaphysically daring) post-human beings, who accepted mind-uploading and all sorts of transhumanist alterations, win the game over those (metaphysically timid) traditionalists who refused such modifications. Whatever the answer to the metaphysical problem of survival may be, then, one of its solutions seems already to be preparing for victory.

 “Nowhere Man : Time Travel and Spatial Location,” by S. Bernstein, takes issue with the fact that, in many SF narratives, time travel takes time. If we distinguish, following D. Lewis (1976), external time and personal time, we can say that it takes some personal time, in most works of SF, to travel along the external timeline. The author wants to show this standard account faces several difficulties. Firstly, where, then, are people, objects, located during their journey through time? If we think, along with many SF scenarios, that the time traveler remains located where her time-machine is  (when she departs), then an obvious problem is the possibility of collisions with past objects (or even with the time-machine itself), which have been occupying this very portion of space at anterior moments. Another problem is that, given the earth’s constant movement, a time traveler cannot simply remain still in absolute position (indexed to the universe) but must make it so that its time machine would remain (and arrive) at the correct relative location (indexed on Earth’s surface). Many works in SF have not realized, for Bernstein, that without such a (painfully) complex coordinating of their position, time travelers would end up in empty space, or at any rate in some undesired location. A last kind of difficulty is that we can imagine a traveler spending a large span of personal time, say a year, to travel only a short way backwards in external time, say a day. Because of the mysterious nature of personal time (is it some extra-timeline or simply “normal” time experienced differently?), several paradoxes can be shown to ensue from this kind of scenario.                    

                                                       

Alternative accounts of time-travel are then considered. One would propose to distinguish between external and personal space, the traveler being, during her journey, located in some extra-spatial dimension. But another set of difficulties are shown to threaten this view. Finally, a “nowhere man” model of time travel is discussed:  the traveler, in that case, would simply not be located at all during her journey. She would be “destroyed” at her departure, and “recreated” at her arrival. This account, clearly, avoids the objections previously mentioned. But it raises other worries as to knowing whether the travelers would survive this process. Such an understanding of time travel, then, would reintroduce familiar worries about personal identity. As Bernstein finally makes clear, metaphysics still has much to do to make sense of what is one of SF’s favorite tropes.

The final contribution, “Speculative Fiction and the Philosophy of Perception”, by B.L. Keeley, shows that SF can actually be relevant for scientific research on perception. This claim is supported in several ways. SF can be shown, first, to be a sound source of speculation concerning the senses, as there is a common ground to the hypotheses imagined by the scientists and those considered by SF artists. Furthermore, SF often depicts, most often in “uplift” narratives, non-human viewpoints and sensory modalities. In that respect, it can try to provide insights into different phenomenologies, or sketch answers to the question “what it is like” to be something other than a human being. This clearly, can be of interest for scientists and philosophers. Another important point is that SF can represent and examine the underestimated social or normative dimension of perception : Well’s short story The Country of the Blind (1904)and Saramago’s Blindness (1995), for instance, discuss the old privilege accorded to sight among the other senses and throw a critical look on what we consider to be a disability. Lastly, Keeley argues that SF can purport to “translate” the scientific picture of the world, to say it like Sellars, into the “manifest” or commonsensical one. SF, in other words, can be seen as an intermediate between the sciences and our common understanding of ourselves. This article, then, shows in yet another way that SF is continuous both with scientific research and philosophical investigation.

The volume ends with two hybrid philosophical-SF short stories, by E.L. Kaplan and R.S. Bakker, which we will let the reader discover. Our final verdict is that this collection of essays is, on the whole, excellent. It is true that some questions could perhaps have deserved more attention (such as the relation between SF and science) and that many ideas proposed by the authors call for further discussion. Yet, the book successfully shows how SF can greatly contribute to philosophy. The sheer variety of topics discussed will make it a nice introduction for anybody willing to examine some of the fundamental theoretical problems raised by speculative fiction. Lastly, the book manages to be both interesting and fun to read, a virtue all too rare to not be mentioned.

 

© 2016 Alexandre Declos