Being conscious of consciousness

by robertjsawyer on Jul.13, 2009, under Robert J. Sawyer

Morgan from Borders just asked what is the cutting edge of science fiction. And I just came back from Readercon, where, as always, the question of what overall theme there is to Canadian science fiction came up.

For me, the answer is the same thing: a scientific exploration of consciousness.

When I took psychology courses at university starting in 1979, the word “consciousness” was never mentioned, and that’s because it really didn’t have a scientific meaning; we were coming of the end of B.F. Skinner and Behaviorism, and the brain was being treated like a black box — input when in, behavior came out.

But numerous fields — medical imaging, quantum physics, philosophy of mind — have made real progress in the last thirty year, and now we’re finally grappling with the question of why it’s like anything to be alive and why we have internal self-reflection. I’ve certainly explored that in a lot of my novels, starting with my 1995 Nebula Award-winner The Terminal Experiment right through to my current novel WWW: Wake (and FlashForward, the one everyone’s buzzing about because a TV adaptation of it is forthcoming, is very much about the nature of consciousness).

I’m not alone in this: Greg Egan has written a lot of interesting stuff about consciousness. Greg’s Australian, true, but here in the Great White North we think of them as just inverted Canadians.

Peter Watts, Karl Schroeder, R. Scott Bakker, James Alan Gardner and other Canadians besides me have also dug into the questions arising from the study of consciousness (and the English-lit majors might opine that it’s a natural obsession for a country whose literature is all about defining national identity).

Faster-than-light travel? A pipe dream. Time travel? Even more so. Aliens? Not likely to ever get here. But consciousness — ah, now, there’s a topic worth exploring! And of all branches of literature, I think science fiction is doing the best job of doing just that.

Thoughts, anyone?

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7 Comments for this entry

robertjsawyer
July 14th, 2009 on 10:16 am
Well, let’s thing about consciousness for a moment. What are the coolest things in STAR TREK? Why — consciousness-related things! Phasers can turn off a persons consciousness at a distance (the stun setting); Spock can shut off a person’s consciousness with a neck pinch; Vulcans can transfer their katras (consciousnesses) into another body (even of another species — witness Spock and McCoy); and, of course, the Vulcan mind-meld is all about sharing what is normally completely separate: individual consciousness.

There was no science behind any of this stuff in the 1960s, but there is now. For me, the most influential nonfiction books on my writing are doubtless ones about consciousness: THE EMPEROR’S NEW MIND and SHADOWS OF THE MIND by Roger Penrose; THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY by Frank Tipler; even THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes — all are great (heh heh) food for thought.
robertjsawyer
July 14th, 2009 on 10:17 am
As for my other point, about the defining characteristics of Canadian SF, welllll, I’m fond of quipping that American SF has happy endings, Canadian SF has sad endings, and British SF has no endings at all …
Ramon
July 14th, 2009 on 11:41 am
I’ve got 65 years of Analog/Astounding on the shelf, & 3,000 paper+hardbacks from ‘then’ to ‘now’. All are re-read, regularly, as I don’t do TV nor movies.
As a construction engineer (think Big Dams!) in many lands, I like alternate: worlds, times, themes (1632: I have all 35 books!), methods, inventions, histories. The concious bit has been growing in Analog for some years, with good stories on varieties of that, in folk, animals + folk, folk + machines or ‘nets, and so on. Fascinating stuff! better than just a better spaceship, by far. Prefer paper, but can/do buy MSWord versions for the ‘puter.
Amazon is preferred source, then Borders then used book stores. See if you can fill my want-to list! I’ll pay money for it.
Ben
July 15th, 2009 on 9:30 am
I’m not much of a science fiction fan. I go more for fantasy. But consciousness is one thing that really fascinates me. I few years ago I took a class on biological approaches to the mind-body problem. I’m trying to remember the books we read… A textbook by Kalat, Descartes Error by Damasio, and Bright Air Brilliant Fire by Gerald Edelman. I’d be really interested in a sci-fi book exploring those kinds of subjects.
robertjsawyer
July 15th, 2009 on 2:19 pm
Ben, try my MINDSCAN and WWW: WAKE, Peter Watts’s BLINDSIGHT, and R. Scott Bakker’s NEUROPATH.
Ben
July 16th, 2009 on 12:37 am
Thanks for the recommendations. I loved Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, but knowing his style and having read some reviews, I’m not sure I’d be up for Neuropath. It sounds much too dark for me. Watts’s Blindsight sounds very very interesting.

I think this blog is great, by the way. I listened to an interview with you, Robert, on Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing a while back and really enjoyed it. And now I’ve gotten a personal reading recommendation from you. Sweet! After hearing your own description of your writing, I wasn’t sure it would be for me, but now I’m starting to think maybe I should try to branch out. Thanks!
fheywood
July 17th, 2009 on 10:45 am
Ben, both “Blindsight” and “Neuropath” are excellent, and have similar themes approached from totally different directions - including the idea of decoupling consciousness from intelligence which both of your examples touch on (although I must confess, I tried to read “Bright Air” and just couldn’t make it.) Bakker’s book is by far the more disturbing of the two - I got into a conversation with him at Ad Astra a couple of years ago that left me wondering if I was even conscious (then I read his book and developed even more doubts.)

I also liked Karl Schroeder’s “solution” to the Fermi paradox in “Permanence” - that perhaps consciousness is just a relatively minor phase that intelligent species go through.

And of course, Rob’s two examples (”Mindscan” and “Wake”) are must-reads.

I have wondered, though, why Canadian SF writers are over-represented in this area - it’s a bit weird. Good, but weird.