scholarly journals The Physical Consequence to Knowing: A speculative report

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-292
Author(s):  
pavleheidler
Keyword(s):  
Learning Curve ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Physical Consequence ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Minimal Difference ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Mind

This is my first attempt at approaching the notion of agency as a practice though the mode of dancing and writing; deconstructing and reconstructing what I know experientially and what I am trying to comprehend theoretically. I am looking for a way of releasing bodily capacities from the jurisdiction of the mind, whose cartesian definition I don't attempt to deny, as most people I have the chance to work with and teach exhibit in one way or another proof of the fact they’ve embodied the concept. All the while, I am considering philosophical texts, anatomical texts, and (science) fiction; I am taking into account my bodily experience, I am dancing and I am writing, I am teaching, conversing, occasionally making progress, occasionally falling back to the embrace of old habits, making unnecessary assumptions, and failing. Repetition is a part of the study. Minimal difference is a part of the study. Changing perspective is a part of the study. My strategy includes not trying to fix but approach with care and attention every step I am taking; every achievement, every set-back; every question and every answer. I assume my learning curve to be cyclical, as I continue to practice in public, always vulnerable but eager to engage in an exchange.

scholarly journals Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

Until Death Do Us Part and They Upload Us Into Clones: An Analysis of Film Narratives About Mind Uploading and the Myth of Immortality

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-548
Author(s):  
Anja Zlatović ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Brain Functions ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
Visual Science ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Tv Show

The fear of death and the myth of immortality are themes long present in various narratives, whether literary or visual. Science fiction as a genre offers us many venues for new explorations of this idea. Mind uploading is one of them. This fictional technique, related to cloning, is performed when the mind and consciousness of a person are transferred to another biological body or machine with the help of technology. In this way, a person continues their social life through their brain functions. This paper looks at four separate recent screen narratives – the movies Self/less, Transcendence, and Replicas, and the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show Black Mirror. With the help of Tzvetan Todorov’s structural analysis, we find clauses that are present in all of the plots and see what ideas and topics they share. The paper also uses the idea of anthropological reading of science fiction and therefore uses scientific research to analyze these themes. By looking at anthropological findings of immortality, mortality, death in modern society, and digital techniques, we see how the analyzed narratives portray a unique mixture of fear of and longing for all the mentioned processes and ideas. Finally, this paper shows how science fiction could possibly reflect reality – both through presenting thoughts of society and inspiring future technological advances and ideas (in this case, the quest for immortality). While humans are still far from achieving eternal life, the mentioned screen narratives portray the growing stream of ideas that deal with mind uploading in the age of the internet and social media.

Zombies, Epiphenomenalism, and Physicalist Theories of Consciousness

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Computer Programs ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
The Mind

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a more reductive kind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.

The Golden Bough and the Incorporations of Magic in Science Fiction

Hard Reading ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 162-181
Author(s):  
Tom Shippey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
The Mind

Magic exists only in the mind. This is the belief that obviously underlies the Oxford English Dictionary’s authoritative definition, that magic is ‘the pretended art of influencing the course of events … by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to the power of compelling the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature’ (...

scholarly journals Utopia, determinismo tecnologico, ingegneria sociale: la dianetica tra scienza e fantascienza

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulio Argenio
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Engineering Culture ◽  
New Man ◽  
Utopian Thinking ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

In May 1950 L. R. Hubbard published in a science fiction magazine “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science”, which would later form the basis of Scientology. Emerging from the technocratic mindset typically associated with the periodical, the article considered the human brain as a computer in need of rewiring, giving birth to a peculiar kind of utopian thinking whose aim was not the creation of a ‘new man’, but the return to an original perfection of the mind. Through an examination of this text and its context, I propose to investigate the relationship between engineering culture and literary fictions, trying to understand how the mind-computer analogy shaped the vision of a regenerated society.

Awakening of faith in Mahāyāna

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Ultimate Ground

The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna (Dasheng qixinlun) is one of the most influential philosophical texts in East Asian Buddhism. It is most important for developing the Indian Buddhist doctrine of an inherent potentiality for Buddhahood (tathāgatagarbha) into a monistic ontology based on the mind as the ultimate ground of all experience. Its most significant contribution to East Asian Buddhist thought is its formulation of the idea of original enlightenment (benjue, or in Japanese, hongaku).

Cognitive psychology

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-234
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Perceived Reality ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores the entanglement of cognitive psychology with science fiction, but avoids familiar motifs from post-cyberpunk fiction. The beginnings of cognitive psychology are traced to the foundational work of figures such as George Miller and Noam Chomsky, subsequently codified into a self-conscious school by Ulrich Neisser. Jack Finney’s classic narrative, The Body Snatchers (1955), draws upon earlier proto-cognitivist discourses to contend, often quite didactically, that the human mind typically operates as a biased, limited capacity information processor. With this psychological and political thesis, the novel explores possible personal, political and aesthetic strategies that might free the human mind from its stereotypes and blind spots. The unsettling of everyday perception in The Body Snatchers is systematically generalized by the linguistic novums of Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973), Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), and Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), which imagine that language (and thought) is fundamentally constructive of perceived reality. These stories ask broader, cosmological questions about the nature and accessibility of ultimate reality – with Watson’s novel ultimately proposing a mystical riposte to cognitivism’s model of the mind.

Assumptions

The Age of Em ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Short Delay ◽  
Input Signals ◽  
State Changes ◽  
Physical Variables ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

The concept of whole brain emulation has been widely discussed in futurism ( Martin 1971 ; Moravec 1988 ; Hanson 1994b , 2008b ; Shulman 2010 ; Alstott 2013 ; Eth et al. 2013 ; Bostrom 2014 ) and in science fiction ( Clarke 1956 ; Egan 1994 ; Brin 2002 ; Vinge 2003 ; Stross 2006 ) for many decades. Sometimes emulations are called “uploads.” Let me now try to be clearer about the technological assumptions whose consequences I seek to explore. When I refer to a “brain” here, I refer not just to neurons in a head, but also to other supporting cells in the head, and to neurons and key closely connected systems elsewhere in the human body, such as the systems that manage hormones. Using that terminology, I assume, following a wellestablished consensus in the cognitive and brain sciences, that “the mind is just the brain” ( Bermúdez 2010 ). That is, what the brain fundamentally does is to take input signals from eyes, ears, skin, etc., and after a short delay produces both internal state changes and output signals to control muscles, hormone levels, and other body changes. The brain does not just happen to transform input signals into state changes and output signals; this transformation is the primary function of the brain, both to us and to the evolutionary processes that designed brains. The brain is designed to make this signal processing robust and efficient. Because of this, we expect the physical variables (technically, “degrees of freedom”) within the brain that encode signals and signal-relevant states, which transform these signals and states, and which transmit them elsewhere, to be overall rather physically isolated and disconnected from the other far more numerous unrelated physical degrees of freedom and processes in the brain. That is, changes in other aspects of the brain only rarely influence key brain parts that encode mental states and signals. We have seen this disconnection in ears and eyes, and it has allowed us to create useful artificial ears and eyes, which allow the once-deaf to hear and the once-blind to see. We expect the same to apply to artificial brains more generally. In addition, it appears that most brain signals are of the form of neuron spikes, which are especially identifiable and disconnected from other physical variables.

Yogic Rays: The Self-Externalization of the Yogi in Ritual, Narrative and Philosophy

Paragrana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gordon White
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Face ◽  
Body Complex ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Mind

AbstractIn the late Upanishads and the Mahabharata, one begins to encounter descriptions of Yogis who are possessed of the power to exit their bodies—via “rays” (raśmi) that radiate outward from their eyes, heart, or fontanel—as a means to rising up to the sun or to entering the bodies of other creatures. In the centuries that follow, this power becomes a commonplace of yogic theory and yogic lore, with ritual, narrative, and philosophical texts describing the Yogi′s appropriation of other creatures′ bodies in both symbiotic and predatory modes. In the former case, the yogic “fusing of the channels” is the means by which a Tantric teacher initiates his disciple: exiting his own body, his mindstuff travels along a ray to enter his disciple′s body, which he transforms from within. In the latter, the practice of “subtle yoga,” as described in the ninth-century Netra Tantra, becomes a means by which a Yogi may take over another person′s body, either to inhabit it or to draw its energy back into his own body, thereby increasing his own power. Through these techniques, the Yogi is said to possess the power to enter multiple bodies simultaneously, creating armies of “himself” in the process. These practices, which are attested in hundreds of documents, fly in the face of received notions of so-called “classical yoga,” in which the emphasis is placed on turning the senses inward to isolate the mind-body complex from the distractions of the outside world. In the light of these practices of yogic self-externalization, a re-evaluation of “classical yoga” itself is in order.

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