Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives
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BRAINS, MINDS, AND COMPUTERS IN LITERARY AND SCIENCE FICTION NEURONARRATIVES A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. by Jason W. Ellis August 2012 Dissertation written by Jason W. Ellis B.S., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006 M.A., University of Liverpool, 2007 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2012 Approved by Donald M. Hassler Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Tammy Clewell Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kevin Floyd Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Eric M. Mintz Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Arvind Bansal Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Accepted by Robert W. Trogdon Chair, Department of English John R.D. Stalvey Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1: On Imagination, Science Fiction, and the Brain ........................................... 1 Chapter 2: A Cognitive Approach to Science Fiction .................................................. 13 Chapter 3: Isaac Asimov’s Robots as Cybernetic Models of the Human Brain ........... 48 Chapter 4: Philip K. Dick’s Reality Generator: the Human Brain ............................. 117 Chapter 5: William Gibson’s Cyberspace Exists within the Human Brain ................ 214 Chapter 6: Beyond Science Fiction: Metaphors as Future Prep ................................. 278 Works Cited ................................................................................................................ 295 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their feedback and thoughtful questions during the writing process and during my defense: my director Donald M. Hassler for his advice, encouragement, and friendship, Tammy Clewell for introducing me to a new and exciting discipline, Kevin Floyd for challenging me to consider my work in a broader cultural context, Eric M. Mintz for questioning the relationship between evolution and culture, and Arvind Bansal for challenging me to think recursively about my own thoughts. I also owe thanks to Pawel Frelik who accepted the first draft of the second chapter for the 2011 Science Fiction Research Association Conference in Lublin, Poland, Lisa Yaszek who suggested the historical link between my cognitive approach and the science fiction genre’s formative years, and the R. D. Mullen Fellowship, which funded my research trip to the University of California at Riverside’s J. Lloyd Eaton Collection where I found useful primary sources for chapters four and five. I thank my parents for helping me achieve my educational goals despite the challenges along the way. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my wife Yufang Lin and our cat Miao Miao who have supported me during this arduous endeavor. iv CHAPTER 1 On Imagination, Science Fiction and the Brain In the following dissertation, I attempt to do three things. First, I develop a cognitive approach to science fiction and argue that science fiction originates as a by- product of the evolutionary adaptations of the human brain combined with our co- evolution with technology. I argue that writers began to generate what we now call science fiction as a means to accommodate and prepare the human animal for rapid technological change at the turn of the twentieth century that evolutionary adaptation alone had not adequately equipped us to handle. Without science fiction, our adjustment to change would have been far slower, more difficult, and more anguishing than it otherwise has been. Second, I use this cognitive approach to science fiction to examine neuronarratives, or fictions that emphasize the human brain as an integral part of the story, by three significant writers of the twentieth century: Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. Finally, I consider the underlying operation of metaphor in this cognitive approach to science fiction to demonstrate how the useful concepts created within the genre spread beyond into cultural circulation. 1 2 This project derives from the long tradition of attempts at defining the science fiction genre. These definitions usually emphasize an arrangement or combination of these elements: extrapolation, science/technology, and setting. For example, the first definition of the genre comes from the influential magazine editor Hugo Gernsback, who emphasizes science and extrapolation when he writes in 1926, “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story--a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision” (Gernsback, “A New Kind of Magazine” 3). J. O. Bailey who wrote the first academic/critical work devoted to science fiction titled Pilgrims Through Space in Time (1947), stresses scientific extrapolation in his definition of the genre: “A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences. It must be a scientific discovery—something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science” (Bailey 10). Finally, Darko Suvin, whose definition is one of the most widely cited, offers this definition for science fiction: “[Science Fiction] is . a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin, “On the Poetics” 375). Suvin emphasizes the cognitive (logically extrapolated) and estranging (other) qualities of the setting. All three definitions also focus on imagination as being integral to their formulation. Gernsback’s “prophetic vision” is a form of imagination, because it requires one to see that which has not yet happened through extrapolation from the knowledge of “scientific fact.” Bailey’s “imaginary invention” relies on its foundation 3 in “scientific discovery.” Suvin’s “imaginative framework alternative” depends on what he calls the “novum,” or “a strange newness” (Suvin, “On the Poetics” 373). Thus, imagination is a key component of the creation and experience of science fiction. It is my intention to add to the discourse on imagination that stretches farther back than its more recent operation in the development of science fiction. Aristotle (384–322 BC) sought to distinguish imagination from perception and mind (or thought) in his De Anima: “Imagination, in fact, is something different both from perception and from thought, and is never found by itself apart from perception, any more than is belief apart from imagination” (Aristotle 123). However, Aristotle does not seek a material explanation for the imagination. Instead, he considers it a capability of human beings and some animals, but he does not delve deeper into its potentially bodily origins. Others attempted to explain imagination during the Enlightenment through empirical efforts, perhaps most notably by David Hartley in his work Observations on Man (1749). Importantly, Hartley grounds the mind in the physiology of the brain: “The white medullary Substance of the Brain is also the immediate Instrument, by which ideas are presented to the Mind; or, in other Words, whatever Changes are made in this Substance, corresponding Changes are made in our Ideas; and vice versa” (Hartley 8). Through his neurophysiological studies combined with philosophical reasoning, Hartley theorizes that excitation or vibration of the nerves by external sensation or persistent memories/experience generates thought. He goes on to argue that the ideas generated in our brain are a result of the imagination: “The recurrence of ideas, especially visible and audible ones, in a vivid manner, but without any regard to the order observed in past 4 facts, is ascribed to the power of imagination or fancy” (Hartley 383). Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes considerable issue with Hartley’s theories in his Biographia Literaria (1817). For Coleridge, he attempts to go beyond empiricism and release imagination from the imposition of Hartley’s physiological conjectures by distinguishing what imagination is and how it is a force of artistic creation. Unlike Hartley’s intermingling of imagination and fancy, Coleridge distinguishes between them and their adherence to the law of association: The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we 5 express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready