gnothi seauton - know thyself

Mind and Reality in Science Fiction

What does it mean to be a mind? How is a mind affected by its embodiment? By the body's immersion in the world? By not having a body in the first place, or not any longer? Is the world out there what it seems? Is there a world out there?

Profound thinking about, and sometimes disturbing insights into, the nature of the human mind and its relationship to reality are found in the writings of a handful of visionaries to be discussed in this course. The issues they touch may be roughly grouped into six themes (the links point to the individual theme pages, which contain fictional and factual material selected for reading):
dreaming and reality sanity and madness self and others sex and embodiment death and immortality humanity and transhumanity
jan 20, jan 27, feb 3 feb 10, feb 17 feb 24 mar 3, mar 10, mar 24 mar 31, apr 7 apr 14, apr 21, apr 28

technical and administrative details

lecture 0: introductory remarks

READINGS and viewings

(fiction, in alphabetical order; works central to this course highlighted; see also the grouping of authors by theme) These authors are usually classified as writing "science fiction," although for all of them, and especially for Philip K. Dick, this tag is about as appropriate as the label "bird" for an albatross. Mercifully, nobody dares categorize Borges.

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Last modified on Mon Apr 12 11:41:40 2004 by Shimon Edelman