Theory of Mind and Science Fiction

N. Pagan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137399113
• eBook ISBN: 9781137399120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Theory of Mind and Science Fiction shows how theory of mind provides an exciting 'new' way to think about science fiction and, conversely, how science fiction sheds light not only on theory of mind but also empathy, morality, and the nature of our humanity.

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Science Fiction and Other Minds

Abstract: This chapter examines various attempts to define ‘science fiction’ including one by Darko Suvin which gestures towards the importance of mind by insisting that readers of science fiction experience an oscillation between ‘estrangement’ and ‘cognition.’ This chapter builds on Suvin’s influential definition by insisting that science fiction invariably relies on the encounter between human and ‘other’ minds underpinned by issues stemming from theory of mind and empathy that have been important in science fiction at least as early as Voltaire’s ‘Micromegas’ (1752), but are dealt with in more depth in later science fiction, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), the subject of the next chapter.

Pagan, Nicholas O. Theory of Mind and Science Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137399120.0005.

To begin his introduction to the outstanding collection, Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology Eric S. Rabkin cites two lines thought to have been written by science fiction writer Frederick Brown,

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.

There was a knock on the door ... (3)

If I am the man in the room, I may never be able to infallibly read the knocker on the door’s intention even when the manner of knocking has been carefully agreed upon, for example, by my best friend and my self. Whoever or whatever is knocking may have picked the wrong door and be looking for someone else or may simply be testing the quality of the wood. The door also of course does not have to be the door of my room. It could be any door. Although someone may usually knock on other people’s doors as a way of seeking entrance into their rooms because he wishes to engage their attention, if this individual is trapped under debris, he may find himself knocking plaintively on the door beneath which he is pinned in order to attract the attention of the man he senses is sitting on top of the rubble—this man may have seemed to be, but can no longer be ‘the last man.’

When Rabkin points to the notion of ‘wonder’ as inhabiting these lines he draws on a theme very prevalent in writing about science fiction. Farah Mendlesohn insists that ‘The sense of wonder is the emotional heart of science fiction’ (3) and Neil Barron highlights the importance of wonder for science fiction by even incorporating it in the title of his seminal Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction. Gary K. Wolfe, in his well-known glossary Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy claims that ‘the term [“sense of wonder”] remains a common, if perhaps unsatisfactory, attempt to describe the affective appeal of fantastic texts’ (116). When he goes on to suggest that in science fiction ‘sense of wonder’ is connected to ‘philosophical notions of the undiscovered universe and romantic notions of the Sublime in the face of vastness’ (140), Wolfe rightly points to the philosophical heritage of the word ‘wonder.’ We might also recall Aristotle on ‘wonder.’ Not only did Aristotle use the word ‘wonder’ to describe feelings about ‘the moon and events connected with the sun and the stars ... ’ but he also used it in connection with our philosophical impulses and with storytelling in general. ‘For it is because of wonder,’ says Aristotle, ‘that men both now and originally began to philosophize’ and ‘the lover of stories is, in a way, a lover of wisdom, since a story is composed of wonders’ (Metaphysics 982b; emphasis added).

The notion of ‘wonder,’ then, is hardly the unique preserve of science fiction, and when Rabkin claims about the famous lines about ‘The last man on Earth’ that the lines are ‘full of inventive possibilities’ he is right—other plausible causes of the knocking include extraterrestrial intervention to more earthly wind-blown limb from a tree—but the idea of a reader imaginative filling in of gaps is hardly confined to science fiction.¹

Nevertheless, although the speaker in Brown’s poem does not invoke science or scientific ideas or imaginary entities that may be the product of scientific inquiry (s)he may be ingeniously gesturing toward the often paradoxical side of science fiction because if the man in the room has been correctly identified as ‘the last man,’ there are no human beings left to allow the possibility that the initiator of the knock be human.² There is, therefore, a tantalizingly paradoxical play in the combined sense of a possible and impossible connection between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human.’ The reader of these lines may thus retain a flickering sense that there has been some mistake, and the knock must have a human source. Does the poem gestures toward the nonhuman or posthuman?

Other attempts to define science fiction include ‘A story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content’ (Theodore Sturgeon), and ‘Fiction in which new and futuristic scientific developments propel the plot’ (Northrop Frye, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins) and ‘That branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings’ (Isaac Asimov). For Asimov, some reliance on scientific innovation and/or laws is what distinguishes science fiction from the genre or sub-genre that is better characterized as ‘fantasy.’ Science fiction has also been defined in relation to its exploration of ‘other’ imaginary timelines and societies—from the invigoratingly utopian to the harrowingly dystopian.

In ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre ‘Darko Suvin shrewdly sums up these possibilities by insisting that a work of science fiction invokes ‘an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ while he also gestures toward the importance of ‘mind’ in science fiction when in addition to insisting on the presence of a freshly created imaginative world he claims that for science fiction ‘the necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition’ (375).³ Suvin’s definition has been much discussed and modified. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction Carl Freedman, for instance, claims that in the realm of science fiction, reader cognition depends upon how ‘the attitude of the text itself’ produces estrangement, so the key ingredient of science fiction is not cognition per se but ‘cognitive effect’ (18).⁴ This might suggest that Freedman would then take up reception aesthetics or what in America has been called reader-response theory, but, instead, his formulation of science fiction as ‘an intrinsically critical-theoretical generic mode’ leads to him to place Suvin’s oscillation between cognition and estrangement against an essentially Marxist backdrop. For Freedman, the fact that capitalism has turned out to be more robust than Marxism, paradoxically, makes ‘the method of critical analysis that bears his [Marx’s] name more rather than less pertinent’ (9).

Here as I take up the question of cognition, rather than turning as Freedman does to Marx and descendants like Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Fredric Jameson, I turn to psychologists, philosophers, and even neuroscientists who take a considerable interest in theory of mind. In terms of attempts to define the genre, I suggest that scholars note that if one of the hallmarks of science fiction is the portrayal of encounters with ‘other’ worlds, it should be added that this encounter is invariably linked to the encounter with ‘other’ minds. This latter encounter is always in turn related to the question of what makes human beings distinctively ‘human.’ I will attempt to probe the contrast between ‘human’ and ‘other’ as found in literary representations of creatures dreamed up by writers of science fiction, whether these creatures be from outer space or are manmade.

The lines from Brown’s poem cited above aptly point to the question of ‘other minds’ because if the initiator of the knock is animate, as an intentional being, this ‘thing’ would most likely have to possess a mind capable of grasping something of the very human semiotics of knocking on doors? If the knock has been produced in accordance with the intention of a manmade creation like a robot, this may suggest that equipped with the appropriate AI (artificial intelligence) such a being can mimic what many would take to be the uniquely human ability to couple intelligence with intentionality. Similarly, if the knock has been produced by a creature from another planet or galaxy, this too implies intentionality matched with intelligence. In both cases, that of the robot and of the alien from outer space, it may then make sense to say that these non-human beings possess ‘mind.’

Writers of science fiction have been in a position to try to pinpoint the distinctiveness of the ‘human’ mind by contrasting it with an ‘other’ since the emergence of the genre in the writings, for example, of Voltaire. In ‘Micromegas’ (1752) Voltaire evokes two giant inter-planetary non-human travelers (one from a star circling Sirius, the other from Saturn) question a group of philosophers. The travelers are amazed by the contrast between their own and these ‘human’ minds and of the disparity between different human minds as epitomized by those that slaughter each other (some wearing hats, some turbans), the palace rulers who command them to do so, and those presumably not belonging to either of these groups—‘the small number of the wise’ (Science Fiction 66–67).⁵ At the end of the tale, the book (which the Sirian has given to humanity) that is supposed to explain ‘the very essence of things’ (Ibid., 69–70) from the perspective of a non-human and therefore radically ‘other’ mind turns out to be composed only of blank pages. Perhaps Voltaire is implying that we humans are the only species equipped with theory of mind and that we are better equipped than anything else ‘out there’ to look into other minds?

Starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (which is often referred to as the first work of science fiction⁶) we will see that sometimes the ‘alien’ creatures that inhabit science fiction have a desire to penetrate our human minds that is as intense as our desire to penetrate theirs. Building on Suvin’s conception of science fiction as ‘the novum,’ the attempt to conjure up answers to the question ‘what if?’ and Mendelsohn’s reformulation of this in line with the notion of the idea-as-hero, I will try to show that science fiction presents spectacularly new imaginary contexts in which to stage expressions of theory of mind and empathy.

I recognize that the choice of exemplars is somewhat arbitrary and that the role of theory of mind and empathy may be as significant, if not more significant in the case of other, especially perhaps more contemporary works of science fiction. The present study ends in the late 1960s with Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I also confine myself to the written texts of science fiction and do not venture into film—science fiction as film could doubtless provide material for a further study addressing the same issues.

Notes

1 On how the reader is involved in filling in gaps in literary fiction in general, see in particular Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading.

2 ‘The last man’ is a common motif within science fiction, beginning with Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme (1805) and continuing in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and even occurring in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) wherein looking back at his lowest point, the narrator/protagonist admits: ‘For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive’ (emphasis added; 157). The motif of ‘the last man’ surfaces again in the twentieth century in, for instance, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) and Last Men in London (1932) and again in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In Orwell’s dystopia during an interrogation scene between the State embodied by O’Brien and the more free-spirited but tormented Winston Smith, the former declares, ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct ... You are outside history, you are non-existent’ (282–83). O’Brien repeats, ‘You are the last man ... ’ acknowledging that Winston is also ‘the guardian of the human spirit’ (283). After forcing his victim to undress and look in the mirror and after peremptorily ripping out one of Winston’s front teeth O’Brien continues, ‘What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity’ (285).

3 Building on Suvin’s definition, Carl Freedman in Critical Theory and Science Fiction claims that in the realm of science fiction reader cognition depends upon how ‘ “the attitude of the text itself” produces estrangement, so the key ingredient of science fiction is not cognition per se but ‘cognitive effect’ (18). Freedman sees science fiction as a genre that is ‘critical-theoretical’ which in keeping with Freedman’s bias means that it is essentially Marxist. For a lively summary of Freedman’s book see Fekete.

4 See also Freedman, ‘Science Fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Literature and the Emergence of Theory of Mind
• 1 Science Fiction and Other Minds
• 2 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: Correcting Faulty Mind-reading
• 3 Stapledon’s Star Maker: Cosmic Minds and the Triumph of Theory of Mind
• 4 A. E. van Vogt’s Slan: Intimations of Superior Theory of Mind
• 5 Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: What Happened to Affective Empathy?
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index