Philosophical Problems

Science fiction can be philosophical fiction. Philosophical analysis is necessary to unravel what HG Wells writes about "Time" in The Time Machine and, of course, from there we proceed directly to several works by Poul Anderson. CS Lewis expounds his philosophy of mind and mankind when he replies to Wells and Stapledon in his third Ransom novel, That Hideous Strength. Anderson continues this discussion of the relationship between mankind and technology in his Harvest of Stars Tetralogy and in Genesis. Man remakes himself with technology in Wells' The Shape of Things to Come and in Stapledon's Last and First Men but declines and becomes extinct because of technology in The Time Machine and Genesis and would have been destroyed if not for supernatural intervention in That Hideous Strength.

I think that the most fundamental philosophical problem is the relationship between being and consciousness. The Time Machine and James Blish's The Quincunx of Time describe immaterial consciousnesses moving inexorably along a Fourth Dimension identified with Time, a notion fraught with philosophical problems that I have addressed elsewhere. A basic part of this philosophical problem is the mind-body question. Neurologists study brains. Psychologists study minds. Philosophers study the relationship between minds and brains. None of us is able to perceive a psychophysical organism as a totality in all its aspects. It is as if we see a circle, knowing that the circle is a flat cross-section of a sphere, but we are unable to perceive the whole sphere in all its three dimensions. Would a sufficiently powerful deity be able to perceive body and mind as a single entity? Is this what Aycharaych, the universal telepath, can do?

What can Aycharaych do that we cannot? We perceive the body and behaviour of an animal or a human being and infer its/his/her consciousness. We think that a cat is conscious of a bird when we see the cat stalking the bird whereas we do not think, except in imagination, that a wound-up clockwork toy soldier is consciously obeying the order, "Forward march!" when we see it perambulating across the floor. However, we do not normally perceive any of the inner workings either of the organism or of the mechanism. Nor does Aycharaych. All that he does that we do not is to sense and interpret neural emissions. (I think that we are told somewhere that they are very long-wave.) Aycharaych literally has a sixth sense. Beyond that, the mystery of the mind-brain relationship remains unsolved.