Abstract
Kafka’s emblematic and luckless Gregor Samsa woke from his dreary ordinary life to find himself metamorphized into a large beetle but still retaining his own consciousness. Would it be like that for a totally paralyzed or dying person to awaken inside a sexless cyborg body, spared death but no longer physically human. That, and the switching of minds from one body to another, used to be a narrative nightmare of horror fiction. In today’s sf, it is often a poignant step into freedom and unexpected adventure.
My position on consciousness and free will has been called mysterianism . The mysterian position is an old and venerable one… the philosopher Owen Flanagan noted that some modern scientists have suggested that consciousness might never be completely explained in conventional scientific terms—or in any terms, for that matter.
John Horgan , 1999, p. 247
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Notes
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The same arch-conservative Pat Buchanan born in 1938? That seems unlikely. A male or female much younger relative?
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Described in Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (1991).
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Burley, Daniel T., Nicola S. Gray, Robert J. Snowden, “As Far as the Eye Can See: Relationship between Psychopathic Traits and Pupil Response to Affective Stimuli,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5261620/2017
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The Observer, London, January 25, 1931.
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Das Wesen der Materie [The Nature of Matter], a 1944 speech in Florence, Italy, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Abt. Va, Rep. 11 Planck, Nr. 1797).
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Declaration of interest: A commissioned chapter by Mr. Schwartz on remote viewing can be read in a volume I co-edited with Dr. Ben Goertzel , Evidence for Psi (2015).
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Susann Cokal, June 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/books/review/little-sister-barbara-gowdy.html
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Broderick, D. (2018). Waking Up Different. In: Consciousness and Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00599-3_11
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