{"id":1010,"date":"2014-05-04T17:57:38","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T00:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:57:05","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:57:05","slug":"goonan-quotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2014\/05\/04\/goonan-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Goonan Quotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like the meaty interview with Joan Slonczewski a couple months ago, Locus<\/i> Magazine’s May interview with Kathleen Ann Goonan, of which I posted excerpts<\/a> this afternoon, has several passages of particular interest to my theme here.<\/p>\n

About science fiction:<\/p>\n

\nAt Georgia Tech, the student\u2019s minds are prepared for science fiction because it\u2019s one of the top engineering schools in the world, so I also taught \u2018The Short Story in Science Fiction\u2019 during my first semester there. Since then, I\u2019ve taught the SF Novel, and used Neuromancer<\/b>, The Female Man<\/b>, Dawn<\/b>, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep<\/b>, The Lathe of Heaven<\/b>, The Diamond Age<\/b>, and Zendegi<\/b>. <\/b>It was a wild ride, a lot of reading, and very intensive. The student\u2019s enthusiasm regenerated my interest in science fiction \u2013 its history, its long-running conversation, its boldness in bringing important issues to life.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

About brain\/mind\/consciousness:<\/p>\n

\nFor a long time we had no tools to study the brain, so consciousness was a subject for religion and philosophy. I minored in philosophy because I was so interested in not only the mind, but in what is going on around us \u2013 everything. I started from the ground up, I suppose, since gaining the tools to see what is very small or very distant is what moved humanity from religion and philosophy as explanations for phenomena to careful observation \u2013 science. Philosophy and religion, disciplines that examine questions like what is free will, what is life, what is really going on? They fascinate me. That is why my own interests turned from pre-science philosophy and religion to science. <\/p>\n

What we think of as \u2018reality\u2019 is the brain putting together an idea of what\u2019s happening around us, and we base our behavior on that interpretation. We live in a shared reality. That\u2019s what the title, This Shared Dream<\/b>, means to me. What we think of as the familial past is actually a lot of different people\u2019s versions of the past. Every child in a family has a different idea family history, depending on their birth order, because their very presence changes family dynamics. That\u2019s another thing I wanted to explore, because it echoes the concept that consciousness has much to do with how we perceive time.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This resonates as I think back on my own personal history and how different that history must have been for my siblings.<\/p>\n

One more, which I didn’t include in the post:<\/p>\n

\nI am always struck by the idea people have that consciousness is just in the brain. They think, \u2018Oh, we\u2019ll freeze the brain and live forever.\u2019 That\u2019s a mostly discarded idea now, although Henry Markram, head of the European Blue Brain Project, wants to slice the brain really thin, including his own brain when he dies, with the idea that all the information of memory and consciousness will be there. But consciousness involves your entire body, and time. A lot of what happens in the body simply isn\u2019t known by the conscious mind. These processes are totally mysterious, and we don\u2019t even realize they\u2019re happening. It\u2019s counter-intuitive, but it\u2019s true: we are not just our conscious state of mind. We are not only our brain. We are our whole bodies, our entire hormonal system. Everything is all one system. The history of humanity in religion and philosophy is about how the soul will survive: the idea that there is something in us that is not physical. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. There\u2019s not anything that isn\u2019t physical, including consciousness. If you are going to preserve yourself, what self do you want to be, really? What a nightmare that could be. In 2005 I was totally depressed \u2013 what if that\u2019s the age at which you\u2019re preserved, by chance? Or, \u2018I will be in a perfect digital world and everything will be fabulous.\u2019 It\u2019s a bit like the questions that might plague one about the possibilities of heaven.
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Like the meaty interview with Joan Slonczewski a couple months ago, Locus Magazine’s May interview with Kathleen Ann Goonan, of which I posted excerpts this afternoon, has several passages of particular interest to my theme here. About science fiction: At … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote-at-length","category-science","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}