Eric Schwitzgebel's Reading List

"Well, I took a class with P J Ivanhoe when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, and it was an amazing class and I fell in love with some of the Chinese authors, especially Zhuangzi, but not only Zhuangzi. And then I went to Berkeley and Kwong-Loi Shun was there, another amazing scholar of ancient Chinese philosophy. He was excited to find that rare PhD student who actually knew some Chinese philosophy. I started working with him right away and he is wonderful. So, my excitement about Chinese philosophy was nurtured and I’ve just continued to be in love with it. About then, but it didn’t get its current form until several centuries later. There’s a lot of scholarly dispute about exactly how much can be traced back to the historical figure of Zhuangzi. Exactly. The butterfly dream passage is a wonderful example of dream-doubt. Another wonderful doubt Zhuangzi has is about life after death. He says, how do I know that in loving life and in hating death I’m not like someone who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back? He tells the story of Lady Li, the daughter of a border guard. Lady Li was captured and taken far away from her home. She wept and wailed at her plight. But instead of being taken to a terrible place, she was taken to a palace. She enjoyed the fine meats and all the luxuries, and eventually she wondered why she had wept so much for home. Zhuangzi says maybe the dead wonder why they ever longed for life. Maybe we’ll wake up to something even more wonderful than our lives as they are now. It is. It’s lots of fragments. The Inner Chapters, which is probably the most ancient core, is conventionally divided into seven chapters, but really, they are seven bunches of fragments, some very short, others more extended. “He’s got an egalitarian spirit, in a way that’s almost anachronistic.” One of the things I also really love about Zhuangzi is how his heroes have such a humane vision. His heroes are usually people you wouldn’t normally think of as heroes. He’s got an egalitarian spirit, in a way that’s almost anachronistic. One of the most famous passages is this lovely passage about the skill and artistry of a butcher. Butchery is traditionally seen as a lowly occupation and an ugly thing to do, gory, messy, not something anyone with literary skills would normally admire. But Zhuangzi’s butcher turns carving up oxen into a dance of fluid beauty. There’s this moment at the end where he does the subtle little turn of the knife and the ox comes falling to the ground in pieces, hitting the ground like clods of earth. A lot of scholars interpret this passage as expressing the idea that you should react to the world with a kind of spontaneous skilfulness like that of a skilled artisan or athlete. One common interpretation of Zhuangzi is that his central idea is to move past words and conceptual thinking to spontaneous skilful almost unthinking responsiveness. I actually don’t take that message from the passage. The passage concludes with the king saying, “I’ve heard the words of a butcher and learned the secret of caring for life.” One of the things I haven’t mentioned about this passage so far is that the butcher talks about how he never needs to sharpen his knife. He says, “ordinary people hack away and they need to sharpen their knife every month. A skilled butcher might have to sharpen his knife once a year. But I’ve been carving oxen now for 19 years and my knife is still as sharp as when it came off the whetstone. That’s because inside an ox there are huge empty spaces, and the knife follows through the empty spaces, and it doesn’t even need to touch anything really.” That’s such an interesting and weird way of thinking about an ox. In a way it is true that an ox is mostly empty spaces. I mean from a contemporary physical point of view, there’s a lot of space between those elementary particles. So, the knife has lasted 19 years by basically just following through the empty spaces and doing nothing. Well, here’s the issue. Most people celebrate the butcher and think the butcher is the ideal. And he’s certainly being celebrated in the passage, but I’m inclined to think that it’s the knife that’s really the ideal. The knife doesn’t do anything. The knife has no skills. Well, one thing Zhuangzi recommends is dozing beneath trees and taking naps. There’s a phrase in ancient Chinese that scholars often give heavy interpretation, “ wu wei” . It literally means “doing nothing”. And there are these interpretations of wu wei or doing nothing that treat it as spontaneous skillful responsiveness. Maybe the ideal here would be the super skilled basketball player who just responds instantly to whatever is going on in the court and does all those amazing no-look passes and slam dunks all without any explicit thought. This is the idea of wu wei, doing nothing, as spontaneous skill. And that kind of skill is maybe what the butcher has. But there’s another, more straightforward way of thinking about doing nothing, which is more like what the knife does or what you do when you take a nap under a tree, a more common sense understanding of doing nothing. That’s the understanding I prefer and that I think is closer to what Zhuangzi favors in the Inner Chapters. Right. One thing Zhuangzi does is challenge the main value sets and dogmas of his day. The Confucians were into ritual and benevolence and propriety, and Zhuangzi challenged that. The Mohists were into the value of productive labor. He criticizes that. The Yangists were into extending your life as much as possible. Zhuangzi has all these passages where he suggests that sages should celebrate their own deaths or not be so worried about death. So I think part of what Zhuangzi wants is for us to relax about all of these things that we might care about so much, and take it a little easier. So, my interpretation of this famous phrase, wu wei , is more literal, doing nothing in, shall we say, the lazy sense. Like the knife. But I also like the celebration of the butcher, that it’s a butcher being put forward as a hero. If the knife is you, then the butcher is the Dao or the Maker of Changes, turning and twisting you through the empty spaces while you ride along. And another thing I really love about Zhuangzi is that he’s constantly undermining himself. He puts his words in the voices of all kinds of people, including amputee criminals and others in the lowest parts of society. Sometimes he puts his words in the mouth of Confucius, although Confucius would definitely not agree with any of this stuff, and then in other passages he has Confucius say things like, “Oh, I’m so stupid.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Zhuangzi asserts things and then he raises doubts about what he just asserted, and then he doesn’t resolve those doubts. He contradicts himself. He says things that are plainly absurd that he knows the reader is not going to take at face value, and it’s sometimes hard to tell where the absurdity begins or ends and where he’s starting to get serious. He works hard to frustrate the reader’s normal reaction to a philosophical text. Normally when we read a philosophical text we want to be able to say, “Okay, here’s the author’s view.” He’s a genius at frustrating that impulse and preventing the reader from saying, “Here’s Zhuangzi’s theory about what’s right and what’s wrong and here’s how he defends it.” Probably. He’s constantly undermining his own authority. He is, in a way, the ultimate anti-authoritarian philosopher. Yes. His writing is beautiful, and that shines through in the English translations. This is one of the reasons I like Watson’s translation. I love Watson’s voice, although there are more recent translations, too, that have some advantages over Watson in other respects. But then, of course, if you go back to the original Chinese, it can be even more beautiful."

"Labyrinths doesn’t exist in Spanish, unless it’s been shifted back to Spanish. It’s a collection of various short pieces written around the middle of Borges’s career—mostly fictions but not only fictions. It’s a wonderful selection, very philosophical. Borges is more a creator than an observer of worlds… Yes, I think so. Yes. He has this fascination with strange heresies from the sixth century and things like that. Some of his worlds are these elaborate imaginings. One of my favorites is The Library of Babel , which is this world that’s just a giant library that contains every possible book in the sense that every possible configuration of letters and punctuation is represented somewhere exactly once in some book in this library. Virtually all the books read like random nonsense, because you’ve got one book for every possible combination of characters. But there will be rare books that seem to be full of profound meaning! There’ll be the book that explains the library and there will be a book that contains the right interpretation of quantum mechanics. There’ll be a book that tells an alternative version of Don Quixote . Everything that you can imagine will be there somewhere. But are such rare works in the library just randomness that we overinterpret, or are they truly meaningful? How much is what we bring to it? “Montaigne and Sacks are also imaginative, but Borges is less constrained by empirical reality” Now imagine every possible language. Then the book you hold in your hand, which looks like nonsense to you, in some possible language is a retelling of Don Quixote , which was another of Borges’ favourites, or whatever you choose. It’s just such a fascinating world to imagine. How would you find meaning in a world like that? Yes. I actually have a similar thought experiment in my book A Theory of Jerks . I’ve written a couple of pieces that riff on Borges. In A Theory of Jerks, there’s a chapter called “Invisible Revisions”. Monday, I write a philosophy essay, version A. Tuesday, I make a number of revisions, creating version B. Wednesday, I examine the revisions in version B, and one by one I decide that each revision was a mistake and I return to my original phrasing. By Wednesday night, I have version C, which is word-for-word identical to version A. But version C is totally different and much better! What was clumsy in Version A is now artfully casual. What I overlooked in Version A is now intentionally omitted. Definitely. A journal should accept version C and reject version A. I also wrote a short story inspired by The Library of Babel called THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL . Instead of having every possible book, the library has every possible computer program, with the books being random computer instructions that are read and executed by read-write heads that look like rabbits. Well, if you accept certain theories of computation, then once you implement a program, consciousness will arise. So while the Library of Babel contains every possible book, THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL has every possible conscious state instantiated in it somewhere—including of course, the conscious state of imagining that very world itself. This story gets deeply Borgesian and self-referential. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I love how Borges stretches the imagination. Montaigne and Sacks are also imaginative, but Borges is less constrained by empirical reality. Right, Borges imagines a perfect map, which ends up being exactly the same size as the place it’s mapping. That reminds me of “Funes the Memorious”, Borges’s story about Ireneo, a teenager who remembers every single detail of everything and of course this turns out to be perfectly useless because it takes him a full day to remember what happened in a day. At the beginning of this interview, I confessed I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my account of philosophical wonder. I feel that Borges invokes philosophical wonder. He doesn’t do it by showing us possibilities that we can take as real possibilities the way the other authors I’m talking about do—though Zhuangzi has his Borgesian moments. Somehow, it’s still wonder about the world. It’s not just wonder at Borges. The wonder is at the possibility of impossible possibilities. No, that’s not right either. Well, I didn’t promise consistency any more than Montaigne did!"

"I agree. Let me just say that all five of these books were personally important to me in my intellectual development. Each of them transformed my thinking. When I first read Sacks, I was just stunned at the variety of ways the mind could go a little bit loopy and how people could put together meaningful, sometimes even beautiful, lives despite what you might think would be staggering disabilities. Sacks describes all this so beautifully and he conveys such love for the people he describes. It’s a series of portraits or case studies of people with neurological damage. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, and he met fascinating people over the course of his career, many who found value and meaning amid quite disconcerting disabilities. Yes. This is a guy who has basically no new long-term memories since World War II. Sacks is interviewing him in the 1970s, I think. Sacks walks into the room and says, “hi” and the guy’s cheerful and he’s able to have superficial conversations, keeping hold of things for maybe 30 seconds, and then it’s gone. He’s living in this superficial world of friendliness. He has no clue how old he is. He looks in the mirror and is shocked and mortified at what he sees and to be told that it’s not 1945. What would that be like? What would it be like to be unable to lay down any new memories, to think it’s 1945 all the time and everybody you meet is new? It’s fascinating to imagine, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the Mariner even though he doesn’t know how bad he has it. “What would it be like to be unable to lay down any new memories, to think it’s 1945 all the time and everybody you meet is new?” A couple of twists add more depth to the story. One is that World War II was clearly the highlight of the Lost Mariner’s life. After the war he fell into alcoholism and had a terrible life. He developed Korsakoff’s Syndrome, due to severe alcohol abuse damaging his brain. His disability, in some sense, erased that terrible life and put him back permanently into this world that worked better for him. So, he lost what he needed to lose in some sense. Sacks is a little critical of him and says, “Look, he’s so superficial. It seems like an empty life in a way.” But then he describes the Lost Mariner going to Catholic church and engaging in the rituals there. Of course, these rituals are timeless and it doesn’t matter if it’s 1945 or 1975. He’s able to participate in the ritual and understand the meaning of the ritual. He has a powerful religious sense. That isn’t lost. He’s able to participate in religion because of its constancy. He knows what to do when the sacrament comes. So how do you evaluate a life like that? There’s no easy answer. You could write the exact same story as fiction."

"When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I had loved science fiction . I’d read lots of Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury especially. For some reason, though, I mostly stopped reading science fiction in college. I suppose that I imagined myself too busy with other, more important things. “ Diaspora opened my eyes to the wealth of philosophical thought that has been playing out in science fiction over the past 30 years” Then in the mid-2000s, someone recommended Diaspora to me, and it set me afire with enthusiasm to devour all the science fiction that I’d been missing. I realized science fiction had potential to explore issues like artificial intelligence in a way that goes far beyond the classic sci-fi I’d read as a teenager. Asimov’s robots, and the android Data from Star Trek, they’re cool and interesting, of course, but if an artificial intelligence can be conscious, Asimov’s robots only scratch the surface of the possibilities. Diaspora opened my eyes to the wealth of philosophical thought that has been playing out in science fiction over the past 30 years, which we professional philosophers almost entirely ignore, to our great loss and discredit. The setup is that we’re living in a world in which, for a few centuries, people have been able to destroy their physical bodies to upload themselves into computers. You have to accept certain views of computation and artificial intelligence and consciousness to accept this, but this is the premise of the book. So let’s accept as a premise that if you were to destroy your body and your brain but record all that information in a computer and have the computer implement it in the right way, you could continue living as a person inside the computer in an artificial environment designed however you want to design the environment. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil now talk about uploading yourself, copying or transferring yourself into computers. David Chalmers and Susan Schneider have given the idea some sympathetic philosophical analysis. In Diaspora, Permutation City, and related works, Egan gives this idea the fullest imagining I’ve seen. What would it really be like if you were a computer program living inside an artificial computer environment? Well, for one thing you could duplicate yourself. You could back yourself up. Multiple times. Yes, and then there’d be the question, ‘do you want to merge back together with the person you diverged from?’ In Egan’s worlds, people can also control what he calls their exoselves. You can do things like tweak your abilities and personality parameters. One character tweaks herself so that she really, really loves math. She is just going at math theorems all the time. Then a friend of hers says something like, ‘you’re getting pretty deep down in this math. Don’t you think you should adjust your parameters a little, so you can kind of poke your eyes up into the world a bit more?’ She says, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.’ She changes herself, and then she looks back on her mathematical self, and she’s like, ‘Wow, that person I used to be really got pretty deep in there.’ So, you could change your values and what you want to value. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What would that be like? We ordinary biological humans, our values change somewhat over time, and with work we can sometimes intentionally shift them in certain directions. But what if you could just say, “I want to value X, intensely, passionately, more than I value anything else” and then make it so? What would you choose? What are the risks? If your choice is too narrow, could you get stuck in a hole and keep tweaking yourself deeper into that hole, until you’re just ecstatically counting blades of grass? Some people choose to stay embodied, not uploading at all, either keeping their traditional human form or accepting various moderate to extreme biological enhancements. Among the people who have uploaded, a wide range of lives and values are possible, from spiritual meditation to space exploration to art colonies with multidimensional enhanced sensoria. If you’re living within one of these giant mega-computers, there’s really no threat of death, no serious scarcity. So the big question is how do you find meaning in life in those conditions? You’ve got in front of you potentially billions of years of subjective experience and nothing that you’re required to do. It’s mixed, but closer to utopia. Yes, that’s often the case. Egan is exploring possibilities. One of the wonderful things about this book is that he explores a broad range of possibilities. Some end better than others. With still others it’s ambiguous how to interpret the ending. They’re all connected, but it’s not a plot-driven book. It’s not for everybody because it includes long descriptions of, for example, hypothetical physics. Philosophers of mind might find the beginning fascinating. It’s inspired by Daniel Dennett. It’s a detailed description of how you might seed artificial intelligence inside one of these computers. Egan’s a fiction writer, and yet the fictions he imagines are, if you accept certain philosophical views about computation, within the realm of possibility. What might the future hold for us, or what are the different ways people—I don’t know if we can call them humans anymore—could or should be? We all have more or less a normal conception of what a person’s life could be. Egan imagines a huge range of alternatives. He knocked loose some of my implicit suppositions about what the future might look like. One more example: dream apes. They don’t play a big role in the story, but they’re fascinating to me. These are humans who genetically engineer language out of themselves and become closer to apes. Yes, out of choice. It’s never really explained, but you can speculate. Yes, maybe. Or maybe that’s what they anticipated. But once they’ve become dream apes, there’s no going back, right? It is a work of philosophy. Borges is also philosophy. I don’t think philosophy has to be written in the form of expository essays. Right! Sadly, I didn’t imagine a punchline."

"Ted Chiang is a short story and novella writer who’s not very prolific. He’s published famously few stories. But a large proportion of his stories have a huge impact and win prizes. His stories are so richly philosophical. The book I’ve chosen is his first story collection. He has another collection that came out recently, Exhalation , which is also excellent. But I have an emotional attachment to the first one because that was the one that kindled my love for Ted Chiang’s work. Though he was certainly well known in the science fiction short story community, his public fame came with Arrival , a blockbuster movie that was based on one of the stories in this collection: ‘Story of Your Life.’ In that story, an alien species arrives at Earth. The story is from the point of view of a linguist who is trying to decipher their language. Their written language is visual and non-temporal in a fascinating way, and one of the wonderful things about the story is how Chiang thinks it through in fascinating detail, what the grammar of a non-temporal, visual language might be, how it might influence cognition, how to build up a language spatially organised in a two dimensional plane rather than linearly and temporally organised, like human languages. ‘Liking What You See’ is a fascinating philosophical thought experiment story set in a near future where people can wear helmets that contain a trans-cranial magnetic stimulator that shuts down the region of their brain that is responsible for making human beauty judgments. It’s told as a documentary with lots of voices expressing different perspectives. But the most central point of view in the story is that of a woman who’s just arrived at college after having been raised in a small community of people who are committed to wearing these helmets. She’s been raised from youth never to make human beauty judgments. She arrives at college and has to decide whether to stop wearing the helmet and end her calliagnosia, the inability to judge human beauty. At the same time, the school is debating whether to require students all to wear calliagnosia devices. The idea is that human beauty judgments are just too loaded with bias and create so much inequality in society. There’s a big psychological literature on this. There are strong correlations between conventional ratings of someone’s beauty and how well they’re treated by other people, even in academic contexts, where your physical beauty shouldn’t matter. We react so differently to people we find physically beautiful than to people we find physically unattractive. There’s something to be said for just taking that out of our lives. Why should we let physical beauty affect our judgments so much? I think it’s doing philosophy. It’s one of Chiang’s most philosophically explicit stories. It’s structured as a documentary, where you hear one character’s voice after another, and each of the characters explains their view about calliagnosia. You hear a humanities professor who says it would be such a loss to humanity to turn off our capacity for appreciating beauty, that we need to be able to appreciate beauty but also to set it aside in making judgments about people. Then it splices to a student who says, ‘Realistically, people never do that. Come on, give me a break.’ Chiang works through the issues philosophically explicitly. I think it is doing philosophy."

"This book imagines a far future in which the world is populated with a diverse range of what I will call ‘persons’, rather than ‘humans’. So if we think of a human as a biological member of Homo sapiens —there are other ways of thinking about them—but if we think about humans that way, we can think about a person as someone who’s ethically relevantly like a human in deserving the highest level of moral concern, but who is possibly an artificial intelligence or a member of another species. In Diaspora, there are AI systems, there are robots, and there are genetically altered humans who populate Earth. Humanity has managed to create real persons who exist inside simulated environments, in high capacity protected computers, and real persons who exist in robot bodies, who are exploring the solar system, and real persons who are biological. Those biological persons come in various forms, because we’ve taken control of our genome. So there are some who have gills and swim under the sea, and there are some who have engineered out of themselves all capacity for language; there are some biological persons who value very different things than we do, who maybe have really deep insight into biochemistry and smell capacities that allow them to interact with a forest in a radically different way than we do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a society without significant scarcity. In this society, people have immense freedom to consider what kind of life they want to live because they don’t need to hold down a job to draw an income. Furthermore, you can control your own values, especially if you’re one of the AI systems. You can just tinker with your settings, saying, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to really love math for a little while’, or you can change your values in many other ways. At one point in Diaspora , there’s an art installation. The people who want to go to the art installation get a special profile attached to their personality so that they will appreciate art in a certain way. One of the main characters adopts the profile, and suddenly she notices the world differently. The clouds in the sky become salient for her as they never would have before. You can voluntarily adopt a new worldview for a while, then shed it. It gives us the existentialists’ question in its purest form. I take central idea of existentialism to be that you have freedom to figure out what you value and pursue that. That freedom is limited in ordinary embodied human life. But much less so in this story. Right. You couldn’t really achieve it, and you’re limited by various practical necessities. But the AI systems in Diaspora aren’t nearly as constrained, with massive resources, vast lifespans, and vast abilities to control both their internal structure and their environment. Yes. And a capacity to control and construct desires beyond what we can even imagine. You could desire to become an artist in 16 dimensional space who works with smellscapes. Yes, I see the pull of that. I think you could take Egan’s work as moving a bit in that direction, although I don’t think he goes fully there. He does not commit, he paints the picture. This is one of the other wonderful things about science fiction. Different characters illustrate different possibilities. One character decides to install an outlook that is universally self-affirming, in the sense that once you adopt it, you can never decide that another outlook would be better. This outlook has an ethics and aesthetics with some resemblance to Buddhism . The character tweaks his settings so that he’s just going to be at peace with the now and he enters into an inescapable meditative state, and his friends are like, ‘Okay, goodbye.’ It probably strikes the reader as disappointing, a mistake. But maybe there’s something to that. Another character plays through all the possibilities that he sees in his personality, and then at the end of an immensely long life, he’s like, ‘I’ve pretty much done everything, so goodbye.’ Another character ends up giving herself over completely to exploring the beauties of mathematics. It is breath-taking in that it gives you a sense of the amazing variety of possible ways of living once you lift the constraints that we normally take for granted. That’s part of what’s coming across in this book. One dimension of difference is how much the different characters care about embodiment. There are biological humans who are highly constrained by the physical and biological realities of Earth and who risk dying in accidents. They choose this and see value in biologically constrained forms of life. And then there are robots who are embodied but not constrained in quite the same way, who can back themselves up and orbit around Saturn. And then there are AI people without conventional bodies at all, living in artificial environments, but who chose to experience themselves as having bodies in those environments, subject to virtual laws of physics like friction and gravity, but maybe they don’t need to use the toilet. And then you have AI people who just dispense with all of that—why would you want friction? Just forget that, it’s constraining. Who needs gravity? These computers are buried 200 meters under the ground in Siberia, so they don’t take up a lot of surface space on Earth!"

"Sure. This came out last year. It’s fun to have a really recent choice. I love this book. This is told from the point of view of an ‘artificial friend.’ Klara is a robot who’s conscious, sentient—a person—who is designed to be a companion to a wealthy disabled girl. Her whole purpose is to be as good a companion as possible to this girl, Josie. Ishiguro is brilliant in giving you the world through the eyes of Klara. You kind of assume it because it’s told from the first person perspective. Klara’s talking about what she’s thinking all the time. It’s a very meditative, reflective book. So it’s hard to conceptualize that as a reader without regarding Klara as a conscious being. He has another interesting science fiction book, Never Let Me Go , but he doesn’t primarily do science fiction. Interestingly Klara and the Sun has some similarities with Ishiguro’s earlier book The Remains of the Day in that it’s told from the point of view of someone whose life is given over to service. And it raises some of the same issues, but maybe in an even starker way than The Remains of the Day does, because Klara doesn’t have many independent desires or values other than to be a servant. So everything she does is for the sake of that. I don’t think I’ll give anything important away by describing the last scene. She’s at the end of her life, in a junkyard. She’s completely happy. One of the amazing things about this book is that Klara is so delighted and unbored with what you think would be abject servitude. In the junkyard at the end, she’s just completely content. All she’s doing is reflecting on her earlier excellence as a servant to Josie and treasuring her memories and being grateful for her existence. So it leaves you with this question of the authenticity of her desires. It’s told so completely and so perfectly from Klara’s point of view that she never even raises the question of whether these are authentic desires, whether she should have some desires for her own flourishing, or for her own sake. But as a thoughtful reader you want to shout at her, ‘You matter as much as Josie! You shouldn’t always just sacrifice everything for her!’ But Klara doesn’t ever think of doing other than the very best for Josie, at whatever cost. It doesn’t even occur to her. But at the same time she experiences her existence as completely fulfilling. Yes, that’s true. Klara and the Sun raises those issues in a fascinating way through this brilliantly told perspective. Also fascinating is Klara’s wonderfully naive religious worship of the sun. She’s a solar-powered robot. She sees a man that she thinks is dead on the sidewalk, and then the sun shines on him and he gets up. She thinks that the Sun performed a miracle cure, and she wants a miracle cure for Josie. She makes sacrifices to the sun in this completely charmingly naive way. Yes. And then from a philosophy of religion standpoint, it’s fascinating to think about Klara’s religiosity and what’s good about it or not so good about it. But to really get into that, I have to give some spoilers. Yes, it’s a wonderful read. Ishiguro is a superb prose stylist. His sentences are so spare and simple, which fits well with the innocent voice of Klara."

"She’s another great prose stylist. Yes. One of the things that Le Guin and Ishiguro share is a remarkable ability to describe the world as their viewpoint character sees it, in a way that reveals both the world and the character. What does the character notice, comment on, and think about, and what does the character fail to notice, comment on, or think about? That’s so important. That already is philosophical. To inhabit someone’s head and see the world through their eyes and see how their values shape what they see and what they don’t see and what they further ponder and what they ignore—that’s a way of helping us explore an alternative set of values. Le Guin does this brilliantly with the character of Shevek. Shevek is raised in an anarchist society. It’s on a moon, Anarres, that orbits a main planet, Urras. Anarresti society is pretty close to subsistence living. No one owns property. There’s no formal government, no laws, no jails, no military: basically you are pressured by your neighbors to do what’s right. You feel pride in serving the community in jobs well done. People provide you with what you need. One of the wonderful things about this book is that Le Guin, more plausibly than I’ve seen anyone else do, really imagines what an anarchist society might look like, what some of its flaws might be, and how it might not really be possible to be completely anarchist and fully to live up to those ideals, given human nature. But this society still comes close in some ways. “I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms” Then Shevek goes to Urras, which is a planet similar to Earth, in that it’s populated with societies that are definitely not anarchist. He ends up in a wealthy society with a sharp division between the classes. He’s a leading physics scholar. He’s the first person to leave Anarres for about 200 years. The anarchists had deliberately shut themselves off from outside contact. Shevek leaves Anarres against his neighbours’ strongly expressed wishes—but with no police force, who’s to stop him?—and on Urras he’s immediately housed in a luxury apartment. He spends half an hour in the bathroom just fascinated by how you can turn on the hot tap and the water runs until you turn it off. There’s a soft carpet, and the bed is far softer than any bed he’d ever experienced before. The servant comes in. Shevek has no idea what to do with a servant. He doesn’t even understand that nudity is inappropriate. He’s completely naked. He strides up naked wanting to shake the servant’s hand. He decides to call the servant ‘sir’. They never use ‘sir’ on Annares but he thinks he should try to be polite. He hears a bird singing for the first time. There are no large land animals on Anarres, and later Shevek sees the long face of a donkey for the first time. Le Guin does a lovely job of briefly evoking the first time hearing a bird, with this sweet song coming in through the window and Shevek’s realising it’s different from a human song. It’s wonderful and wondrous. And it’s fascinating thinking through how someone from such a society might view a world like ours, with its luxury and its classism. Yes, she is. An ambiguous utopia, I think is what she calls it. You can tell she prefers Anarres to Urras. But she’s also clear about some of the shortcomings of Anarres and some of the good things about Urras. She thinks that there’s a kind of beauty on Urras that’s hard to find on Anarres, that the wealth and inequality create a capacity to do high level physics, for example, and for amazingly beautiful objects to be created, objects it would be hard to imagine existing in a fully egalitarian society where you don’t highly privileged people in power. Someone needs to buy the beautiful works of art and someone needs to pay to have people devote their lives to creating amazing things. She’s enough of a thoughtful philosopher not to have a simplistic view about this. Yes, there is something about the perspective of the naive individual. Klara and the Sun has some of that, too—that’s also a very inegalitarian society where some people have servant robots, and some people have cognitive enhancement, and others don’t. Klara has a very naive perspective on that. Oh, yes, absolutely. I agree with that completely. I think there’s an important question in the background here, which we touched on briefly earlier. You could say that science fiction is a good teaching tool —that it’s not really philosophy, but it’s good for popularising philosophical questions or getting people who might not otherwise be attracted to philosophy to think about philosophical questions. But serious philosophy takes the form of the expository essay, the journal article, the monograph. I don’t agree with that. I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms. Consider a classic of recent moral philosophy, Bernard Williams’ essay ‘Moral Luck’ . That essay turns on an imaginary version of the story of Gauguin. Had Williams’ treatment of Gaugin been more detailed and more complex, it might have been even more philosophically interesting, as some subsequent commentators have pointed out. The more detail, the more we understand the complex dilemma that Gaugin faced, concerning his hopes for being a great artist and what the difficulties of leaving his family might be. Yes, I think that’s right. There’s a reason that philosophers sometimes reach for sketching mini-fictions in their writing. Those mini-fictions achieve something that can’t be as effectively achieved through more abstract prose. But as long as it remains a mini-fiction contained within an essay, it’s going to be somewhat impoverished as a fiction. I think we need to do both. It’s a kind of historical accident that philosophers almost exclusively write expository essays now. That’s not historically been the case. You mentioned Sartre, who’s a relatively recent example. But you also mentioned Voltaire . And Rousseau , and Nietzsche , and in their way, Zhuangzi and Plato too. I basically just agree with everything you’re saying. I like that definition of philosophy."

"Stapledon was actually an academic philosopher—he wrote his PhD on ethics. He’s not well known for his expository essays. But he was an important science fiction writer in the ’30s and ’40s. Sirius is told from the point of view of a dog, Sirius, who has been cognitively enhanced to have human-like intelligence. It’s the story of his struggle to find meaning in the world and make sense of his life. It’s a sad book. It’s tragic. You can tell from the beginning, this is not going to work out well. He doesn’t fit in the world. One of the most wonderful parts of the book is his continuing confrontation with music. It illustrates nicely—and this plays out in lots of different ways in the book—how he doesn’t fit. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Sirius has dog ears, so he can hear much more accurately than humans can. I don’t know if this is physiologically true about dogs or not, but at least he’s portrayed in the novel as being able to hear tones much more precisely. As a consequence human music to him is always a bit off key and wobbly because they’re not quite nailing it. Well, it’s got to be tuned. In the 1940s instruments needed to be tuned by humans rather than computers. Sirius spends time creating elaborate music and even a musical notation that no dog could possibly appreciate because it’s far too complex and intellectual for a normal dog. And no human could possibly appreciate it either. Howling is part of the aesthetic. It is not going to make sense to humans. He’s trying to find meaning through artistic expression, but he’s got no audience other than himself. How is he going to make music just for himself? There’s a loneliness in that. Sirius the dog is not satisfied with that inescapable loneliness. Maybe some people would be completely satisfied with that. Right. In Egan’s Diaspora , Yatima is perfectly happy to just go figure out math on her own. At that point in the story she’s living in a solitary universe, almost. So maybe you don’t necessarily need that audience. But Sirius the dog felt like he needed more. Another example of yearning for connection in Sirius is the dog’s attitude to sex and love. He has this sexual attraction to female dogs, based primarily on the sense of smell. He tries to describe to humans what it’s like to be sexually attracted to a dog on the basis of smell and of course no one understands. At the same time, he describes other dogs as being nine-tenths asleep because they don’t have human-like cognitive capacities. So he can’t love them in the rich way that he loves Plaxy, a human woman he’s attached to. So he has this rich emotional attachment to a human that can’t be sexually consummated; and he’s got this sexual attraction to dogs that can’t be emotionally consummated. So he’s constantly feeling misplaced. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, absolutely. Once you have the idea of the story, this just plays out. It almost writes itself—the natural consequences, or at least the plausible consequences of this scenario. His doggish perspective, for example on war— Sirius was written during World War Two and is partly set during the war—illuminates the human condition, too. Sirius stands outside of humanity to some extent and judges us. Yes, I write science fiction. I’ve published several science fiction stories. Oh, no, I think of it as doing philosophy through science fiction. I’m not sure I’ve convinced my colleagues of that, but that’s what I think. For me, absolutely, it’s a way of exploring philosophical issues."