Content area
Full text
The Turing Test, devised by Alan Turing, the forefather of Artificial Intelligence, challenges a person to distinguish between artificial and human intelligence, between a human creation - an artifact and that which Aristotle and others have called the essence of human beings. It is a test to see if a person can discriminate between a paranoid human being and a computer programmed to be paranoid, when the only communication is written. The challenge reflects a twentieth century movement of philosophy away from a comfortable certainty that meaning can be gleaned from the experience of an individualistic self to the conviction that reality is not singular, positions are not fixed, and essentialist concepts of human nature are absent, or at least weakened. In place of an essentialist concept of human nature there exists in postmodernist thinking the idea that humans create themselves through their own narratives - their stories, their dreams, their myths, their histories, their memories.
Postmodernism, like other intellectual eras, is characterized by a set of questions, themes, or "preoccupations" as Langer calls them (Langer, 1957; McHale, 1987). The preoccupation of postmodern fiction centers on the ontological, asking questions about modes of being. Examples are: "Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?. . . What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?" (McHale, 1987: 10). Given the confusion over the differences between human and artificial, we may supplement the list with yet another ontological question: "What happens when the boundary between human and non-human is violated?"
Concerns about the "nature" of human nature have reached outside the confines of the academic world. Dramatic advances in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering have increased the lack of certainty about what is human. At a time that we are deconstructing sexual identities and finding the previous delineation of male and female unsatisfactory, the popular culture has picked up the theme of blurred boundaries between real and imaginary, human and artificial, self and other. Tied to science and yet beyond it, science fiction is a literary genre suited to examining the...