What If and What’s Next? Philosophy in Action

It’s been said that one might make a stab at reading 10,000 books in a lifetime. Some among them, novels especially, anchor tenaciously. Looking up at my bookshelves, familiar characters leap out, reanimating Candide’s blithe blundering, Frodo Baggins’ heroic doggedness, Molly Bloom’s erotic drifting, George Smiley’s rueful, meticulous revenge, the Grand Inquisitor’s offer of terrible freedom, or Sophie Zawistowska’s impossible choice.

Pull one of these classics off the shelf, wipe away a decade of dust, read a single passage, and the whole story may come rushing back.

Their creators explored the most fundamental questions—of authenticity and conformity, of personal responsibility and guilt, fairness and victimization, of perception and reality, of loyalty and sacrifice, of consciousness, beauty and art and the metaphysics of quality, of good and evil, of the promise and limit of rationality, of love and hate, of permanence and decline and alienation, and onward.

These stout volumes are nonetheless the smaller surviving sample of a greater group of bygone books, often paperbacks long since donated, discarded, lent, or scored from libraries’ electronic book catalog, never having made it onto a shelf or a night table. Still, these thrillers of speculative fiction burned a consequential path. Not often for their characters, and rarely for their prose, but for their sense of immanence, crisp technological promise, and sometimes awful warning.

It didn’t strike me that I was a science fiction “fan” until, standing in Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (a gem then squirreled away in the basement of the Experience Music Project), I found that I’d read something of each one of the inductees. This stack of novels and short stories lured me with provocative questions: “What’s next?” and “What if?”

What’s Next? Creativity at Play

In this genre it’s easiest to trace the “what’s next?” questions. Setting aside all the imagined apocalypses, a powerful, recurrent theme, science fiction is equally an exercise in bright prospect, the great big, beautiful, technological tomorrows that visitors also glimpse at world’s fairs.

Nichelle Nichols vaulted racial and gender hurdles in her portrayal of Star Trek's Lieutenant Nyobi Uhura.

Source: NASA/Public Domain

Before all those fascinating things can take shape, they must first be imagined and envisioned. Science fiction authors obliged by generating a long list of ideas for soon-to-be-familiar life-altering technology.

Flip phones first materialized on the television series Star Trek as “communicators.” The starship’s communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura, wore something like Bluetooth in her ear. The irascible Dr. McCoy deployed a pocket MRI machine. Captain Kirk carried a stun gun. As for universal translators, another Star Trek staple? Your cellphone can now do that for you, routinely if not always reliably:

Q: “What is the soup du jour?” (Here fill in the garcon’s shrug.) A: “The soup of the day…”

In the 1960s, a torrent of predictions flowed. To name a few: the trans-dermal medical patch, the electronic bookstore, non-stick coating, video billboards, non-wetting fabric, voice dialing and voicemail, the “laser rifle,” “Doctor Smile,” a robotic psychotherapist which threatened to put clinicians out of business, and artificial intelligence, another servitor and disruptor now so much on our minds.

Thirty years before the Manhattan Project, H.G. Wells had imagined the possibility of containing and sustaining a nuclear reaction. And more darkly and presciently, he envisioned an uncontrolled reaction that could be harnessed in the form of an atomic bomb.

Wells’ contemporaries predicted the “driverless taxi,” the “automatic air mail plane,” “automatic toll taking,” and the “audiophone.” Short story by short story, authors predicted the people-moving “slidewalk,” the traffic control camera, the robot bartender and robot lawnmower, the robotic arm, the voice synthesizer, the “high frequency oven,” grillable “yeast steak,” self-sealing plastic wrap, a solar-powered prefabricated house, sunscreen, and antidepressants.

What If? Philosophy in Action

The genre travels mostly on thrilling plots and, fair to say, less often on sharply drawn characters and memorable prose. But speculative fiction rewards readers with ideas that none have entertained before. Even the pulpiest tales have thrived on posing tough and challenging philosophical questions.

Philosophy Essential Reads

Deleuze, Mindfulness, and a Life Worth Living

The Therapeutic Philosophy of David Foster Wallace

Perturbing “what if?” questions such as:

Personhood. What if computers could become so complex that we would could not tell if we were talking with a machine or a human? Could independent, thinking machines become conscious? Could they experience emotion? Could they empathize? Could they dream? In a word, could they become “persons”? And if so, would they be entitled to human rights? Would they have free will? If frustrated or repressed, could they turn on us?

Metaphysics. What if simulated, virtual reality were to become so convincing that it would become indistinguishable from workaday, quotidian reality? What status would ordinary reality then hold?

Ethics. What if spacefarers were to discover a happy utopia that had no concepts for sin, duplicity, and crime? No understanding of betrayal, lying, or violence? Would contact with imperfect humans bewilder and frighten them? Should we enlighten them, making them sadder and wiser? Or should we keep our distance? Or more fundamentally, would we even recognize life as life in an alien ecology? And so might we well lurch headlong and heedlessly?

It's a Small World After All

Most powerfully, speculative fiction envisions planetary unity, our one world.

Sometimes this vision arrives shockingly as a response to existential threat. The ominous 1951 feature, The Day the Earth Stood Still, protested the accelerating nuclear arms race and the hair-trigger nearness of nuclear holocaust. The film features a humanoid alien who bears the message that the people of Earth must unite to surmount its petty squabbles and temper its aggressive, contagious, technology. Or else.

Sometimes in the not-too-far-off future, Earth unites, hopefully. Star Trek’s “United Federation of Planets” leapfrogs trivial local ethnic and national strife, class antagonism, and (most of) the gender inequalities that beset Earth. If earthlings can find ways to get along with treacherous Romulans, antagonistic Klingons, annoying Ferengi, and unfeeling Vulcans, surely trivial racial differences among human beings must fade to dim memory.

And sometimes the dark fictional vision the near future lies uncomfortably close. In tales of this sort, spaceship Earth must unite against transnational enemies. No single country can stand alone against the slate-wiping viruses, sometimes bioengineered, or by themselves head off human-caused climate collapse that could bring Earth’s brilliant, flowering civilization to its end.