Willow ,'Conversations with Dead People'
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I think of "brain in a vat" as a philosophical proposition.
Yeah.
Are you saying it's a male fantasy because some of us like to imagine ourselves as Supremely Rational Man™?
I'm saying that because I couldn't get beyond the idea that the whole proposition of pondering the possibility of sentience without a body. It sounds like psychosis to me, not philosophy.
Nah - I don't think its a fantasy in the sense that men want it. It's a fantasy in that it is a nightmare. I don't know that it is more a male nightmare than a female one - but if it is it may (as I said) be because it is the ultimate castration nightmare.
Dude, it's not worth spending two seconds thinking about. And yet people have written 100s of pages on it trying to rationalize it. You can't tell me that's a nightmare.
Burrell - seriously trying to rationalize it? You mean as in "this is a good thing". Or "this is route we should go". Because that is new to me. I've run into as extended premises for stories - but always as pretty horrible (0r in some cases comically horrific) stories.
Hey, Jim, maybe you ought to add a link to the Zmayhem FAQ in your Press post, because that did its job really well, I thought. No one should miss it.
One thing I like about Futurama is that it follows up on a bunch of really SFnal tropes like "heads in jars" and all that.
All the head in a jar talk is hard to swallow with coffee. But in a weird (and bizarre and horrifying)way it sounds like the ultimate in asceticism. I wouldn't know how it reads or plays, because I don't think I could read or watch such a story. Despite my body image demons, I'm still glad I have one. But still...
I don't see anything male about the head in a jar thing ... it's about sentience, about consciousness, isn't it? Integration/differentiation, that stuff. I've not read any happy stories about it, but as a bit of conjecture it strikes me as no weirder than many, and no less "deserving" of print space.
All the head in a jar talk is hard to swallow with coffee.
It would be really hard to swallow coffee if your head was in ajar?
(sorry, that's all I've got. I think the coffee hasn't hit the brain yet.)
It's an expression of Cartesian duality - it turns up in Beckett's trilogy as the last stage of Malloy/Mallone/Worm's descent.