The first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer, with logic gates standing in for the brain’s synapses and neurotransmitters. Joshua Rothman’s recent piece for the New Yorker tackles the plausibility of such a claim, as well as Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for it: “The argument is based on two premises, both of which can be disputed but neither of which are unreasonable. I saw The Matrix. You saw The Matrix. Let’s all agree it was crap, all right? And yet the evidence is starting to maybe definitely possibly show that we are, in fact, living in a kind of simulated reality, one conjured not by sentient robots, but by a moon-computer programmed by our far-off future descendants. One of the flaws might be that a narrator thinks she has certain political beliefs, but might not understand where they come from or what they really mean.” And, as a fiction writer, if I feel like if that’s an important part of the character, I need to let that out, even if it’s not what I ‘officially’ believe. If you’re tapping into something emotional-even if you’re really left-wing, like I am-you might wind up finding a conservative streak in you. … Sometimes I wonder whether being a feminist and being a fiction writer, whether these two things are in conflict, whether some things about being a fiction writer are in conflict with progressive politics. “I’m not interested in writing a story that can be read as direct political allegory,” says Schiff, “but since I think and care about politics, it makes its way into the work.
Rebecca Schiff’s recent interview with Emma Winsor Wood for The Rumpus tackles the question of whether the stories in Schiff’s acclaimed debut collection, The Bed Moved, deliberately gesture toward satire or the political. … Syme told the Times Higher Education that reading the book was a ‘dismaying experience’ that went against his ‘scholarly convictions and principles.’ Vickers responded that he had ‘lived’ with Lear for more than 50 years and that it took him three years to write the book, which has been anonymously peer reviewed twice by scholars.” As Alison Flood writes for The Guardian: “Rather than sounding off in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement, a professor at the University of Toronto has taken to the less genteel world of Twitter to unleash an extraordinary tirade of more than 500 tweets attacking a new book on King Lear. That’s how Professor Holger Syme got his point across while live-tweeting his reactions to Sir Brian Vicker’s book, The One King Lear, a text that argues for a blended version of the 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio. Everyone knows that if you want to kindle a meaningful dialogue about art and intertextuality, you’ve got to put on your troll hat and hit the mean streets of Twitter.
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