A History of Semi-Popular Philosophy of Mind (No, not a semi-popular history of philosophy of mind)

I understand that there was a period in which it was wildly popular to model human mental processes after the calculating processes of digital adding machines. But that particular fad was so thoroughly debunked that it is almost forgotten now.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looms very, very large in the history of sf, of course. Among others, Delany did some of his best work with it as an inspiration.

Then there’s good old Korzybski and his General Semantics, and van Vogt and Piper and such. Neuro-linguistic programming has certainly been popular in sf fandom, but I’m not right now thinking of a lot of pro work directly influenced by it. These may count as crank work in the way Sapir-Whorf does not, however.

I may have some history-of-spiritualism stuff in my archive; will check.

Apparently King George III who went mad tried to educate himself on mental illness by reading King Lear. His doctors did not think this was the best idea.

Makari, George (2015) Soul machine : the invention of the modern mind, New York, NY : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

Sharon Packer (2015) Neuroscience in science fiction films, Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc

Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl, (2013) The new human in literature : posthuman visions of changes in body, mind and society after 1900, London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic

Looking for evidence on whether Orwell’s 1984 was directly influenced by Sapir-Whorf (I suspect not), I came up with this, which looks ideal.

https://www.academia.edu/1727003/Monstrous_Linguistics_The_Use_of_the_Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis_in_Science_Fiction

As well as Orwell (author says pre S-W but when linguistic relativity was in the air), the piece mentions continuing through The Languages of Pao (Jack Vance, 1959) , Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 (1966), Doris Lessing’s The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
(1983), and China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011)

Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? Widely read although never mainstream, I think. Certainly looks kooky now, and apparently had a role in shaping some 70s-80s science fiction. Influential psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann cites it as a major influence, too, so maybe it still has relevance to contemporary psychological anthropology/anthropology of religion.

I don’t know what category, if any, Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration falls in, but it’s by God a theory of mind. Reminds me of some stuff in Oliver Sacks.

Coming back to the original question, Freud has to be the mega-example, not only for his own work but being the founder of a school that includes Jung, Reich, Laing and many more. My impression is that Reich is now completely forgotten, Jung and Laing pretty much so. Freud looks cranky after 100+ years, but he’s unlikely to be forgotten completely.

Probably James Cooke Brown’s “logical language” Loglan, as seen in Heinlein, is related to General Semantics.

Maybe the influence is backwards from that desired, but surely Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health is worth a mention.

Also not quite on topic: if the intriguing but dubious premise of ST:TNG’s Darmok episode (“Shaka, when the walls fell”) has actual linguistic sources, which I doubt, it would be interesting to know what they are.

Maybe something in Deborah Blum’s book on William James, ghosts, seances, which I have not read. There were Institutes of Psychical Research in the UK and France in the early 20th century. Serious philosophers such as Bergson attended seances, talked about telekinesis, were fascinated by Eugenia Palladino. Perhaps Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism which I have seen around the house but also never read may be of interest in another way?

Whitehead’s prehensions, in terms of mutual mind/body constitution of co-present entities, certainly have some connection to 20th century telepathy and pop-culture accounts of telekinesis ala Scanners and Carrie. Connectivism (of a sort) certainly is behind that excellent film Colossus: The Forbin Project. Functionalism seems to lurk behind the premises of the movie Brainstorms. All I got for now.

Oh Brainstorm. Confused with the Dennett book for a moment.

And Spielberg’s AI makes a good case for the emotive component of self-consciousness as a need to be needed (as I argued in a pop culture book “SS and Philosophy: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Book”).

And Turing tested Data in the classic ST2 episode Measure of a Man, of course.

Aldous Huxley’s _The Perennial Philosophy_ was widely read and reviewed in post-war England and America and, along with other 20th C popularizers of mysticism such as Autobiography of a Yogi, were likely an influence in sf references to mysticism (Star Wars, Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels in which whole civilizations can Sublime into an ecstatic metaphysical paradise, doubtless many more).

In the “Compleat Enchanter” (L. Sprague de Camp and???), which I think dates originally from the 1930s, the method by which the hero travels to alternative realities is by concentrating on, internalizing, principles — written out in symbolic logic — characterizing the alternative: principles of magic, say, rather than of physics. The idea being that, if you think in terms of the alternative metaphysical framework, you organize sense data differently, and so experience a different world. (This isn’t gone into in any detail– it’s just the framework that allows the hero to travel, and most of the story is devoted to his romp through a literary or mythological world.) I’ve always assumed that this plot device was inspired by contemporary state-of-the-art philosophy: C.I. Lewis, maybe.

R.A. Lafferty is always a lot of fun, and some of his stories featured an assortment of characters based on the four elements or the four humors, as well as stories about bears licking their cubs into shape, and bachelor uncles turning into bears. I didn’t understand the joke behind one character’s contention that the human race didn’t need to be grounded until I learned that Lafferty made his living as an electrician.

That history I don’t have, but here’s a short list of direct applications of philosophies of mind that come to, ah, mind. Jack Vance explicitly relied on Sapir-Whorf in The Languages of Pao. Gene Wolfe drew on Jaynes for Soldier of the Mist. Blish relied on Jung in Midsummer Century. Oh, hell, theosophy and fundamentalist christianity in Stranger in a Strange Land?

Thinking it over, it seems to me that science fiction and fantasy are themselves an evolving source of popular philosophies of mind. Ideas go back from sf and fantasy into the popular culture. Odd, very odd.

Jung to Campbell to Lucas and Star Wars?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

http://tedfriedman.com/2011/12/20/marx-jung-yoda-the-dialectics-of-the-force/

Seconding the Blindsight rec for anyone remotely interested in sci-fi exploration of philosophy of mind.

(All I want for Christmas is a CT Peter Watts book event)

Dennett: Consciousness Explained

Maybe one of Searle’s books, definitely cranky and already outdated but not sure how which and how popular.

“And does Chinese, and thus do the speakers of Chinese, partition the space of all possible concepts differently?”

I read that Western people tend to visualise Time horizontally (as in time lines, and how we read from left to right) whereas Chinese (or more generally Asian?) people tend to visualise Time vertically. I was talking to a woman who lived here for a while and she said in Alice Springs the Indigenous people use the expression “Under Today” for talking about things in the past (she made a performance and sound art project http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/under-today/6080484)

This seems like the place for a shout-out for Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself, due out this month: probably the only work of SF that is ever likely to take Kantian metaphysics as the S for its F, and then to mash them up with John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Also, further back, what about J W Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, hugely influential on fiction between the wars, which produces an argument for the immortality of the soul from precognitive dreaming and some vaguely Einsteinian hand-waving about time’s dimensional structure?

Back at Theosophy and related stuff: John Shirley is very strongly influenced by Gurdjieff among others (and has written a biography of Gurdjieff, in fact).

Michael Kube-McDowell’s The Quiet Pools has a really interesting spin on determinism not much like other sf I can recall. I think it was a thought experiment rather than what he actually believes, though, whereas Michael Flynn is apparently moderately serious about the sort of psychohistory nouveau in The Country of the Blind.

#26: Einsteinian relativity was not merely “a generic imagine the impossible ticket”. What it did was to give a scientific imprimatur to half a century of popular fascination with the “fourth dimension”, which until then had only been based on abstract mathematical speculation.

The “fourth dimension” and non-Euclidean geometry had been adopted as a utopian principle by the theosophists long before Einstein, and it was mentioned not only by H G Wells, but also by Oscar Wilde (his Canterville ghost “hastily adopted the Fourth Dimension of Space as a means of escape” and Proust. Flatland reflected the popular association between three dimensions and conventional limitations on human perception and cognition. The fourth dimension wasn’t generic weirdness: It was a separate place, vaster than all the world we know put together (which then creates scope for spirits, souls, and generic weirdness). The association of fourth dimension with time added to the sense that these new geometric ideas must somehow be linked with human consciousness in a profound way.

(Actually, it’s been pointed out that an English 17th-Century philosopher Henry More wrote, in a book on the nature of spirits, that “besides those THREE dimensions which belong to all extended things, a FOURTH also is to be admitted, which belongs properly to SPIRITS.” )

Cubism was heavily influenced by this tradition (the classic historical work is Dalrymple’s Non-Euclidean Geometry and the Fourth Dimension in 20th Century Art), and futurism was a post-Einstein expansion.

So you had Einstein coming in, saying, you know this weird thing that the spiritualists have been banging on about? Well, it’s real, and you can measure it, and I have an equation for it, and then the rest of the physics community comes along and says, he’s right, we’ve measured it, and Newton (the symbol of plodding deterministic rationalism) is overthrown. No wonder he was treated as sort of a sorcerer.

I like Gateway, but I found all the Freudian analysis bollocks harder to take seriously than the eighth and ninth rays. When was Freud taken seriously again? (In pop culture, I mean, not as a scientist).

greg @37:
So consider Chinese. Whereas anybody can string together a series of letters in an alphabetical language, in a character based language like Chinese, combining radicals to create compound characters is something which is not causally done. Which raises the issue, how much has the nature of Chinese written language affected the character of the spoken language?

Since the vast majority of Chinese speakers — like speakers of any language — have up until very recently been illiterate, the answer is almost certainly “very little.”

People don’t, even in languages that happen to have alphabetic writing systems, create new words by rearranging written symbols, except in very recent and rather rare circumstances (e.g., acronyms becoming words). That’s not how languages work.

ZM @40:
I read that Western people tend to visualise Time horizontally

Well, except for tendencies to visually time vertically (family trees and lines of descent)…

Of course, a tendency for literate people to visualize — and diagram — time according to the mode of writing would mean that visualizing Time “horizontally” would hardly be just a “Western” thing, since all the languages of the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia use horizontal writing.

It was cross cultural psychological testing to see how people visualise time in their minds, not about visual representations of time in different cultures. Some people also visualised time as a circle, for some going clockwise and some counter-clockwise.

Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973): riffs on Whorf-Sapir and Chomskyan Universal Grammar…

@John Holbo (26)

“Relatedly, not a lot of behaviorist-inspired sf. (Too dry and conceptually ascetic.)”

Well, there’s A Clockwork Orange, although Burgess was critiquing the moral implications of behaviourism not so much critiquing the process itself.

I don’t know if William Gibson was inspired by philosophy of mind but Neuromancer does have a very strong physicalist bent, and was published around the time that those philosophies began to gain currency

Peter Irwin@50:

“Since the vast majority of Chinese speakers — like speakers of any language — have up until very recently been illiterate, the answer is almost certainly “very little.””

That the majority of speakers of any language have until recently been illiterate is a very good point. However, the idea that this implies that the written language has had very little effect on the development of the spoken language would seem to assume a completely bottom up origin for novelty in the evolution of languages. This seems unlikely. Consider the relative variations in experience of a peasantry, compared to the experiences of a literate elite. Indeed, the literati were reputed to be highly venerated and influential among all classes, sometimes even more so than the political and military, although that reputation may be somewhat self-serving. (I suppose that requires some verification.) Anyway.

On the question of new Chinese characters, this selection from Quora may be informative: “https://www.quora.com/Are-new-Chinese-characters-still-being-invented.”

I’ve also wondered how the propensity of German speakers to create bigger words from smaller words reflects and affects their thinking. Does it make it more- categorical?

“How Dogs Bark in Different Languages:” “https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201211/how-dogs-bark-in-different-languages ” is also interesting regarding at least the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I find it difficult to maintain the belief that the various words for “bark” do not somehow reflect how a dog’s bark actually sounds in each of those languages. We do know that the auditory responsiveness in people to particular phonemes varies for people in different cultures.

I think people, when confronted with a novelty, try to represent, or describe, the new experience in the terms of the old language.

ZM @50: Yes, I have heard of the various geometrical representations of time. I have also heard about time’s flow being front to back, or back to front, (ie. people go ass-first through time,) and differing ways of describing one’s geographical relationships. It is of course all tied to language, but I don’t know of any information on the direction of influence, or its affect on the evolution of a culture, and so on the ‘hypothesis.’ I would think there would be some, though.

Both van Vogt’s War Against the Rull (a paste-up from Astounding stories of 1949-1950) and Dave Langford’s 1988 short story “Blit” make use of glyphs that cause mental lockup/breakdown in anyone who looks at them, presumably through a recursive loop in our wetware: neuro-visual programming? See also Peter Watts’ explanation for vampires’ response to the cross (=right angles) — still handwaving, yes, but such clever dexterous handwaving that…. I… uhh…

NO CARRIER

Dennet (sp?) and Hofstadter co -edited The Mind’s I back in the early 80’s. It has classic papers and SF short stories on the subject.

Samuel Delany’s “Babel-17” for Whorf-Sapir influence as well.

Not quite “phil of mind”, but J.W.Dunne’s “An Experiment With Time” and “The Serial Universe” were *hugely* influential, with Wyndham Lewis, C.S.Lewis, John Buchan and J.B.Priestley amongst others responding to his ideas.

Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1986) and Norretranders’ The User Illusion (English 1998) are both worth a look. They can be seen as “anti-philosophy of mind,” arguing in distinct but parallel ways that consciousness / self-awareness / qualia are not precious, ineffable fundamentals — “that which is to be explained above all” — but epiphenomena, integrating icon-and-folder interfaces, convenient executive summaries.

The beast was reading “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” in this X-men comic:

http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/X-Men_Vol_1_134

I found this book just confusing but it may have something:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11909762-mutants-and-mystics

In addition to Jung’s Shadow showing up in the Stat Wars Dark Side his collective unconscious is used in Herbert ‘ s Bene Gesserit.

Jim @59–

It’s irritating, right? Why is it so hard to get the idea of eternal recurrence through people’s heads?

If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a million times….

Francis Spufford #43: You may not be interested in HTML, but HTML is interested in you.

Niall McAuley@50: When was Freud taken seriously again? (In pop culture, I mean, not as a scientist). One of the fascinating things I got out of a college history class was a couple weeks going over the history of American advertising. Holy cow is it obvious when Freud hit the awareness of ad makers. in the course of a decade or a bit less, ads for everything from cars to canned food go from pretty much staid recitation of facts to innuendo-laden prose torrents. 1920, give or take five years on each side, is about when it happens.

Freud was a significant presence in American culture (I’ll let others speak to other countries) from the ’10s through the postwar era; it’s my impression that he started losing some intellectual mind share in the ’60s and that this continued on through the rest of the century. But, well, to grab a random example, Freudian interpretation is crucial to the wonderful paranoia comedy The President’s Analyst, from 1967, and there is nothing at all remarkable for the time for it being so.

Fuzzy Dunlop@74: That reminds me, Ursula Le Guin has certainly been influenced by Zen and Daoism and related ideas in a disciplined way. I remember being so tickled when taking an intro survey of Chinese philosophy/religion to discover that she’d embedded bits from Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) in The Lathe of Heaven, and of course she actually did a fresh English rendering of the Dao De Ching.

La Mettrie was a big influence on Shelley, and later ideas of ‘artificial consciousness’.

“The Hidden Persuaders” by Vance Packard has a lot of psychoanalytic theorising about the best advert strategies, if I remember.

@oldster:

As an example, I think that Jung is credited with much more influence than he really had. Most of the so-called “Jungian” ideas aren’t proprietary to him at all–they are just universal, archaic patterns that derive from the collective unconscious.

Oh, well played, sir or ma’am!

Someone mentioned Van Vogt, but specifically, The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A come to mind. Also, Bester, again specifically The Stars, My Destination. Quant suff!

Thnks, Jim. You are kind to indulge an old man.

PS Clones whose individual mentalities depend upon their DNA are a kind of theory of mind, albeit a rather genetic determinist one. Ursula LeGuin’s “Nine Lives” and Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

Michael Furlan @34:
Jung to Campbell to Lucas and Star Wars?

I’ve seen arguments to the effect that Lucas started claiming inspiration from Campbell only after Campbell started getting attention arguing for mythical patterns in Star Wars, and the latter was (of course) only after the movie had gotten really popular. (“The spiritual truths of universal human myth” is a lot classier than “old Flash Gordon serials and pulp sci-fi” as a source of inspiration, after all.)

” Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”

Not SF, of course, but:

http://www.longbeachopera.org/2012-season/the-man-who

Another vote for Reich here. He influenced Woody Allen too!

James Blish – A Case of Conscience; Phillip Kerr – A Philosophical Investigation

Bateson is actually still cited by people who work in extended mind / embedded cognition.

Kurt Goldstein, The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (1934)

Though plenty of serious people dumped on it from the beginning, Teilhard de Chardin Phenomenon of Man (1955) probably counts.

John Eccles, The Understanding of the Brain (1973).

I was going to mention Korzybski, also. He’s someone who never
seems to have been taken seriously by academia (e.g. what might
reasonably be called “the Korzybski doctrine” we call “the strong
form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”), but he was very popular
with a number of odd thinkers like Heinlein, Englebart and
Burroughs (William Burroughs, that is). Korzybski’s General
Semantics was used explicitly in Van Vogt’s Null-A books.

William Reich is a good thought too… he was another thinker
popular with the Beats (Burroughs, Kerouac, etc), and could
easily be an influence on the likes of Sturgeon.

I picked up on Gregory Bateson from the Whole Earth Catalog
(Stuart Brand has much to answer for), and I don’t doubt
that their other enthusiasms had some influence on SF.
(maybe Huizinga, “Homo Ludens”?).

I read a minor SF pulp from the 50s (FUTURE, Sept 1952) and found
that a number of the stories played up civilized vs barbarians,
where the human explorers are very controled and rational and the
aliens are wild and sexually seductive. There’s a lot of that in
the first run of Star Trek (logic vs emotion, right?). That’s
all clearly in sync with a lot of anthropology, e.g. Margaret
Mead on Samoa.

By the way: the letter column of that issue of FUTURE had a
theosophist complaining about L. Sprague de Camp dismissing
Madame Blavatsky.

Anyway, to take all of this from the other side: there’s an
expectation in a lot of earlier SF that morality might be
grounded in science, e.g. E.E. Smith’s “Lensman” where possessing
a lens is a guarantee that you’re a Good Guy, or in Heinlein’s
“Starship Troopers” where there’s they use symbolic logic to
settle moral questions. Where exactly does that idea come from?
Most of us children of Descartes are more inclined to overplay
the fact-value dichotomy, where did they get the notion of
morality derivable from scientific reality?

Peter Erwin and Greg,

Peter Erwin: “2. There’s ample evidence from historical linguistics that languages evolve in the absence of literacy. 3. Literate elites are probably just as likely (or more likely) to promote linguistic conservatism. ….
… literate European elites continued writing almost exclusively in Latin until the High Middle Ages, so it’s hard to argue that they were primarily responsible for the development of Italian, French, Spanish, etc.”

Imperial Chinese is a good example of a written language that was distinct from the spoken languages. It was a bit like Latin in that the written language was the same throughout China — and there was a rigorous exam system to maintain standards — whereas the spoken languages were like the different Romance languages in Contintental Europe being quite different from one another so people from areas speaking different language groups couldn’t easily understand each other. There was also a women’s written language in Southern China. When the PRC wanted to mainstream literacy in the mid 20th Century, they changed the script into simpler characters, but traditional characters are still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Peter Erwin @92

Having seen the films, your story makes more sense.

They show the workings of a mind “unencumbered by the thought process”.
T. Magliozzi

@11. Neural networks were a hot area in AI research when Terminator was made. I’m not sure there’s much more to it than that.

Intelligence emerging unexpectedly from a sufficiently sophisticated computer is explored in previous works such as Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Adolescence of P-1.

John,

I know it isn’t primarily a Philosophy of Mind, but Objectivism would appear to meet your first 4 criteria? (But, alas, still far too influential to meet #5.)

sigh

“their writings”, of course

HPMoR, and more generally Less Wrong, is a gold mine in this regard. Those people are of course aware of their own crank factor, and take some measures to avoid going off the deep end, but those measures don’t always work. Or, for more a mainstream work that gestures towards a similar nexus of singularity, simulation, etc., there’s A Fire Upon the Deep and sequels.

I don’t believe anyone has mentioned Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” yet, which inspired John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider”, amongst others.

I think it definitely meets points 1-4 and probably 5. It isn’t a theory of mind as such, though. Still, any excuse to mention the rather brilliant “Shockwave Rider”!

In movies, the 1956 SF classic Forbidden Planet was based loosely on The Tempest and the Caliban character was called The Monster from the Id.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet

Anyone else read “Operators And Things” by Barbara O’Brien?

John, your post gave me the key to the very good, simple description of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: It could be classified as science fiction about the “collective unconscious”.

Consider: It is a novel. It expresses a fictional dreamer’s guilt, confusion and denial about a failure that happened, perhaps during the previous day.

In his sleep, out pours the entire European mental-soup circa 1930, including a cornucopia of references by name and quotation to reams and reams of psychology, philosophy of mind, mysticism and spiritualism — both serious and pop, from the ancients up to the time of its composition, even Conan Doyle and Blavatsky.

It’s not clear that Joyce really believed in the “collective unconscious” (unlike Jung). Yet Joyce obviously took it as a literary theme that is necessitated by a major trend in modernism (and he locates the beginning of the trend in Vico, another writer who fits your five criteria, although an English translation of Vico did not appear for 150 years).

So, Finnegans Wake has been difficult to explain because, in addition to its broken language, it is a genre-bender. It’s a fictional representation of where myth is generated; in essence, it’s a science fiction about meta-myth.

Joyce had serious purposes, and one reason he may have led himself down this path was an intent to update Dante’s encoded presentation of mystical experience for the modern era.

But “modern” means “scientific”, and Joyce took every theory or creed, whether serious or popular — including science — to be provisional if not misleading. Because that would suit the unconscious! Accordingly, everything is leveled into the soup of dream puns.

Something valid remains of Arthur Koestler. His short essay, “Some general properties of self-regulating open hierarchic order” (1969), which I think was derived from The Ghost in the Machine, is a remarkable statement of systems-hierarchical epistemology. It’s about ten light-years beyond anything Hayek wrote, and still unsurpassed.

I think that Gregory Bateson hasn’t come into his own, yet. He was beginning to describe the contours of a life science/social science which would posit “information” as a basic thing, to stand alongside “mass-energy”. This is a return to the ancient dichotomy of form vs. substance. Bateson won’t lead to deterministic quantitative prediction, but then, neither will much of social science.

So far however, the monists will have none of it, even the neutral ones. Perhaps it’s because, in their futile search for the quantifiable, they become addicted to great quantities of pages of science fiction… Leavened by reams of realms of sword and sorcery! Yet, if only they paid attention, the philosophy of mathematics and the rise of “philosophy of computation”, if we could call it that, would throw a big chink into their armor.

It’s great that there are so many “not exactly phil of mind but…” responses here. The on-line equivalent of “My question is more of an observation…”

There’s a passage in a Philip K.Dick novel speculating that FW was inspired by alien or time-travelling influences, I think it’s in “The Divine Invasion”.

John, I think that, in terms of a history of this, you are almost asking for a book with universal subject matter. When the Great Chain of Being was inverted in the popular mind in around the middle of the 18th century (see Arthur O. Lovejoy), all sorts of myths, legends, and religious stories became psychologically available to “repurpose” into fiction, and into speculative nonfiction about the constitution of the psycho-social world. There appear to have been many dozens of bestsellers in several languages, now all but forgotten, and this may have influenced the earliest SF and horror.

PS on computer theories of mind: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. The AI Shalmaneser V (if I remember the name correctly) is a practicing solipsist.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that part of the initial appeal of Dianetics was that it promised some of the same mental-health benefits that Freudianism was famous for (while claiming to be superior to the latter, of course), at a time when Freudian psychiatry was largely unavailable to the general public — mainly because Freudian psychotherapists were a) rather rare; and b) expensive.

casmilus, you are the first person I’ve come across who has heard of Operators and Things, never mind read it.

I didn’t know about the the shoddy reprint. I was lucky enough to find an old paperback of it for cheap some years ago.

i find it remarkable that an audience of this level of erudition and sophistication has paid
so little attention to Philip K Dick. Like Nietzsche and Blake, he takes some getting used
to; but he deserves (and rewards) serious attention.

[In a recent discussion of film adaptations of his books, it was said that his `Do androids dream of electric sheep’ has been misinterpreted as being about how closely robots might
resemble people, when its real concern is why people act like robots.]

For the curious,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik

is a good place to start…

“anthropology as a whole was used. Andre Norton drew on anthropological studies for her cultures (I’d have to dig around in the books to find a specific reference.) Heinlein had a minor anthropologist character in Citizen of the Galaxy named Margaret Mader, and Gordon Dickson’s No Room for Man (also published as Necromancer) borrows terminology from Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language.” raven on the hill @137

Say what now? Do you mean that Bateson drew on anthro to develop his theories? He was married to Margaret Mead after all…

To your last point, he did seem bemused by the eco-mystical ends to which his work was often put.

@136 I heard of it as it is mentioned here:

http://www.zero-books.net/books/hidden-valleys

The reprint does have an Introduction setting out the history of the book. There was a film version mooted at one point. It’s had waves of popularity over the years.

http://www.amazon.com/Operators-Things-Inner-Life-Schizophrenic/dp/0615509282/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1449608481&sr=8-1&keywords=operators+and+things

If you like that sort of thing, check out the many different styles of cover design it’s had, from the 50s through 70s to 90s and teens.

Leibniz’ characteristica unversalis to Bertrand Russell to John W. Campbell?

Jack Morava @138

“i find it remarkable that an audience of this level of
erudition and sophistication has paid so little attention to
Philip K Dick.”

A number of people have referenced Dick already. Myself, I think his
(largely posthumous) popularity is itself an odd phenomena, he seems to
have been discovered and championed by people who aren’t terribly familiar
with other Science Fiction… there’s no question he was a very good
writer, but they give him more credit than he deserves. E.g. A.E. van
Vogt was just as weird (if not weirder) than Philip K. Dick, though it
seems that van Vogt was less self-aware about it.

I’ve read Ubik, and thought it was fun but not tremendously heavy.
It’s got an improvised first draft quality to it– I don’t think
Dick knew where he was going when he started.

I think there is an implicit theory of mind in The Second Sex< and its popularisation The Female Eunuch. They fulfil the first three criteria and possibly the fifth, but because the theory is implicit, it might be too much work for you, John.

Feminists seem to focus on the self as a whole rather than its parts.

Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin presents an anti-Spenglerian, rather uniquely brilliant unfolding of human consciousness from the flattened linearity of the Archaic through to the eteological parturiency within the Integral of our modern present. A philosophy of mind via the prism of culture, in a manner of speaking…

Yeats.

There’s also Michio Kaku’s “The Future of the Mind.”

phenomenal cat@140, 141: Bateson and Mead met doing anthropological research and worked together for, IIRC, about 15 years before Bateson left her. Bateson’s later work was rooted in his early anthropological work. But perhaps the strongest anthropological connection comes through Ursula Kroeber LeGuin, daughter of anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber.

Joseph Brenner@145: Blish himself acknowledged Spengler as an influence. Psychohistory, as far as I know, was an invention of Asimov himself, though it was built on macro-historical theory (which Alfred Kroeber also dabbled in.) It’s a fairly obvious step if you were a science-fiction writer of the period and also underlies some time-travel stories: if a science of history can exist, even a rough, statistical science, why not shaping history as an engineering practice? And that, of course, leads back to Marx and perhaps other 19th-century philosophers.

Blish spent some fiction addressing issues of Roman Catholic theology. and Lafferty’s work is similarly informed– his beautifully written novel “The Fall of Rome,” for example, passing as nonfictional history.

Similarly, Jewish topics and themes often inspire genre works. See for instance the marvelous short story master Avram Davidson.

Robert Sheckley ‘s “Options,” a short novel in 64 sections is based on I Ching hexagrams. His sometime collaborator, Roger Zelazny, based his “Chronicles of Amber” series on the tarot and is hardly the only writer to base works on the cards . Do those books qualify for this comversation? Or do tarot and the Chinese oracle not count as philosophies of mind?

BTW, Lafferty also has a story in which everything in the universe needs to be held specifically in mind or it ceases to exist. Bishop Berkeley, anyone?