Waking Up Different

Abstract

Kafka’s emblematic and luckless Gregor Samsa woke from his dreary ordinary life to find himself metamorphized into a large beetle but still retaining his own consciousness. Would it be like that for a totally paralyzed or dying person to awaken inside a sexless cyborg body, spared death but no longer physically human. That, and the switching of minds from one body to another, used to be a narrative nightmare of horror fiction. In today’s sf, it is often a poignant step into freedom and unexpected adventure.

My position on consciousness and free will has been called mysterianism . The mysterian position is an old and venerable one… the philosopher Owen Flanagan noted that some modern scientists have suggested that consciousness might never be completely explained in conventional scientific terms—or in any terms, for that matter.

John Horgan , 1999, p. 247