“The genre has been defined as an art of “cognitive estrangement”. This means, in the first place, that science fiction distances us from our everyday cognitive assumptions and frames of reference – which is something that philosophy is also supposed to do. But the definition also implies, at least in some instances, that science fiction works to estrange us from the very possibility of being able to cognize our “immediate experience” at all. In science fiction narratives, cognition may fail because new technologies “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception” so radically that there is no evident pathway from here to there; or because the sort of subjectivity that we take for granted has broken down; or because we encounter alien forms of sentience that are not commensurable with our own.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”


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LLMs can be trained to show that can't be shown, i.e. confabulate consistently on a massive scale.

“Science fiction is a special kind of literature – or better, paraliterature, as Samuel R. Delany calls it – that operates through speculation and extrapolation, and that takes place (conceptually, if not grammatically) in the future tense. It is a kind of thought experiment, a way of entertaining odd ideas, and of asking off-the-wall what if? questions. But instead of approaching its issues abstractly, as philosophy does, or breaking them down into empirically testable propositions, as physical science does, science fiction embodies these issues in characters and narratives.
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The method of science fiction is emotional and situational, rather than rational and universalizing. ”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”