but it received a substantive rewrite afterwards, so we could say it was written after “Hopeful Monsters,” as well. This novella is another of the stories that appear here for the first time. While the arguments for artificial intelligence and for “downloading minds” into computers are well known to science fiction readers—Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Penguin, 2006) is typical—the arguments against them are not. By this I do not mean arguments that we should not do these things, but that we cannot do them. The idea for the story came from reading the Gödelian papers of the Oxford philosopher, John Lucas, specifically “Minds, Machines, and Gödel,” Philosophy, XXXVI, 1961, pp. 112-127 copied along with subsequent replies and responses on his website: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ (scroll down to I Gödelian Papers). I later learned that the physicist Roger Penrose had taken up the argument, and that Gödel himself argued against the mechanistic concept of the mind.
