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    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds
    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds
    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds

    By Noah Levin

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    About this ebook

    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds is a thought-provoking collection of philosophically inspired science-fiction short stories by Noah Levin. The stories revolve around the central theme of how memories relate to our identities and how potential technologies can alter this relationship. The three stories contained within this short volume (Rhonda, Daydream Believer, and Percival and the Grail) each explore different issues in different ways. These stories have the same feel as an episode of Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, and any fans of these shows, sci-fi short stories, or just a good story in general, will enjoy this work. The author, Noah Levin, has published both academic articles and book chapters, but this is his first independent publication.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNoah Levin
    Release dateJan 1, 2019
    ISBN9780463468128
    The Digital Galleries of Our Minds
    Author

    Noah Levin

    Noah Levin is a publisher of FREE works for everyone. His day job is a Professor of Philosophy, and his night job is writing cool stuff, mostly philosophically informed science fiction. If you want to download anything I've written (in ePub and PDF formats) visit my publisher, NGE Far Press at http://www.ngefarpress.com .

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      Book preview

      The Digital Galleries of Our Minds - Noah Levin

      The Digital Galleries of Our Minds

      by

      Noah Levin

      For my wife, Jenny,

      And our children:

      Talia, Ronen, and Ziva

      Without whose support and inspiration none of this would have been possible.

      Licensing Information

      This work is released under a modified CC-BY-NC-ND license. You may copy, print, distribute, share, and do anything you like with this work (as long as you keep it intact and attribute me, Noah Levin, the author) EXCEPT profit from it or any derivative works. All rights to profit from this work (if money can be made from it) are reserved solely by the author because I want to be the one to make money from it (if such a thing is possible). But since I doubt I can make money out of this and I wrote this for fun, I don’t want a desire for profits to be a barrier to anyone ever reading this. You get what you pay for, right? This is free, so don’t expect much, except the rambling stories of a troubled imagination. Aside from small quotes used for scholarly, journalistic, or publicity purposes (or anything else that falls under fair use), any distributions of any part of this work must contain this notice.

      But seriously, who am I kidding? This is free because I know you won’t pay for it even if I asked you to. But if you want to support me in making more stuff like this (paying for future works, if you will, which I’m sure you’ll regret), you can support me on Patreon:

      http://www.patreon.com/nlevin

      You can find all my works available wherever there is a desire to read them. And for FREE here:

      A Phony Publisher for Real Works

      http://www.ngefarpress.com

      You can contact the author at the above websites or at nlevin@gmail.com

      The Digital Galleries of Our Minds

      by Noah Levin

      Originally Released in 2018

      ISBN: 9780463468128

      Acknowledgments

      Thank you to all of those that read earlier drafts of this work and provided helpful feedback and words of encouragement: my wife Jenny for being my guinea pig and test subject to determine if I was wasting my time pursuing this project; my family: Aaron Levin, Victoria Levin, and Jerry Levin; my friends Chris Gee and Juan Olier (and his students); and my students that sent me encouraging words to write more after reading (or being subjected to) the stories I wrote explicitly for the purposes of Philosophical education. 

      Contents

      0 Foreword

      1 Rhonda

      2 Daydream Believer

      3 Percival and the Grail

      4 Afterword

      0 Foreword

      ¹

      I just read the news that Ursula K. Le Guin passed away. It was two days ago, but it still takes time for information to spread, even with the countless methods of electronic dissemination we have. It feels fitting that I partly dedicate this volume to her because she is one of the reasons I am writing this. Without her influence and words, I would have never thought seriously about undertaking this project. Her speech when she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters coupled with some other bits of advice from authors that began later in life saying something to the tune of my best advice is to start sooner than later! lit the proverbial fire under my butt. This was maybe half a year ago, and here I am, finally putting some of my visions into existence, as my technical ability to use the written word has finally caught up to my ability to imagine (I hope), and I can finally craft a story very close to what I envision it should be. At the very least, what I am presenting here is a faithful presentation of what I was one day hoping to create.

      I write this foreword now before completing two of the three stories contained herein because it feels appropriate. I have their path laid out clearly in my head and I am having that rare feeling of gumption to finish them, but I must write this first. Writing is a life activity, as Steinbeck taught me from his experiences writing the incomparable Grapes of Wrath. This foreword to honor Le Guin is the exact preparative I need to complete my short volume. It will be my first piece that I will let others (anyone) read and all I can do is my best, writing for myself and seeing if others enjoy it as well. Stephen King, in his foreword for his last version of The Gunslinger that he knows people won’t and shouldn’t read but actually wanted them to read, helped solidify my acceptance of that mantra.

      While this volume is dedicated partly to Urusula K. Le Guin’s memory, and my stories are mostly about our memories and how they define us (and these stories are not merely my musings on the future of science and technology – truly great works of science fiction and fantasy perform their best when they utilize the right fanciful setting to tell a story about humanity), it feels odd to say this both because the news of her death is so fresh and because she will never die. Her life and words live on through her works, and will undoubtedly continue to entertain and inspire many people for generations to come. The irony of dedicating this volume to memory is that we don’t really have memories as we generally think about them. We have our lasting impressions of what struck us as interesting and important about an event or feeling. We paint a picture of what we remember, focusing on the details that matter to us, for whatever reason. Oftentimes, we are unaware of the reason ourselves. Much like how the painter of a person’s portrait attempts to cast their (yes, this is a singular their, thank you, Ursula, for convincing me to use this) subject in a specific type of light, those events that happen to us get filtered into an essence that preserves those most striking elements. The portraits of memories are all we have. And there you have it, the meaning for the original title of this volume buried in that most useless of all pieces: the foreword…but I have clearly chosen to change the title away from this.

      After reading this proposed title, my wife remarked that while the title fit the stories, it sounded a bit sentimental and didn’t make it clear that the work was one of science fiction. She was right, so I thought about this, and also realized I’m not telling tales about memories themselves. I’m musing about the collections of our memories and how they impact our identities. If I take the portrait analogy one step further, then our minds (and our identities) would be portrait galleries, with the portraits of our memories adorning the labyrinthine walls of our innermost caverns. Some paintings will be better than others and more cherished; others will get dusty; still others will get put into storage, possibly never to be seen again. Some will get damaged and even some will be found to be fakes. Some go on loan, and some get copied. We store them in a fashion similar to computer files, but often with much less organization (or maybe not, and if you saw how I organized my files, you’d understand). Since our brains are effectively a network of electronic impulses, our minds can, in theory, be stored as files on a computer and subsequently even recreated in a virtual space so that anyone could take a stroll through the digital galleries of our minds. And now you have it: the meaning for the title buried even deeper into that even

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