Rucker's Cartesian Demon

Even with the profound escalations in human knowledge and ability Postsingular purposes, Rudy Rucker demonstrates human inability to answer certain pressing philosophical questions. By highlighting the limitations of human knowledge within the context of incredible human achievement, Rucker displays the limitless nature of investigation into metaphysical and epistemological ideas. Indeed, future technology and epiphanies may merely clarify the impossibility of answering certain questions.

Specifically, Postsingular forces the reader to question their knowledge of and access to an external world.

“What actually happened was that the Big Pig, for reasons of her own, threw Jayjay into a profoundly convincing hallucination that seemed to him, to last a full sixty years. During the six or seven hours that Thuy was gone, Jayjay lived out an entire simulated life, full of incident and emotion, the sim life ending with death by virus at the deeply hallucinated age of eighty-four” (Postsingular, 290).

Although this occurrence is specific to and contextualized within Postsingular, it has implications that intellectuals have wrestled with for ages. For example, as an underpinning to Cartesian skepticism, René Descartes purposed a similar story about a delusion caused by a demon.
"I will suppose some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment" (René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: First Meditation).

Inevitably, the philosophical implications of doubt about external world knowledge are not unique to Postsingular or the science fiction genre in general. But by developing a story to suspend disbelief about the possibility of extended delusions, Postsingular makes the question all the more interesting. In general, science fiction postulates philosophical questions in specific, evolving, and unique stories to contextualize the concept with names, personalities, places, and emotions. By creating concrete variables to engage the concept, science fiction literature enables the reader to understand and synthesize the information more explicitly.

Through the character development of Big Pig and analysis of Jayjay’s life, Rucker is providing a name and personality to the Cartesian demon, analyzing the content of a delusional life, and investigating the emotions involved in this dilemma. Ultimately, he unravels the same epistemological dilemma: no one truly knows whether the world external to people is merely a figment of their own, or someone else’s imagination or simulation.