title: Exploring the brain, looking for thoughts: on Asimov's second Fantastic Voyage.
abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate various concerns which appear in Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain. I will disregard his first voyage inside a human body in Fantastic Voyage I, which the author disavows as not being his own work. In contrast, the second voyage is intricate, suggesting problems drawn from a variety of sources. In a nutshell, Asimov's explorers enter the body of a comatose man in order to read his thoughts. The story can be related both to philosophical thought-experiments, such as those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and of Herbert Feigl, as well as to personal anxieties peculiar to Asimov.
authors.affiliation: CNRS, France, UMR 7219, SPHERE. pierre.cassou-nogues@univ-lille3.fr
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cassou-Noguès
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology; D003243:Consciousness; D005197:Famous Persons; D049673:History, 20th Century; D018594:Human Body; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D019365:Metaphor; D013850:Thinking; D014481:United States