The Machine as Literary Exoconsciousness in Works of César Aira, Mario Levrero and Ricardo Piglia

Abstract

From the very beginning of Literature, there’s a deep link between human beings and imaginary androids. The presence of this ancient topic in nowadays literature should by no means be regarded as extraordinary, insofar those machines in current times are involved in worldwide scientific and philosophical discussions about the ethical limits of Artificial Intelligence and the trueness and scales of their cognition and awareness. The main idea of this paper is that there are good grounds to suppose that our perceiving and reasoning skills are indeed reproductible and developable by machines, not only in the view of neuroscientific theories that maintain expanded or distributed cognition, but also in the imagination of some Latin-American writers, such as Mario Levrero (La máquina de pensar en Gladys), César Aira (in many books, especially in El pequeño monje budista) and Ricardo Piglia (La ciudad ausente). Those authors seem to explore the possibility of a fictious exoconsciousness.