Andy Weir
Andy Weir’s hard science fiction examines how cognitive agents interact across extreme environmental and physical constraints. In Project Hail Mary (Ballantine Books, 2021, ISBN 978-0-593-13520-4), he constructs a rigorous encounter between a human astronaut (Ryland Grace) and an extraterrestrial intelligence (Rocky, an Eridian engineer).
Weir’s depiction addresses a core problem in the philosophy of mind: how two minds instantiated on radically disjoint sensory substrates (human visual-trichromatic cognition vs. Eridian high-frequency acoustic echolocation in high-pressure darkness) can establish shared semantic representations, coordinate causal models of the physical universe, and construct a functional theory of mind without shared biological ancestry.
Known for. Author of The Martian (2011), Artemis (2017), and Project Hail Mary (2021)
Coverage on this site
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.