Before I start, massive kudos to Guy Henry, an actor too excellent for words. To make 'Henrik Hanssen' both believable and worthy of our empathy. Staggering!
Apropos nothing in particular today, I was reminded of early evenings spent in front of the televisual magic lantern, in the days when I worked a vaguely normal day and could somehow be home by six and my partner would have my slippers warmed by the fire, a pipeful of ready rubbed shag (I kid you not, it was really called ready rubbed shag*) tobacco and the chips (that's fries for you yanks wot dont spik da kings English) frying in the pan. That was a time of true relaxation, a time spent in the company of chips, deep fried in lard, eggs fried in beef dripping and Heinz baked beans and Lea & Perrins, topped with duck fat croutons and, holy of holies, Star Trek: TNG on the goggle box. Star Trek, and Patrick Stewart ordering 'Make it so', in the eighties was the only known antidote to a heart attack and it also dissolved the rotting fat in your arteries. It is no accident that I only had a stroke after giving up Star Trek: TNG and moving on to Wallander and Battlestar Galatica.
The episode in question is one in which, in the space of a mere fifteen minutes, Picard (Stewart) has to defend, by legal argument, Commander Data, the android, against the man that wants to dismantle him in order to find out how he works and therefore build more like him. (Shades of Tolkien's Gandalf there; "he that breaks a thing to find out how it works has left the path of wisdom") It is the officer's right because, as an android, Data cannot be afforded any of the rights of the Federation's constitution, essentially the same as the American one - no surprise there then - because he is not 'alive', a living, feeling being.
This, in a superficial way, although not so superficial as it turns out, goes to heart of an eternal dilemma; how do you tell the humans from the zombies****, in what way can you tell the man from the machine? How do you know something is alive in the way that each and every one of us knows that we are alive? The matter was a largely academic one before the machine age since zombies were merely a theoretical construct, a 'what if' parable, the province of the professional, and sometimes the amateur down the pub, philosopher. However, with the rise of 'machine intelligence' and a growing belief in the 'intelligence' of other animals, do we need a better way of grappling with this question than the 'Turing test'?
At root, the fundamental question is 'Am I alive?', to which the answer is, as Descartes famously said, 'cogito ergo sum', a resounding 'Yes'; by our very definition of what being alive means this must be so, no life, no definition! However, is this definition of life valid? Just because we ask the question does not necessarily mean we know what the answer is or what it might mean. The mice assume, as we do, that when they give 'Deep Thought' the perennial question to answer, the question of life, the universe and everything, that they will know what the answer means. When it happens to be '42', they have no more idea as to what the answer might mean than we do.
John Searle once conducted a 'thought experiment' in which we feed a Chinese text, say 'The art of war' by Sun Tzu, into a closed room with which we have no contact except for a small chute out of which a translation into English will appear in time. Eventually, the book appears duly translated. Does this room exhibit conscientiousness, life? No, argues Searle, because the room lacks 'intentionality, even if there is a little man inside, duly consulting the translations of every pictogram in the Chinese language, and rendering the text into grammatical English, it is still an automaton-like behaviour which, lacking intent, cannot be alive, cannot have conscientiousness. Most people would, I think, agree the basic principles with Searle. However, is this valid?
Whether one is 'a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain, a Buddhist, a Baptist or a Jew' (to sort of quote Buffy Saint-Marie*****), the sense of 'soul', 'spirit', 'mind' pervades every society; that there is something other than the raw materials of a physical body, a 'something' which makes us alive. However, all of the evidence (yes, I know a rational argument simply uses the a priori assumption that I am alive, it is one, of many, reasons that I am not a philosopher) suggests that this is not the case. No evidence has been found for a soul or spirit, a life force which transcends the moment when we are consigned to the furnace to save space in the graveyard, no heaven and no hell, no giant cosmic wheel of reincarnation, no journey to enlightenment, and no evidence to suggest that our wildest dreams and creations are not just the product of the passage of electrically charged ions across a synaptic gap formed by that most wonderful of creation of evolution; the brain cell.
Is thought, belief not, at a basic level, merely automaton-like behaviour and, if it is, what gives us the right to pronounce on 'alive, not alive'? Is our translation of Sun Tzu any better, any more valid, then Searle's closed room because we apply a further 'layer' or 'layers' to it; seek to define what was in Sun Tzu's mind (there it is again!) when he first penned the work.
This is, of course, a largely academic, and pointless, exercise, the province of professional philosophers with too much time on their hands, since it is an intractable problem; the definition of the problem already makes too many a priori assumptions, not the least of which is that we know what it is to be alive. However, I do wonder sometimes whether the notion that thought, ethics, morality, justice might just be a product of automaton-like behaviour, might just make us consider that 'alive', 'life' extends beyond the confines of the strictly human and thereby make us somehow more responsible, more caring, more aware of that which we hold in our hands.
By its very nature, science-fiction forces us to confront these issues. Whether it be Data's 'humanity' (and Picard does a good job in justifying that - the hologram of 'Tasha Yar is surely the defining moment of his address), the 'aliveness' of the 'Crystal Entity' or the ship that is 'Tin Man', the question as to whether a cloud of gas or a planet can be alive, whether or not it is capable of conscious thought, impels us to a position where we no longer deem our human-centric view to be the most valid.
Should I consider my computer alive? It seems to be. Or at least as much as an amoeba. I provide the stimulus via a keyboard or a mouse, it provides a response. It matters not a jot whether the response is a product of 'man's invention'; we have become the gods of man's invention.
* I do not expect to have to point out what 'rubbed' might mean in this context; 'shag' is a more polite word for 'fuck'. As in the phrase, 'you shag a slag**' but you make love to your missus*** :)
** Slag. A euphemism for a 'worldly girl'; one who is prepared to 'give it away' for half a bottle of Cava and a bag of pork scratchings, or lardons as they are known in French.
*** The wife.
**** 'Zombie' is a staple of philosophical discussion; the being that appears human but is not.
***** 'The universal soldier', a song, written at the height of the US war in Viet-Nam, which goes to the heart of what it is to be existentially responsible, hippie-chick cod philosophy notwithstanding; the full lyric is here.
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