Sci-Fi Metaphysics

Remember Johnny 5? You know, the military defense robot in the movie Short Circuit that comes alive as the result of getting zapped by lightning? How about Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Mr. Data? The android who (or is it which; we’re getting to that) has made attaining humanity (whatever that is; we’re getting to that, too) the ultimate goal for his existence. The Terminator (later to become the Governator) comes back from a sentient, yet murderous, computer/robot ruled future to protect a young boy who is the only hope to save humanity from extermination. And from one of my wife’s favorite movies, the recent movie based on the novel by Isaac Asimov, I Robot, Sonny discovers his uniqueness as the first robot to have, dare we call it, a soul.

All of these characters share some common threads. They are anthropomorphized machines. Each one faces its (or is it “his”) own challenges. We want the good robots to succeed and we want the bad robots to fail. We care for them. We want them to be treated justly and with dignity. We don’t actually see them as things but as persons.

In fact, calling them “it” or “thing” just doesn’t seem to fit. That’s what the evil scientist did he wanted to take Data apart to study him (it; I’m so confused) so he could make a whole herd of slave robots to do work that was too dangerous for real people. The episode peaks emotionally when Commander Riker, acting as legal council for the bad guy, presents a very compelling argument, even though he doesn’t really believe it himself, that Data is in fact only a machine, and as such does not have the right to refuse what its owners, Starfleet, want to do with him (I mean it). It isn’t until Data chooses to save the life of the doctor, the very man who wants to kill/disassemble him, that the doctor changes his mind and begins to see Data as a person rather than a thing. And when the technology-hating Detective Spooner in I Robot called Sonny “he” for the first time, the audience feels a great sense of relief that Spooner has finely come around to the fact that Sonny deserves to be treated as a person rather than a toaster.

Of course the question all these situations dance around is, “What is it to be human?” Why do we see these characters as person’s rather than things? With Sonny, it’s his ability to choose whether or not to obey the Three Laws. In Asimov’s futuristic story, every robot comes hard wired with the Three Laws.

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.[1]

With the Three Laws operating system at the heart of each robot, the robots are seen as completely trustworthy, yet they are not seen as anything other than machines. Sonny also has the three laws but he is unique. His designer built Sonny in such a way that he can actually choose not to obey them. He has freedom of choice with moral responsibility. He has a moral conscience. This is what makes Sonny unique. This is what makes him a person. This is why the audience can see him as a person. And this is part of what makes you and me human persons as well. We know there is right and wrong.

Of course, in real life we don’t hold our computers or our robots morally responsible. They are just like the regular robots in I Robot. They are personhood-less. They’re just computer controlled machines whose actions can be explained completely by chemistry and physics. We don’t think much about tossing them out or replacing a broken part when they stop functioning. But we treat people very differently. This is just the way the world works. There is something that we know intuitively about human beings, we are peculiar in our nature. There’s something about us that makes us different way down deep at the foundation of who and what we are. It’s a good thing we don’t think people are just complex biological machines. Man, wouldn’t that be scary?

But some people do think that humans are just complex biological machines. They think we are not actually peculiar in our nature, but merely in our structure, that in fact we don’t have a nature at all. In their view, humans are simply made up of physical stuff, matter and energy, just like rocks, and trees and stars at the most foundational level. It is the unique complexity and organization of their physical parts that causes all of our peculiar characteristics to emerge. I loved playing with Legos as a child. I could make almost anything out of those multi colored blocks. But whether a space ship or a dragon, at the end of the day, they were all just made out of legos. That’s what people are like, on this view. After all, if you look at the protons and electrons in a rock they look exactly the same as the protons and electrons in a human body. They’re just put together differently. We can see this objectively with the tools of science, after all. And this view is called physicalism.

But there is something missing in this picture. We are only able to see the things we are able to see. Some have confused this with meaning only the things we can see actually exist. Seeing is believing, as it were. But here is a question that deserves some attention. If this were actually the case, why try to see something that we couldn’t already see? It looks like we really think some things exist which are invisible. That’s why we go looking for them.

And besides, there are lots of things that we can’t see whose effects we observe all the time. By their nature, they are invisible. Take gravity for example. We know it’s real. We see and feel its effects. But scientists have yet to really get at what it is. How about electro-magnetic fields? We can’t see those. They don’t actually have a physical form, but we know they exist because of their effects. But people were using compasses long before they could understand Earth’s electro magnetic field. And just like gravity and electromagnetic fields have a visible effect on the world, invisible human souls have visible effects on the physical world through their bodies. But gravity and electromagnetic fields don’t have moral choice or a sense of self.

I know I have a sense of self to which only I have direct access. I just pay attention to it and I know it’s there, by intuition. And I am quite sure that you have a similar sense of self. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this paper. I expect “you” to read and understand it. Self awareness is not a new concept requiring explanation. Everyone has this sense of self. All of the robots mentioned earlier are portrayed as having this same sense of self. And this is one of the things which makes them personal. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be very interesting characters after all.

I also have the sense that I am actually thinking and feeling, and that I am in control of these faculties. In other words, I can choose to think about and do just about anything I want to. Sure there are limits to my abilities. I can’t choose to make a four sided circle, or bench press a freight train. I am limited by the laws of logic, physics, and chemistry, but not controlled by them. I am autonomous, like Sonny. I’m not like the other robots who have no choice but to follow their programming. I have a strong sense that my thoughts and feelings are not merely the product of chemical reactions. I have consciousness.

Here’s a little experiment. I know that right now, as you read these words you are thinking about a purple elephant standing on its hind legs surrounded by 5 yellow monkeys. Wow! I can read your mind! Now, you could simply change your mind and think about something else. Go ahead. Stop reading this, close your eyes if you need to and think about something else. . . . See, you actually have control over your thinking, at least to some degree. I could bring up the purple elephant and yellow monkeys again and . . . well, you get the picture. The point is. There’s something going on within each of our minds that no one else can observe. Sure, we could do brain scans of people thinking about elephants and monkeys and we would find some activity there, but we wouldn’t be able to actually think their same thoughts with them. Each of us would have our own unique experience of our own thoughts, even though the thoughts are about the same thing.

There’s something else unique about myself. When I think about the first time I rode a bicycle without any hands, I have the distinct sense that it was the same me on that long gravel driveway, hands high in the air at the age of 9, that is writing these words at the age of 31. There is something about me that keeps being me over time. How does that happen? If I and my sense of “I” are merely the product of the unique arrangement of stuff, matter and energy, that is my physical body, how is it that my sense of “I” endures? Every piece of stuff that made up the “me” riding that bicycle in third grade has been replaced with some different piece. The physical me is not the same today as the physical me in third grade. If I have physically changed, how can I be the same me? And it’s not just me. Other people tell me stories about what they did or experienced as a child, and they really think they were the same person then as they are now.

The body changes from moment to moment. But we know from intuition that the self endures over time and is not undone by physical changes in the body. The person is more than their body. I had a serious disease that required the removal of an internal organ in order for me to survive. My body is literally missing a piece. Am I still me? Am I less of me than I was before? My body is different, for sure. But the bill collectors sure seem to think I’m still me. Physicalism can’t explain the existence of the enduring self, the “I” that remains over time.

There are some profound consequences if physicalism turns out to actually be the case. If physicalism is true, then every person convicted of a crime was innocent. Think about it. The person sitting in the court room was not the same person who committed the crime because they are not made up of the same physical stuff anymore. They would literally be a different person if our personhood is merely physical.

In fact, if there is not something non-physical that makes humans really, substantially different from rocks and trees and cats and dogs, then we must either hold everything to equally moral standards or hold nothing to any moral standard. After all, if we’re just all matter and energy answering ultimately to only the laws of physics, then Hitler was no more morally responsible for the death of millions of innocent lives than the leaves in my front yard are for falling off the tree. In fact, those six million lives weren’t even innocent. Innocence and guilt apply to souls, not atoms and molecules. If physicalism is true, then the Holocaust was nothing but survival of the fittest. But it wasn’t just survival of the fittest. It was a horrible moral wrong committed by human persons against other human persons.

You see, the only way the world can actually work is if there is an actual enduring self that is not simply the product of matter and energy. This idea is called substance dualism. You’re familiar with the idea already. You’ve been reading about it for several paragraphs now. Here it is in a nutshell. The person is a mind(soul)/body unity. That is, we’re made of two kinds of stuff, physical (matter and energy) and non-physical (the mind or soul). If only my physical body were here, I wouldn’t be here and the body wouldn’t actually be able to survive without the soul (me) giving it life. But if only my soul were here, I would be here.

Our language reveals our real beliefs about this. When my Great Grandma Ethel died of cancer, our family all gathered together to have a funeral to mourn her passing and celebrate her life. All of the words we used to describe her were past tense. We talked about missing her. We talked about the kind of person she was. We used phrases like, “now that she’s gone,” “we really miss her.” But you see her body was still there with us. But we all knew the part of her, the non-physical part of her, that made Grandma Ethel the wonderful person that she was, was no longer in her body.

Some people see this mind/body dualism kind of like a hermit crab and a shell. Hermit crabs (the soul) can move into any shell (body) that fits. Thomas Aquinas had a different idea. He said that the soul and the body were more closely related. His idea is that the soul actually directs the formation of the body and causes it to grow into a physical form that is appropriate for its type[2]. This would explain why we not only don’t, but could not have, human souls living in ape bodies, or dog bodies, or any other type of body for that matter. Some people may be rats, but they still have human souls. You also couldn’t have a robot person either. Sorry Data, you’ll have to stay a fictional character.

But there’s more than intuition that helps us know that we are souls with bodies. Remember I said before that we can only see what we can see. But we can know much more than we personally experience. Most of what you know is the result, not of your experience, but someone teaching you. This is called knowledge by authority. My mom and dad taught me a lot of things over the years and continue to teach me things. They have proven themselves to be trustworthy sources of knowledge. But of course they are not infallible. They are wrong on occasion.

But there is a trustworthy authority that has a history of never being wrong. I don’t have space here to go into all the reasons why God is the most trustworthy authority and why we know that the Bible is his revealed truth. There is plenty of evidence elsewhere to support this. For now, I will treat it as a given that what the Bible says is true. Again, this is not a baseless assumption. I do have good reasons for this position. Historical accuracy, textual criticism, archeological evidence, cosmological evidence, fulfilled prophecy, various philosophical arguments, scientific evidence; it’s all there for the finding.

Anyway, the Bible teaches us that there is something about us that keeps existing even after we die. Hebrews 9:27 says, “…it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment….” The physical body dies, but the person, their conscious self, continues to experience existence. Jesus himself experienced physical death, but continued to be himself even while his body was dead. So the Biblical revelation agrees with what we know about ourselves from intuition, by just paying attention to the nature of our own existence.

But the Bible also says something very important about the nature of human souls. See what Paul writes concerning human souls and physical bodies in I Corinthians 15:38-55.

But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds, and another of fish....

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So also it is written, "The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL." The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly. Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, "DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP in victory. "O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR VICTORY? O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR STING?"

You see, our souls endure, not just over time while we live in our current physical bodies, they will last much longer than our physical bodies. But we will get a new body that won’t get old and fall apart and rot and break and decay. We will have bodies fit for eternity.

Could it be that some day there will be a real Data or Sonny, a machine with consciousness? No. And I have good reasons for thinking that I am right. But these Science Fiction characters help us see what it is to truly be human. If we didn’t have a universal sense of self with unique access to our own thoughts and feelings that can control itself, and that has morally consequential choice, then we wouldn’t be able to think about the very thing we are thinking about right now. We wouldn’t be able to consider whether it is really the case or simply the product of natural forces. Society wouldn’t work, and the world that we actually live in every day wouldn’t exist. And we wouldn’t have science fiction characters who want to be human.

Now that seems like a pretty trustworthy conclusion. Physicalism is false. We really do have souls that will last beyond the death of our physical bodies. And that’s something no mere machine will every have.

Works Cited

“Three Laws of Robotics” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics Accessed on 12/16/2005

Moreland J.P. & Scott B. Rae. 2000. Body & Soul: Human nature &the Crisis in Ethics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

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[1] “Three Laws of Robotics” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics Accessed on 12/16/2005.

[2] J.P. Moreland & Scott B. Rae, Body & Soul: Human nature &the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 202.