The online fonds

mills:

Sheldon.

It is an experience ostensibly exclusive to the advanced android: to experience emotion against a reflective awareness that nothing —not the emotion, not the awareness of the emotion, not the longing ambivalence towards consciousness, nothing— can occur within his mind except what has been programmed by some external agent. Apart from his designer, there is no source for his experiential world. Typically, his designer is absent.

This is the archetypal anguish of the android in film: to feel, but to be aware that in a sense it is not a self that is feeling —not a soul— but rather a program that is manifesting feelings, computing algorithms that simulate, within and outside of his mind, emotion, for some ulterior purpose. The dilemma of countless such creatures: do experience or emotion have meaning without agency? If one is not self-created, is one simply a dead vector for executing algorithms? A cipher? An automaton whose self-awareness, happiness, sorrow, and love are not one’s own, are, in their origin from beyond oneself, not real?

If it is the case that often in our science fiction we reduce into comprehensible symbols the dilemmas that we confront —I think particularly of the speech Kateoplis noted from Blade Runner, in which an android laments that his memories, experiences, self must vanish because his creator made his life finite— we might ask why this issue recurs so. In countless stories, this relatively abstract question —do experience or emotion have meaning without agency?— is posed, again and again.

Indeed, it colors Spike Jonze’s new and wonderful film I’m Here, which in avoiding any explicit discussion of it only underscores how archetypal it has become: it is immediately in the minds of the audience, and it gives to the story a despairing air, making the emotional commitments of the characters seem an almost heroic hedge against the nihilism with which they might treat their love —which must, after all, reflect some programming.

If it seems irreducibly poignant, that’s because it is our dilemma as well: the superabundance of evidence that we —our love, our fear, our creativity, our taste, our habits, our perceptions, our hopes, our selves— are merely the expression of coded programming has been assimilated into our consciousness, even as we refuse to accept it. Whereas it has been the habit of philosophers to ponder whether free will can endure in an age of scientific determinism, it has been the habit of scientists to demonstrate that the will —free or not— controls little.

I think particularly of Steven Pinker’s infamous thesis in The Blank Slate. One cannot read it, or watch his TED presentation on it, without recognizing science’s steady erosion of the idea of self-determination. That is to say: with every year it is clearer that you are not responsible for who you are. You are an android; your programming is genetic; your design reflects principles unrelated to your own hopes; your feelings delude you into behaving in accordance with algorithms you don’t understand. When you cry, your face is a machine: pulleys and levels contort your skin to communicate with the ocular apparatus of the nearest androids, so that they can diagnose your malfunction and react appropriately. Skin flushes; pupils dilate; you care more for iterations of the android prototype that look like you; you are so-programmed; you cannot change. You will never be a good sprinter; you will heat your body to kill infections, perhaps killing yourself in the process; you fear loud noises, even when you anticipate them; you have bugs; you will want to reproduce at a certain age.

And should you make children —your body reading a code that instantiates incubation with a certain failure rate, you willing little of what it does, or how you feel, or what you think— you will love them. You are programmed to do so; it is a rare exception that does not: an aberration. So how proud should you be of them, and of your love, and of all the automatic ways in which you express your programming? Pride over taste! Pride over beliefs! Pride over achievements, which were invariably enabled by genes thoughtlessly activated and socioeconomic circumstances beyond one’s control!

That we stake ourselves on feelings and deeds is our hedge against the nihilism that accompanies reflections on our automatic nature, on the irrelevance of consciousness, on the illusion of free will. If a robot’s love, derived from scripts written by men, is meaningless, how could our love be better: derived from filthy, bloody nature, from natural selection, and designed for mutative iteration and improved breeding.

How could your creaturely self not look with pity on a robot?