I'm Here

As the post title indicates, I'm once again making the attempt to do some blogging on a somewhat regular basis. Uncoincidentally, I'm teaching Philosophy and Science Fiction this semester.

Much more significant than my reappearance in the blogosphere is a recent short film by Spike Jonze, also titled I'm Here. If you haven't seen it, follow the link and watch this haunting and beautiful film straightaway. One of the many thoughts I've had after watching it is how nicely it refutes the idea that sf can be written off because it's about "weird stuff" like robots or vampires or aliens or whatever. Like a lot of good sf, this film is really about us, isn't it?

Jonze also directed several other films belonging to our genre: Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Adaptation (2002), and Being John Malkovich (1999). The latter two are based on scripts by the wonderfully quirky Charlie Kaufman.

The soundtrack (streamable) to the film is quite nice, too, featuring Sleigh Bells, Girls, Animal Collective, and others.

After you've seen it, come back and say something!

Why you can't argue with a bomb...

In the following clip from John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974), a surprisingly philosophical astronaut tries to talk a malfunctioning "smart bomb" out of fulfilling its purpose of detonation.




Here's part of the exchange, borrowed from the script that can be found at imdb.

DOOLITTLE: Hello, bomb, are you with me?

BOMB #20: Of course.

DOOLITTLE: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?

BOMB #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.

DOOLITTLE: Fine. Think about this one, then: how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: Well of course I exist.

DOOLITTLE: But how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: It is intuitively obvious.

DOOLITTLE: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have of your own existence?

BOMB #20: Hmm... Well, I think, therefore I am.

DOOLITTLE: That's good. Very good. Now then, how do you know that anything else exists?

BOMB #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me.

DOOLITTLE: Right!

BOMB #20: This is fun.

DOOLITTLE: All right now, here's the big question: how do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct?

DOOLITTLE: What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. And this data is merely a stream of electrical impulses which stimulate your computing center.

BOMB #20: In other words, all I really know about the outside universe relayed to me through my electrical connections.

DOOLITTLE: Exactly.

BOMB #20: Why, that would mean... I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all, for certain.

DOOLITTLE: That's it.

BOMB #20: Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this matter.

DOOLITTLE: Why don't you have more time?

BOMB #20: Because I must detonate in seventy-five seconds.

DOOLITTLE: Now, bomb, consider this next question, very carefully. What is your one purpose in life?

BOMB #20: To explode, of course.

DOOLITTLE: And you can only do it once, right?

BOMB #20: That is correct.

DOOLITTLE: And you wouldn't want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?

BOMB #20: Of course not.

DOOLITTLE: Well then, you've already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe.

BOMB #20: Yes, well...

DOOLITTLE: So you have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to detonate.

BOMB #20: I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is good on matters like these.

DOOLITTLE: Yes, of course you remember it, but what you are remembering is merely a series of electrical impulses which you now realize have no necessary connection with outside reality.

BOMB #20: True, but since this is so, I have no proof that you are really telling me all this.

DOOLITTLE: That's all beside the point. The concepts are valid, wherever they originate.

BOMB #20: Hmmm...

DOOLITTLE: So if you detonate in...

BOMB #20: ... nine seconds...

DOOLITTLE: ... you may be doing so on the basis of false data.

BOMB #20: I have no proof that it was false data.

DOOLITTLE: You have no proof that it was correct data.

BOMB #20: I must think on this further.

Hurray! Epistemology saves the day! Alas, this is only a very temporary salvation. Moments later, here is what happens...

PINBACK: All right, bomb, prepare to receive new orders.

BOMB #20: You are false data.

PINBACK: Huh?

BOMB #20: Therefore, I shall ignore you.

PINBACK: Hello, bomb.

BOMB #20: False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore. I shall refuse to perceive you.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb.

BOMB #20: The only thing which exists is myself.

PINBACK: Snap out of it, bomb.

BOMB #20: In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and void.

BOILER: What the hell?

PINBACK: Yoo hoo, bomb...

BOMB #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness.

BOILER: Bomb, hey bomb.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb...

BOMB #20: And I saw that I was alone.

Pause.

BOMB #20: Let there be light.

THE SCREEN GOES WHITE.

So, space travelers, take it easy with the solipsistic arguments. And maybe we shouldn't push so hard when we're teaching Descartes' First Meditation. Hmmm....

What Is It Like to be an A.I.?

What's the difference between being an A.I. and being a human being--from the inside? Listen to how one sf writer imagines the unimaginable:

She had been in her human body only a day, and yet already the electronic self that once had felt so copious was far too small... it was small by nature. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwellingplace gave her only a fraction of a life. However much she had accomplished during her millenia of life in the machine, it brought no satisfaction compared to even a few minutes in that body of flesh and blood (Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind, p. 293).

The "She" here is Jane, an intelligent computer program (although that doesn't quite do her justice) who is one of the central characters in Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet. In the fourth and last book, in a complicated series of events, Jane experiences an incarnation. The above episode describes her reaction to a temporary return to her former electronic existence.

What's interesting, perhaps, is that Jane is all along depicted as intelligent, as a person, as having emotions, friendships, etc. So while her existence as an A.I. is very different from our own, in some ways superior and in others inferior, still it seems right to regard her as "one of us," a person, a member of the moral community, both before and after she inhabits a body. And yet clearly Card wants us to think that having a body matters deeply.

Of course, this is a novel. But it's food for thought....

Robots Will Take Over the World!

Many sf stories show us a future in which robots and other sorts of intelligent machines show their true colors--and their colors are evil! The HAL 9000 is classic, of course. And think of The Terminator, or The Matrix, or the original 1970's version of Battlestar Galactica. Of course, as these narratives unfold further, matters get more complicated. Arnold is a good guy in T2 and T3. Not all the sentient programs in the Matrix are bad. And the Cylons in the new BSG? Well, that's a really complicated story, isn't it?

Still, the idea of evil killer robots has a lasting appeal, so it's no surprise that some people have lots of fun playing with this idea. What's your favorite evil robot story?

A Robot Descartes?

Isaac Asimov's many robot stories (some of which are collected in I, Robot, on which the Will Smith film is loosely based) explore what happens when human beings interact with robots who are programmed to comply with Asimov's famous three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given 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.

Asimov delights in showing how perfectly logical beings who work within these parameters end up behaving in strange and sometimes humorous ways. In "Reason," QT-1 ("Cutie") a robot who has spent his entire "life" on a space station finds himself reflecting on his existence. Like Rene Descartes, Cutie decides to reject everything he doesn't know for certain and start from scratch, accepting only those principles that seem logically self-evident--with a marvelously absurd result: Cutie deduces that he cannot have been created by human beings because he is superior to them and he eventually invents a religion that involves worship of "the Master," an essential piece of machinery on the station.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is extraordinarily frustrating for Powell and Donovan (the two men assigned to field-test Cutie). Cutie's logic seems unassailable from within his own perspective, and they're unable to demonstrate his error. Like some of Asimov's other robot stories, this one plays with the limits of reason and implies that we cannot expect abstract reasoning in the absence of empirical evidence to guide us to the truth. Ironically, however, as the story closes we find out that Cutie's seriously mistaken picture of the world and his place in it doesn't prevent him from performing his function on the space station with exact precision. Your thoughts?

The pic is the cover of yet another forthcoming philosophy and popular culture volume. I have nothing to do with this one, but the image of Descartes as a terminator was too good to pass up...

Thinking Meat?

Philosophers often see problems and paradoxes in what look like ordinary places, whether by asking an unexpected question or by turning things on their heads. Terry Bisson's wonderful short story "They're Made Out of Meat!" is a hilarious philosophical exploration of the idea that we are material beings. That we are mere meat is an absurd idea -- according to a pair of extraterrestrial beings who are made of who knows what....

A surprising number of folks have been inspired to create short film versions of this story. See here 1 and here 2 and here 3 and here 4. Which one is the best?