Chappie

Human consciousness has traditionally been defined as an essence, or a form; a spiritual correlate of a material body; and more recently as "something" beyond data, something that cannot be accounted for by materiality. In this sense it is best understood as residual. Residual being captures three metaphysical distinctions. 

We have received this distinction by another name: mind and matter. Mind things are of the order of "things" that can imagine Pegasus, say; whereas bodily things (the sensory apparatus, which is an interconnected neural relationship between nerves endings, and pathways in the brain), will, short of an hallucination, never verify the image combined (presumably) from a set of previous verifications. Material substance is not immaterial substance; and not everything is one substance. 

We late moderns take it for granted that this distinction is without use. Personally, I took it for granted that the mind was illusory, or at best something unnecessary in explanation. If we can explain morals by way of evolutionary hypothesis, for instance; if we can explain empathy by self-interest, say, then what is the point of the posit? What makes us human doesn't seem like the kind of thing that we have to worry about, if the explanandum has been robbed of the need for an explanans. But an impression managing psychopath is not the real McCoy, precisely because we, on the anti-material side of things, refuse to admit that the spiritual is reducible. Being genuine; being a truth teller, runs counterintuitively to calculation and self-interest. 

Of course, everyone knows that self-interest is not easily distinguishable from empathy, as though the latter were a matter of capping off the former. Why? Because it makes sense to ask: Is there value is doing X, whatever the X. Obviously, the realist point that one might value even self- destruction, say in refusing to lie to save oneself, is well intended; and yet, the question: but don't you do that for some kind of reward, is always on the table. Why? Because we take it for granted that we do things for a reason. 

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Consciousness, however, does still pique an interest. I recently watched Chappie, a story about a robot that has been given consciousness and then learns how to download consciousness into a data form, with the final result being that one need not "go to the next world" because "one would thereby become fully living cyborg, and, you guessed it, "live immortally". If consciousness can be conceived as data, albeit very complicated data, then the life hereafter is unnecessary. We have then another distinction: the living and the dead. Data is dead; humans are alive; chappie is the living dead; and Deon becomes the living dead too. Of course, the cyborg promise is that our body parts are replaceable, for a fee, of course, if you can't just steal it. 

There is another traditional distinction caught up in Chappie. That is the worry of freedom versus determinism.  Humans are free; Machines are bound by obligation and rule; they are programmed. Determinism is programming, whether from the Maker on high or some less than cosmic maker in the lab. Freedom is precisely what the buffoon played by Hugh Jackman did not have: the capacity to arrest the desire to do ill will, or to calculate motives. 

So there you have it: mind and matter; freedom and determinism; self-interest and morality; life and death. It is because this movie reaches far into these distinctions that it tends to appeal. 

And yet, I am a little less convinced by the premise that these enduring questions can be satisfied by a simplistic middle ground analogy. 

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Obviously the idea that a machine can have consciousness is about as ridiculous as believing that Pegasus is real. And it's not that this is due to the fact that I have religious ideals that I wish to protect from science. It is that these ideas are not well grounded by scientific measure; they are not the kinds of thing that permit analysis by empirical tools. This is a debate that goes back to Descartes, Hume, Kant and the medievals. It didn't get sorted then, and it's now no longer on the table, after 200 and some odd years of empirical investigation. And yet, after all that, it seems to have found an audience. It may very well be the case that we have anxiety about the idea of humans being replaced, outlined in ways above; but these anxieties stem from a common perception of time passed; one that cannot be easily answered without traceable echoes. 

Yes, the Hugh Jackman character is a buffoon. No he isn't bound to act viciously. Yes a machine follows orders. No we do not. Our freedom is residual; minds are residual. 

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Inventing a middle ground between humans and machines doesn't answer anything we are asking; it occludes an old memory, a set of three distinctions that must be articulated and which will always trouble. We still have the same anxieties, only we have a new set of permissible answers. But those anxieties are going nowhere because technology is not in the business of solving problems as much as it offers itself as a distraction. And so we trace them back, and so we profane.