Deep questions about life
I am leaving for a company event that will have me out of Internet range for two days. So in the meantime I will leave you with this:
At Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder writes about the a robot baby dinosaur’s response to violence, which sounds rather distressing:
The press materials that came with the Pleo suggested I hold it by its tail to see what happens. It screams and thrashes. My 4-year-old started crying. I had to promise my wife never to do that again in front of her. [ Killing a Pleo Robotic Dinosaur ]
I find the idea rather stomach-turning myself. At what point do we decide something like this is actually alive? There’s the Turing Test, of course, but that’s a test of human-level intelligence (which in the form of Captchas I routinely, embarrassingly fail) not being-ness. Is the Pleo just a machine because we understand how it works? Or because we decided how it works? Or because we created it?
These are the kinds of questions science fiction has asked until we are all bored of them. Are clones really people? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Etc. But the last few years have seen a rash of products that “simulate” life — Tamagochis, the Sea Man game, Aibos, and now this.
Mark continues:
So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.
My wife didn’t want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is “bad for your psyche,” and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too. [ Ibid., emphasis mine ]
“Even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything.” What’s our standard for that? We provide a stimulus, the Pleo provides a response. If our stimulus is violent, the Pleo reacts with an expression of pain. From a strictly materialist point of view, you could make a case that the Pleo does feel pain. We know it does because we’ve programmed it to do so.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we’re “tampering in God’s domain.” But perhaps we should re-think our assumptions on what we’re capable of. We don’t know what “life” is, anyway, so how can we know if we’ve created it?
That IS deep. I, myself would agree with Mark’s wife. I remember my college philosophy teacher who talked about Decartes (I think it was Decartes) and his belief that animals were merely machines, and when he performed experiments on them, their cries and whimpers were merely the sounds of their machinery. He went made, by the way. My sense of empathy would extend to anything that sounded like it was in distress, whether animal, mineral, vegetable, or robotic.
And a further question – what does it say about a culture where the torturing of animals is recognized as an early sign of sociopathic tendencies, and yet we can construct an animal-like machine designed to have a pain response and encourage people to test it out?