by Josef Steiff
Put broadly, the questions link identity to thinking (cognition) and to a thinking subject’s awareness of its thinking and being (consciousness). Identity is thus something like a thinking subject’s awareness of its own thinking and being, with emphasis on continuity. We can then ask how thinking is related to physical being: the problem of embodiment or, as it’s often called, the mind-body problem.
As we try to understand what the film’s final scene means for its thinking beings, we thus get to wonder what it might mean for us as embodied thinking beings, or as “rational animals,” a phrase from the fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher Aristotle, who used it in his Metaphysics to define “human beings.” Raising questions about Tetsuo’s identity, cognition, and consciousness, and about how they relate to his physical being, brings us to another important question that is easy to ask but much harder to answer:4. Is Tetsuo a Human Being? And what is a “Human Being” anyway?
I think he is . . . in a way. And I think a human being is someone—maybe also something?—somehow like us. But the “somehow” matters: how is Tetsuo, or for that matter any fictional character, sufficiently like us to be, like us, a human being?
By defining “human being” to include someone or something like Tetsuo, we may be redefining ourselves: as posthuman beings.
Who Is “I”?
Is the voice that says “I am Tetsuo” really Tetsuo? It sounds like Tetsuo, but we’re also made to wonder what’s happened to him in his gruesome transformation and his absorption by Akira. Other characters wonder even earlier: on encountering Tetsuo in their favorite dive bar, his friend Yamagata asks, “Are you Tetsuo? Or somebody else?” So when “I” speaks, is it the same “I” or “Tetsuo” as before?
Who thus asks about sameness or identity. “Identity” comes from the Latin idem, “the same,” related to identidem, “again and again” or “continuously,” as if we are the same over time. To explore such continuity, consider two thought-experiments from ancient Greece, “Heraclitus’s River” and the “Ship of Theseus.”
In the sixth century B.C.E., Heraclitus (as transmitted by the fourth-century B.C.E. Plato in his Cratylus and by the third- and fourth-century C.E. Eusebius in his Praeparatio Evangelica) raises the question of identity or continuity by asking: Can we step in the same river twice? He argued that we can’t: since a river is always flowing, by the time of our second step, there’s a whole new river! If a river seems a long way off from the continuous identity of thinking or human beings, consider something more obviously bodily:Imagine a ship built of wooden planks (as first- and second-century C.E. Greco-Roman writer Plutarch did in his Life of Theseus). Now imagine that the planks are replaced, one at a time, until all have been replaced. There is still a ship - it might even still belong to Theseus, the mythical Athenian hero -, but with 100% plank replacement (replankment?), is it “the same” ship?
If we accept the implication of these examples, we might conclude that “I” is not the same Tetsuo, at least not the same as before, because of the substantial changes he’s undergone.
But we could reach a similar conclusion about most, maybe all, of Akira’s characters, most of whom are shown undergoing some change over the course of the story. It wouldn’t be a very dramatic story if they didn’t, and it’s a very dramatic story indeed, ending in nothing less than the apparent second destruction of neo-Tokyo! If everyone is changed, is it meaningful to single out Tetsuo as especially changed? If everyone is always changing—including us: we are affected by experience, and every cell in our bodies is periodically replaced—then it would seem that a thinking being can undergo even complete change and still be the same being.
Maybe it’s not the degree of change (its quantity), but the kind (or quality) of change that matters. For our purposes, there are two kinds of changes to consider, divided roughly into “mental” and “bodily” . . . although the connection between the two is just as interesting as their separation. Both are made even more complicated by Akira’s interest in psychic powers that bridge the gap, the mind directly affecting other bodies in the world.
How Does “I” Know? Or Why Does “I” Think So?
How does the voice, or the speaking person whose voice it is, know that it is Tetsuo, or at least why does it think so? In addition to being a question of epistemology generally (the philosophical study of knowledge, from the ancient Greek episteme and logos: how do we know what we know?), this is specifically a question of cognition: what are the thoughts or thought-processes that led to the voice’s declaration of identity? This includes asking, first, “Why does ‘I’ think that he is Tetsuo,” or in other words, “What are his or her reasons or arguments?” This initial set of questions is about general patterns of thought, about connections logical or illogical.
A second set of questions comes from the specific fact that it’s not any old “someone” who thinks that he is Tetsuo, but an “I” who thinks it about himself. That reflexivity is a link between cognition and consciousness: thought’s awareness of thought, or the thinking being’s awareness of itself as a thinking being. If we define consciousness as reflexivity in thinking, then the voice that says “I am Tetsuo” has clear consciousness so long as his speech accurately represents his thought.
In other words, we think we know that the speaker of “I am Tetsuo” is conscious because he uses a language, because language can represent thought, and because this use of language in particular, by being reflexive, represents its representation of thought. That kind of recursion—the repeated application of a function to the results of the same function—has been taken as a hallmark of consciousness, at least as it’s expressed in language.
But how do we, who seem to be thinking beings, know that the voice belongs to a thinking being of sufficient similarity to us to be a human being? Why do we think so?
We’re close here to one of the most famous phrases from Western philosophy: the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”: in the popular Latin, cogito ergo sum; in the original French “Je pense, donc je suis.” Cogito ergo sum is a summary of Descartes’s attempt to ground his philosophy in the only thing he thought he could be certain of: his awareness of his thinking. In the terms I’ve been using, and with just a bit of philosophical jargon, we can say that Descartes predicates his identity, even his existence, on his consciousness and therefore on his cognition.
Does Descartes’s formula tell us anything about someone or something like Tetsuo, a seemingly disembodied voice from the transcendent void?
Another thought-experiment may help to clarify some of the philosophical complications involved, “The Turing Test.” This particular experiment highlights areas of interest held in common by philosophy since basically forever and by cognitive science since roughly the middle of the 20th century: what is thought, who or what does the thinking, and is there a difference between cognition and computation?
In 1950 the computer scientist Alan Turing proposed an “imitation game.” Imagine yourself at a computer, IMing with two strangers, one of which is human, the other of which is a computer. If you can’t tell the difference between them, then, Turing argued, computation is functionally indistinguishable from—is the same as—cognition. In other words, such an “artificial” constructed intelligence would be the same as “natural” human intelligence. From this perspective, a machine that seems to be thinking actually is thinking!
Add this idea to Aristotle’s definition of human beings as “rational animals,” and to Descartes’s only certainty (“I think, therefore I am”), and we would have to conclude, with Turing, that a seemingly-thinking machine is a human being. But our test for Tetsuo needn’t be so stringent. We don’t need to imagine the voice behind “I am Tetsuo” as belonging to a machine—and would of course be wrong to do so, based on what the movie shows us—to treat it the same way. It sounds like a human being so it is a human being.
But if we identify successful language use—or, m
ore precisely, the appearance or semblance of such use—as the key to “human being,” aren’t we missing something essential about “human beings”? About ourselves? To better decide whether appearance or semblance is sufficient, we need to think a bit more about thinking—cognition—and how it relates to computation.
Cogito Ergo Tetsuo?
Because of questions like these, the Turing Test has inspired generations of researchers to work in the field of artificial intelligence as well as legions of science fiction writers to create characters like the cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell or the computerized Dixie Flatline and Wintermute in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But does it get us any closer to defining “human being?” However convincing the computer may be—and it’s worth pointing out that in official contests, no computer has ever convinced a majority of the judges (although some humans have come across as computers!)—there can be the lingering feeling that, even if the computer puts on a good performance, it’s still not really thinking, is it?
In other words, we might feel that because a sophisticated artificial or constructed intelligence only seems to be natural intelligence and gives only the appearance of “thinking,” such a semblance or appearance isn’t the same as actual human existence: seeming to think isn’t a sufficient definition for “human being.” After all, Descartes’s formula isn’t “I seem to think, therefore I am!” Computation isn’t really (or sufficient for) cognition in the sense of human understanding, much less for the somehow qualitatively distinct self-awareness or reflexive thinking we call consciousness.
This position, that the successful application of rules by a machine isn’t meaningful, has been given a handy shorthand in linguistic terms: “syntax isn’t sufficient for semantics.” This quotation comes from the philosopher John Searle, who illustrates it with his famous Chinese Room Argument.
The Chinese Room can be thought of as the Turing Test from the inside out. Imagine a windowless room with a slot in its single door. In the room are paper and pens, a rulebook that shows how to respond to certain strings of Chinese characters using certain other strings of Chinese characters, and a person who doesn’t know Chinese. Outside of the room is a Chinese speaker, who slips through the slot in the door pieces of paper with Chinese characters and sentences on them. The person in the room—Searle, in his own example!—looks up the characters and sentences in the rulebook, copies the responses given by the rulebook, and slips those responses back through the slot. The Chinese speaker outside of the room reads the responses and has no reason to doubt that someone in the room knows Chinese. But we know better (weirder?): no one in the room knows Chinese; it just seems like someone does.
We might then have the same feeling as before: semblance or appearance isn’t enough for reality, the syntax isn’t sufficient for true semantics, the mechanical application of a rulebook’s rules isn’t really speech (much less consciousness), and computation isn’t cognition.
On the other hand, we could read the results of this thought-experiment in reverse, as showing not that computation isn’t sufficient for cognition but that we need to redefine cognition, and equally consciousness, in terms of computation . . . and, more radically and maybe a little weirdly, as taking place through a combination of individual and environment. Maybe the ‘mind’ that knows Chinese is only and precisely a combination of Searle, room, and rulebook all together! Cognitive scientist and anthropologist Edwin Hutchins advanced this interpretation as an analogy for ship’s navigators, who “know” where their ship is not as individuals but only in concert with each other and with the ship’s instrumentation (Cognition in the Wild).
From this changed perspective, although the voice that says “I am Tetsuo” is only a voice, we’re licensed to treat it as if there’s a speaker behind it, since that’s how we’re used to treating speech. Because of that habit, and in line with Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, we assume that someone called Tetsuo exists because he—a mind, spirit, soul—thinks of himself (is conscious) as thinking something behind the statement. So we could read “I am Tetsuo” like Descartes’s famous phrase, as a way of predicating existence on consciousness of cognition: “I think, therefore I am Tetsuo” (cogito ergo Tetsuo!). Of course, this would mean accepting a semblance or appearance of consciousness as evidence of consciousness: updating Descartes to be, precisely, “I seem to think, therefore I am (a human being).”
But should Descartes’s formula, even passed by Turing and updated by Hutchins, be applied to someone—or something—that isn’t already recognizably a thinking being? Tetsuo may not qualify. His body has been, first, horribly transformed and, second, apparently absorbed into the timeless, bodiless inner space of Akira’s power! Can he have (or be?) a mind without a normal body, or any body? And more: can he have evidently more mind than the rest of us - his immaterial thoughts affect material reality directly!—without a body? If, as Morpheus puts it in The Matrix, “the body cannot live without the mind,” how do we feel about minds without bodies? More generally, what is the relationship between “mind” and “body,” and, as that question implies, are they really two separable things?
What Is the Thing that Does the Thinking?
Descartes argued that his existence is predicated on his consciousness of cognition—his “mind”—alone, and not on its existence in his body. After him, Cartesian dualism argues that immaterial “mind” and material “body” are distinct (even if they’re not usually separated!).
This is among the oldest, most important, and most disputed ideas in Western philosophy, treated by, among others:• the fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher Plato, whose dialogue Phaedo has his master Socrates arguing, just before his execution, that the soul is immortal, such that a philosopher ought not to fear death;
• the first-century B.C.E. Roman poet Lucretius, whose epic On the Nature of Things argues that the soul, like everything else in the world, is entirely material and thus mortal . . . with a similar recommendation for philosophical fearlessness; and
• early and medieval Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas of Aquinas, both arguing, although for different reasons than Plato, that the soul is immortal, with the important caveat that only in combination with a body does it make a “person.”
It continues to be a hot topic after Descartes, as authors reject or refine his dualism:• via philosophy of mind, patching holes in the Cartesian fabric: for example, Immanuel Kant, who tried to achieve Descartes’s conscious certainty without reference to an external ground (for Descartes this external ground had been God)
• via cognitive scientific research, science of brain, starting over with different material: for example Steven Pinker, who writes that he is as certain of the fact of his consciousness as he is of anything in the world (How the Mind Works) and Daniel Dennett, on whom just a bit more below.
If mind and body are distinct, how do they interact?
There are two rough types of answer. The first is embodiment. Either a mind needs a body generally, or needs the human body in particular, and there is a limit to the quantity or quality of change allowed to brain or body before the “mind” no longer exists to define “human being” (a consciously or recursively thinking being, a “rational animal”). If no changes are allowed—if there is total embodiment—then the mind is the body, or an inseparable part of the body, or depends on it for its existence. From this first perspective, Tetsuo is a human being only if he still has a brain in a body whose voice is the one that says, “I am Tetsuo.”
This is close to the perspective of cognitive science, explained well by Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. Briefly, the argument is that it’s the brain that makes “mind,” such that embodiment is more or less clearly (if complexly!) the answer. From a similar perspective, Daniel Dennett argues that “identity” or “self” is not a thing but a story that consciousness tells itself, a “center of narrative gravity.” Fuller discussion on these lines would take us away from philosophy t
o the roots of cognitive science in information theory and cybernetics; see N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman.
The second, opposite category is disembodiment. Either a mind doesn’t need a body, or doesn’t need a human body in particular. Even with substantial changes to brain or body—perhaps including no body at all—the “mind” is still sufficient to define “human being.” If all changes are allowed—if there is total disembodiment—then the mind is less a material thing than an immaterial pattern potentially separable from the human body and, so, potentially transferable to other bodies.
This potential could take the form of the information-age image of “mind uploading”—the mind as the ghost in the shell, feared by Hans Moravec (Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind) and hoped for by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Posthuman Bodies, after Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”)—or of bodilessness, as in the Aquarian age ideas of clairvoyance, psychic travel, or astral projection (as when Kei is possessed). From this second perspective, Tetsuo is easily a human being . . . although we may wonder whether we’ve defined “human being” too broadly.
So which is it? Immaterial mind and material body, separate but interacting? (And dualists would need to explain the interaction.) Or a material mind-body? (With the question asked previously: How much and what sorts of bodily change do we allow before a “mind” no longer defines “human being?”)
So, Is Tetsuo Human? Are We? Is Anyone or Anything?
Tetsuo was certainly human at one point, while at the end of the movie . . . well, maybe. With careful attention to, and some slight redefinitions of, critical terms (especially identity, cognition, consciousness), we’ve reached a point where Descartes’s cogito ergo sum seems to allow for cogito ergo Tetsuo, precisely “I am Tetsuo,” even if that statement and our sense of a thinking being behind it must be modulated by other thought-experiments. At the same time, we’re left wondering about how much “human being” depends on embodiment.
