by Josef Steiff
In this connection, a final thought-experiment to consider is Katsuhiro Otomo’s own: Akira, the ghost who haunts the anime (and the manga before it) and its shell of a decimated city.
In the anime Akira says nothing audible, does nothing visible, and generally barely exists. At first he’s a mystery, then he appears in memories, and when he finally enters fully into the story . . . well, instead of a body, Akira has—is?—only bits of biopsy material stored in jars, cryogenically frozen and buried beneath an Olympics construction site. At the most, his giant cryogenic pod looks a bit like a brain. Even so, though, he is able to interact with bodily things: he destroys the city (twice, it seems!). Tetsuo may have undergone grotesque transformation, but he still has a body. By contrast, Akira has no body because he’s undergone dissection, and to enter at all into the picture he requires a sort of reconstitution by the combined powers of the other psychic children.
But still there’s a connection. Tetsuo’s body starts to change when his mental power is at its uncontrollable strongest (he cries out in fear: “My body’s not doing what I tell it to!”). Akira’s body barely exists as frozen pieces, and still he levels the city (uncontrollably? even unconsciously?). Add to this the three other psychic children featured in the film, all of whom are rightly child-sized but prematurely aged (evidently as a side effect of the psychotropic drugs that keep their powers under control). All five children have supernatural powers, and all five have—whether temporarily or permanently, and with diverse surface manifestations—unnatural or denaturalized bodies: they are mutated, prematurely aged, operated on, dissected. Is superhuman psychic power—the direct effect of immaterial mind on material bodies—related to changes in the human body? Does Akira thus argue that disembodiments are linked to, or lead to, what the Colonel calls—in reference to Akira—“transcendental awakening?”
The Posthuman Condition via the Problem of Representation
Whatever the answer, by simply raising the question, Akira points us to what writers like Haraway, Moravec, Halberstam, and Hayles have called the “posthuman condition.” This idea redefines “human being” according to the more radical implications of the perspectives and experiments we’ve discussed: a decentering of identity or the self (the same river never!), a fragmentation of the thinking subject or its consciousness (where “mind” is not a thing but a story, a “center of narrative gravity!”), and taking seriously the possibility that “mind” is affected by embodiment but not entirely determined by it.
To get at this, let’s step back from characters like Tetsuo and Akira to consider Akira, the anime, for what it is: a fiction or, maybe more precisely, a representation.
We’ve already complicated Descartes’s formula, “I think therefore I am,” by pointing out that it and formulas like it are really preceded by an unvoiced “I seem to myself,” or, shorter but similar, “I think that . . .,” such as “(I think that) I think therefore I am” or “(I think that) I am Tetsuo.” In a similar way, any spoken utterance is introduced by an unvoiced voice. So “I think therefore I am” is really something like “Descartes writes that he thinks therefore he is,” and “I am Tetsuo” is really “A voice says that it thinks that it is Tetsuo.”
This can get even stranger and go on forever (thanks to the property of language we’ve called recursion). We’ll do just one more. If you’ve seen Akira, then the next step is for you to say, “I know that Akira says that a voice says that it thinks that it is Tetsuo.” If you haven’t seen the film and therefore have to trust what I say, your next step is, “The author of that chapter says that Akira says that . . .”
These highest levels of language are examples highlighting what I mean by representation. We don’t have direct access to Descartes’s or Tetsuo’s thinking or even their speech, as if they were present before us. Instead, their thinking or speech is re-presented: in Descartes’s case by written language; in Tetsuo’s case by audio recording.
So what does all this complication in representation have to do with whether Akira teaches us something about disembodiment and the posthuman condition? In a nutshell, it gives us a more precise way of wondering what sorts of representation, appearance, or semblance we should accept as standing in for presence or reality; whether “human beings” are ever more than merely represented to us or are ever actually present before us. In other words, are we human beings ever actually present, or always only re-presented?
Let’s go back a couple of thought-experiments. Searle’s Chinese Room may have merely seemed like a mind, but an animated movie like Akira doesn’t even seem like Searle’s Chinese Room. A movie will never pass the Turing Test, unless we trivialize the test by asking only one question—“What have you got to say for yourself?” —only once, just before the opening credits, and then listen patiently to a two-hour “answer.” So we would be wrong to think of a movie as having a mind, even as we find ourselves responding to it as if it were real. We can wonder something similar about Tetsuo, Akira, and the other characters, since without exception they’re fictional, only representations of human beings.
But this seems a lot like—in a rough order from “most real” to “least real”—videoconferencing, IMing, watching a live telecast, watching a live-action but recorded movie, listening to recorded music, looking at photographs or other images, or reading about characters in a book. In each case we think of ourselves as responding to or even interacting with people, and we’re usually not bothered by the discrepancy between representation and presence. Often we don’t even notice it . . . unless we’ve made it our professional philosophical business or have been reading a chapter by someone who has (*coughs*).
We know that representations aren’t—or don’t have—minds of their own, but we respond to them as if they did because we know (or think?) that there are human beings represented by them. But we treat fictional characters similarly. We know they’re not people, we know they don’t really have minds, in part because they don’t have human bodies. We might catch ourselves feeling for them; a famous example of this in philosophy is from Augustine, who in his Confessions reprimands himself for shedding tears at the represented death of a fictional character called Dido in the Roman poet Virgil’s epic Aeneid.
Maybe we should agree with Augustine: even if fictional characters bring us to tears, we recognize that they’re not people because, in his terms, they don’t have souls or, in our terms, minds. Right? Because, first of all and despite Descartes’s insistence on the mind as proving existence, they don’t have human bodies . . . and have never had them?
Is Everybody Disembodied? (or, Have We Always Been Posthuman Beings?)
On the other hand, since we’re questioning everything in order to figure out how cognition gets human beings, and as a result whether Tetsuo is a human being, we might note that no one seems to wonder whether a voice at a distance (telephony, videoconferencing, IM) is “human.”
Instead, we seem to assume that aspects of human being are perfectly abstractable from embodiment, or at least able to be reproduced or represented at a distance. The cases I’ve mentioned are mostly distance in space (and we could add something theoretical, matter teleportation, a power Tetsuo displays), but others involve distance in time, like books written long ago ... or even this book: I assume you’ve assumed that “I” am (is?) human, just as I’ve assumed it of you (which takes us back to our first question!).
In other words, we routinely think of representations as coming from people even though their bodies aren’t present or, in some cases, any longer in existence. We normally treat a represented human being as just as human as a present human being . . . and we should, because we expect representations of ourselves to be treated the same way by other people. Granted, this may get us too close for Augustine’s comfort to being unable to distinguish compelling fictional characters or stories from real people and stories that deserve our attention.
But it also lets us pose a more precise—or at least more particular—version
of the simple but impossible fourth question from earlier: is Tetsuo a “human being,” and what is a “human being” anyway? Think of it as Question 5 (and think about it!):5. Have we always been posthuman beings?
We normally and unproblematically respond to decentered identity and fragmented consciousness as continuous and coherent: the river may flow but we know it’s “the same;” the ship is replanked but it, too, is “the same.”
We regularly respond to the semblance of thinking as evidence of actual thinking, of thinking beings, of minds, of human beings. We let many things pass the Turing Test, and—unless we’re cognitive scientists—don’t usually wonder what goes on in Searle’s Chinese Room.
We normally treat representations as re-presentations: as pointing to an original presence. And we expect representations of ourselves to be treated in the same way. Despite our own decentered, fragmented, and re-presented disembodiments, we expect other thinking beings to treat us as fellow thinking beings, even though it seems that only an “I” can know its consciousness for sure.
As a result of all this, instead of wondering whether Tetsuo is sufficiently like us to be a “human being,” we may find ourselves wondering instead whether we are—and always have been—decentered, fragmented, discontinous, and re-presented posthuman beings, not so different from Akira and Tetsuo afterall.6
5
The CPU Has Its Reasons
JOHN HARTUNG
Driving to the secret lab where she was assembled, Armitage asks Ross, “Why are you helping me?” Angry at her impetuousness in asking this over and over again, Ross barks, “Stop that! You sound like a little child! Why? Why? There is no reason.”
Imagine former police detective Ross Syllabus’s situation. He came from Earth to get away from the memories of his former partner Jennifer who was killed by an android. He transferred to the Mars Police Department with a strong prejudice against robots, especially ones meant to simulate humans. On Mars, a series of such models, called the Seconds (as in Android 2.0), have assumed many jobs in the service sector of the Martian economy. This prevented many ordinary humans from finding employment and created social unrest. However, a new advanced series has been uncovered. These Third models closely resemble human beings. They seem to be self-directed in their behavior, work in creative professions, and have gone unnoticed by others, even those who have formed close relations with them. But their existence has been made known because several of them have been victims of a “killing” spree conducted by a self-appointed android “assassin” who is trying to make Mars aware of these cryptic robots.
To top it off, Ross has discovered that his partner and close friend, detective Naomi Armitage, is one of these Thirds. Before he can decide exactly what she is—I mean, she is clearly not human, as a biological category, but perhaps she is still a person in the same sense as Ross, a rational and free agent who is entitled to basic rights—the police department discovers that Armitage is a Third and sees her as a piece of runaway illegal technology to be rounded up and destroyed. Ross has decided to throw away his career and help Armitage protect herself from the assassins and the police, and find her “father.” Accused of terrorism against the Martian government, Ross teams up with Armitage and goes on the run to her father’s lab.
It’s not surprising that Armitage asks Ross the question, since she herself is troubled by the idea that she is “only a monstrous doll.” By adding this little domestic scene in the midst of heavy artillery mayhem and hot pants moe, the screenwriters have provided a means for the audience to stop and reflect on the central question raised in Hiroyuki Ochi’s Armitage the Third: Poly-Matrix , namely whether robots can have moral standing, and for me the more interesting related question of whether Ross (and we) can be justified in thinking that a robot does have moral standing.
Consider why the question, “Why are you helping me?” makes Ross so upset. I suspect that he mistakes what the question is asking. He thinks that Armitage wants a reason in the sense of evidence, as if she had asked why Ross is convinced that Armitage is a person and not just a machine. Ross has just made enormous sacrifices based on the proposition that Armitage is a person of moral standing, even though a robot. But no evidence is available that proves this important claim and this lack has upset Ross, inclining him to act out. Ross has been confronting this difficulty since the briefing he received on the termination of the first Third, Kelly McCannon, the last country singer in the solar system, who arrived on Mars on the same shuttle with him. Ross at the time reported that he could not tell her from a human being.
However, Armitage did not necessarily ask for evidence for Ross’s belief in her personhood. Rather it is a request for a reason for why Ross made a decision, a practical matter rather than a theoretical matter. In theoretical reasoning, we try to argue for the truth of some hypothesis. In practical reasoning, we try to deliberate about which purposes to pursue and the best course of action to obtain them. Instead of evidence for believing that she is worth helping, Armitage could be asking for a reason why Ross chose to help her as someone worth helping. This assumes that Ross had the option to believe or not believe and act accordingly. This distinction between evidence and prudence suggests the possibility that even if someone does not have sufficient evidence for believing something is true, it does not follow that the person has no sort of reason at all for believing that thing is true. Ross could have practical reasons for believing in Armitage’s standing.
Or could he? Ross no doubt understands what it means to have evidence to believe a theory, what it means to have good practical reasons for choosing one option rather than another, and the difference between the two. But can practical considerations support the adoption of a hypothesis? Is Ross entitled to choose to believe in that for which he has no evidence?
Let’s accept as true—at least in the world of Armitage—that there are Thirds, and that these Thirds are impossible to tell apart from humans, at least in terms of behavior and demeanor. However, we can easily tell them apart from humans if we examine their internal workings. And as a result, skepticism about their moral status is possible.
But I’m particularly interested in the idea that it is reasonable for Ross to believe that Armitage is a person and not a mere machine because of the peculiar features of the choice to believe in her case. In his classic essay “The Will to Believe,” American philosopher William James argues that in certain cases it is not only permitted but even obligatory that one allow one’s passions to decide whether or not to believe in something.
The Genuine Article
According to William James, any claim that Ross might consider whether or not to believe is a hypothesis. Any such hypothesis, like a wire, may be said to be either live or dead. A hypothesis is live to Ross if and only if it is a hypothesis that seems plausible to Ross personally. If a hypothesis seems implausible to Ross personally, then it is a dead hypothesis to Ross. Which hypotheses are live or dead to Ross depends only on the peculiar character of Ross and not on the hypotheses themselves. A particular hypothesis, such as that the Martian government is behind the termination of the Thirds, might be a dead hypothesis to Ross but a live one to Armitage. To James, the measure of how live a hypothesis is to Ross would be how willing Ross is to act on the hypothesis. To act without hesitation on a hypothesis is, for all practical intents and purposes, to believe that hypothesis. So if Detective Eddie bet a Martian year’s salary that Mars would never give up seeking complete independence from Earth, there is a sense in which he believes this is true. This is the sense of belief that James has in mind.
A decision between believing in one of two or more hypotheses is a belief option. Belief options, according to James, can be of several kinds:• Living or dead.
• Forced or avoidable.
• Momentous or trivial.
Ross faces a living belief option if he chooses between hypotheses which are all live hypotheses. A belief option for him in which one of the two hypotheses he may choose is t
o believe that Mars is full of chocolate custard or that Detective Eddie is a brilliant wit would not be a live belief option, those being quite dead hypotheses to him.
A forced option is one where you must decide between the hypotheses. Often enough, we may find that we may simply suspend judgment and choose not to believe any of the hypotheses. But according to James this is not always the case. For example, in the assassin attack on Armitage, Ross, and Julian Moore in the sewer systems below the city of Saint Lowell, Ross is left behind to be picked up by the police because he needs emergency surgery to receive new cybernetics. What if it turned out that his condition was even more severe than it was? What if the only option to avoid a quick and inevitable death was to try an experimental cybernetic surgery that only was understood in theory, but only Armitage had the power of attorney to approve the procedure? Here Armitage must decide to believe that the surgery will be successful and permit it or believe that the surgery won’t make a difference and not permit it. To suspend judgment in this case and thus to not act at all would lead to the same result as acting on the belief that the surgery won’t make a difference. In that sense, deciding whether to believe in the surgery or not to believe in it is a forced option for Armitage.
Finally, a belief option is momentous if there is a lot at stake if you do believe, if believing is a unique opportunity, and if you don’t have the liberty to back out of it once you have committed yourself to it. In the second feature film, Armitage the Third: Dual-Matrix (directed by Katsuhito Akiyama, Makoto Bessho and Tekuya Nonaka), Ross is offered a one-time-only chance to represent Mars in an Earth conference on robot rights, which if passed would clear his and Armitage’s name and allow them back into regular society. These conditions make a momentous belief option for Ross. Typically, belief options in scientific inquiry are not momentous in this sense. We can often make mid-course corrections if our hypotheses fail to be confirmed by the search for evidence.
