For some contemporary thinkers, things are crystal clear: we are living in a post-human world. This means something very precise. Humans, living beings in general, can be understood and explained according to scientifically established laws and rules of existence. The much-heralded Human Genome Project (HGP) is nothing more than the “engineering” plan (or map) of the gigantic digital-electro-chemical machinery that is the human being. We are sophisticated artifacts, nothing more. As a confirmation of this assumption, the Cartesian scholar Andres Vaccari, in a demanding essay entitled “Dissolving Nature: How Descartes Made Us Posthuman” (2012), describes the current state of affairs as follows:
Engineered animals, clones, intelligent machines. Virtual identities, designer babies, artificial life. Organ farming, modified foods, life support machines. Cyborgs, medical miracles, reproductive technologies. Robocop, Dolly, Deep Blue, the Human Genome Project, FrankenFoods. Stem cell research, distributed cognition, life-forms and genes copyrighted as technical creations. Forests with human rights, and machines that live and evolve. The dissolution of nature, the artificial and the human as self-defined, meaningful categories. Welcome to posthumanism!
What Vaccari means is that we are living in a world where it is widely accepted that human beings can be fixed, just like cars, planes, or computers. But not only do we change our bodies’ limbs and organs as damaged parts of an electronic or mechanical device; we can also choose what we ourselves want to be. The current state of affairs seems to be as Andres Vaccari observes: nature is going to be disintegrated. Nothing stable exists. Or, expressed differently, as the epistemologist Paul Karl Feyerabend puts it, “anything goes.”
But how could something like this be possible? It is possible because life itself is gone. Whether in the form of digital AI or a physical humanoid robot like Elon Musk’s Optimus, the “machine” is the only triumphant reality. As I have already posited, as humans, we can be described as machines—a very sophisticated kind of automatons. For almost all the proponents of the so-called ‘computational theories of mind,’ this definition of humans is more than a hypothesis; it is a scientific fact. Surrounded by thousands and thousands of digital devices, we are used to thinking instinctively in terms of computational theories. Even—or especially—in the context of popular culture, many post-humanist ideas are more or less explicitly accepted as facts, even accomplished realities.
Inventing the automaton
But what is an automaton? Better known under the denominations “cyborg” or “android,” the automaton has been a major attraction since the 16th and 17th centuries. Popular culture reflects well the fascination that surrounds these advanced mechanical devices. Many legends about famous thinkers such as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and René Descartes illustrate this curiosity.
In one of these legends, it is narrated that after his daughter had passed away, Descartes created an automaton named Francine (after his deceased daughter), which he would take with him wherever he traveled. Francine supposedly talked and walked autonomously. In any case, for an uninitiated observer, it was quite difficult to tell that it was not a living human being. That is why, according to the legend, during one of his trips, the ship’s captain entered Descartes’ cabin while the philosopher-mathematician was out. As we can imagine, the captain discovered Francine. At first, the captain thought that Descartes was traveling with a corpse, but when he saw that the thing was moving, he thought that Francine was possessed. Out of fear that a curse was following his vessel, he threw Francine overboard.
From such stories, we can easily deduce that for common people, the simple idea of the possibility of such automatons was, simultaneously, unacceptable and horrible. Practically speaking, for them, it was inconceivable that such creations could exist. But, if somehow their existence could become a reality, it was obvious to anyone that those automatons were accursed creations similar to any other demonic creature. The same state of mind characterizes one of the most famous novels about such unlawful creations: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Immortalized by actors such as Boris Karloff (who was the star of the 1931 movie with the same title), Shelley’s Frankenstein manifests a similar tendency oriented against the creation of automatons. In the second half of the 20th century, the perspective dramatically changed. Starting with the famous I, Robot, the collection of short stories written by Isaac Asimov, the attitude towards automatons, cyborgs, androids, and any other creation of such kind is now radically different. They are treated as not just possible but eminently desirable. In some particular cases, they are even lovable.
If, in the much-celebrated Blade Runner movie, the wonderful female “replicant” (another name for “automaton”) named Rachel is a highly sophisticated mechanical-digital creature that could be desired and loved by an adventurer like Rick Decker (played by Harrison Ford), in Robocop and Bicentennial Man, the message is even more powerful: a cyborg could be a better creature from any point of view, including the moral one, than any human being. Lieutenant Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series and Oscar from Benoît Sokal’s Syberia pc game are just other examples of this assumption.
The post-humanist “paradigm shift”
To strengthen our argument, we can give hundreds of other examples that prove what we can call—together with Thomas Kuhn—a major cultural “paradigm shift.” And this change is not just a fashion. In every historical period, many important thinkers play, as forerunners, important roles in this change of attitudes toward automatons. René Descartes and Alan Mathison Turing are two of the most important players in this debate around the (im)possibility of a perfect automaton. If I mention them together, it is because of important research done in 2011 by Professor Darren Abramson, from Dalhousie University, who proved that “it is therefore extremely likely that Turing was aware of Descartes’ views on the claimed in-principle difference between minds and machines. Descartes’ views at least helped crystallize Turing’s own conception of the Turing test, and at most presented him with the idea in toto.”
In short, Abramson continues, René Descartes “held that material things, whether animals, plants, or inorganic objects, are ruled by the same mechanical laws. All living things, he held, can be looked on as machines. A sick man is like an ill-made clock; a healthy man is like a well-made clock.” This is convincingly explained by D. J. Weatherall in his article “Scientific Method and the Art of Healing,” published in the Oxford Textbook of Medicine in 2003. Although much more elaborated, the same view of man-machine animated Alan Turing as well. In his influential paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), he stated that we can speak of “artificial intelligence” if a computer is capable of imitating a human being when, in a specific context, it responds in a manner similar to a human to certain questions.
As mentioned earlier, the difference in attitude towards automatons is certainly a radical one. While for Descartes, the question ‘Can machines think?’ in the sense of so-called ‘Strong Artificial Intelligence’ seemed to be merely debatable, for Alan Mathison Turing, three hundred years later, a digital machine capable of thinking like a human being is something possible and even realizable. Turing’s predictions about the dissemination of his idea can be observed by reading volumes dedicated to various branches of computer science. Here is just one example.
The author of a massive work entitled Hardware Bible, Winn L. Rosch—a professional writer in the field of personal computers and digital technologies—does not hesitate to assert that “ultimately, the computer is a machine that thinks.” While only a few pages earlier in this same book, he notes that “the complex thoughts of a computer are no harder to understand than the operation of an electric switch,” he then returns to his statement and affirms the following:
A machine that thinks has a brain; therefore, when we fix it, we are opening a brain and perhaps an inexperienced hand can cause irreversible damages to the electronic patient, as to a human patient. A thinking machine must operate in the same way as the human mind—which is so incomprehensible and complicated that many attempts of human genius have failed to satisfactorily explain it.
Rosch’s statements show the current manner of speech of those who lean towards accepting the similarities between computers and human minds. The latter are nothing more than huge calculators based on electrical impulses. On the one hand, they know very well that any computer’s operating principles are very simple, reducible to binary digits represented only by ‘0’ and ‘1.’ However, the electrical and chemical principles behind the design of computers are presented as a mystery, emphasizing the ‘thinking machines’ metaphor that immediately brings to mind the human brain. Anyway, Turing’s prediction is fulfilled: for many contemporaries, the possibility of creating a digital machine that can hardly be distinguished from a human mind is completely feasible. Nowadays, in certain laboratories, they are working hard to create such entities.
Fixing humans, engineering cyborgs
Unlike Descartes’ world, where ideas were circulated with a certain caution, those like Turing’s tend to be spread unabashedly. The contemporary intellectual and cultural context is radically different. Firstly, in the academic environment where scientists are currently trained, any form of Christian theology or philosophy is completely eliminated. If either still exists in some universities, they are considered merely “vestigial” disciplines, akin to antique museum pieces. However, they no longer have any impact on science, no influence on the scientists who can create and sell, in the name of a better world, any destructive innovation, like the morning-after pill. As a consequence, the classical concept of natural law and theological-philosophical expressions like ‘moral impossibility’ are unthinkable. Therefore, any descendant of Turing is free not only to circulate ideas about the possibility of creating a perfect automaton, but also to pursue the creation of such a thing. In the name of progress, anything goes—and it does not matter how wrong.
Maybe the best illustration of the common intellectual attitude regarding the possibility of creating human-like machines is the famous Dartmouth Summer Research Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Organized in 1956, this event represents the starting point of the widespread dissemination of ideas specific to Strong Artificial Intelligence. Scientists and thinkers such as H. Simon, A. Newell, E. Feigenbaum, P. McCorduck, C. Shannon, and many others became strong advocates in favor of this type of research, oriented toward the creation of digital minds. In the invitation address signed by J. McCarthy (Dartmouth College), M. L. Minsky (Harvard University), N. Rochester (I.B.M. Corporation), and C.E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories), we notice a very clear statement which contains a main idea identical to Turing’s about the possibility of creating the perfect automaton:
The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.
Today, things are much more advanced. The fact that sixty scientists, many of whom were Nobel Prize winners, voted in 2004 for Blade Runner as the world’s best science fiction movie is highly significant. For them, the prospect of creating in fact what Descartes had only discussed hypothetically—the perfect automaton—is certain. As passive spectators, we can merely observe this paradigm shift that is deeply related to our understanding of the nature of human life. But as contemporary thinkers, we have to explain it and, last but not least, answer the simplest but most important question: where is the truth? And what are the concrete results of such creations? If we concede and accept the definition of human beings as machines, let us not be surprised if we witness the most terrible experiments and consequences. At the same time, as testified by an author like Ross Douthat in his poignant book The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery (2021), we will discover that nothing is more shocking than the contrast between what medicine claims—in the name of science, of course—it can do and what it is truly (in)capable of doing. In any case, when the living and immortal soul is removed from the education and science of physicians, and their patients are nothing but sophisticated machinery, there remains no place for the heart, isn’t that so? Douthat is just one of those who, directly or indirectly, wistfully confesses this painful truth.
