Perhaps you are thinking, “Now wait a minute! Maybe my holding this book is a biomechanical process, but there is also my conscious experience of reading the book. Surely that isn’t mechanical!” However, here, too, a case can be made for understanding yourself as a machine. As you read this book, your eyes are physically taking in information conveyed through patterns of light. That physical information is then processed in your brain to produce the meaningful experience of reading, through a vast and complex network of neural firings that many cognitive scientists claim are understandable in terms of computational processes. Of course, we don’t know all there is to know about how the light that hits your retina gets transformed into conscious experiences and meaningful thoughts, or even how you are able to actively hold a book in your hands in an engaged manner, but we are beginning to figure it out, and our best models treat your mind as a series of complex biochemical processes that physically embody various computational functions. In short, the most workable hypothesis we have for understanding the human mind is that minds are just complex collections of computational processes, carried out by the neural machinery of the brain.
This brings us to a philosophical viewpoint known as
functionalism
. There are several different versions of functionalism, but the core idea behind them all is that minds are best understood in terms of the functions they perform. Minds are what brains do, but something other than a brain can do the same thing—perform the same function.
Most often, the functions of the mind are treated as computations that mediate between our sensory inputs and our behavioral outputs. They are informational processes that happen to occur in our brains but that could potentially occur in other media as well, such as the synthetic neural networks that constitute the minds of the machines in the
Terminator
saga.
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From a functionalist perspective, it doesn’t matter what a mental process is made of, as long as the process is actually mechanically manifested in some form or other, whether it be through the biochemical events of a brain or the electrical firings of a silicon computer chip. What matters are the complex informational processes that constitute our perceptions, memories, and concepts, enabling us to experience and think about ourselves and the world around us. If this view is correct, then there is no significant difference between you and an artificially intelligent being like a Terminator. If a Terminator were reprogrammed with a similar set of memories, beliefs, personality traits, and so on, then it would be just like you in kind, as a conscious being that can perceive, think, and even feel the same sorts of things that you do.
Why should we accept this functionalist understanding of ourselves? To help resolve questions like this, philosophers often resort to thought experiments, or hypothetical scenarios that can help clarify our understanding of, and commitment to, our various conceptions of the world. So here is a thought experiment to help us out, adapted from an idea proposed by the philosopher William Lycan.
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Suppose you are one of John Connor’s compatriots in the future, and a human friend of yours, we’ll call her Henrietta, is in bad shape. She has some type of cancer that is destroying her body. But you, being an expert on the biomechanics of the T-101 and its relationship to human physiology, have a plan. You start replacing Henrietta’s various body parts with functional duplicates taken from your large stash of spare T-101 parts. First, you replace her legs, then her arms, then the vital organs of her torso. Henrietta continues to act her same old self, and thanks you for saving her life. But unfortunately the cancer still exists in her head and threatens to destroy her brain. So you take Henrietta to a mind-scanning expert and get him to scan her brain, decoding the vast number of intricate details encoded in her neurons. Then you perform a series of brain-to-computer-chip transplants, in which you replace each part of her brain with a synthetic, but functionally identical, duplicate. Throughout these transplants the same old Henrietta pulls through, with her memories, sense of humor, and anti-machine gumption intact. When Henrietta has finally been entirely replaced with Terminator parts, but still talks and acts just like she always has, how will you respond to her? Will you continue to treat her as a conscious, thinking, and feeling being, still deserving of your friendship and personal devotion? Is she still a person, with the same psychological features and moral status of ordinary flesh-based human beings? If you say no, then you are what Lycan calls a “human chauvinist,” a person who has a philosophically unjustified bias in favor of human biology and prejudice against nonhuman forms of consciousness. If Henrietta has continued to behave just as she always has, embodying the same functional processes encased in her old protein-based skinbag, then you ought to regard her as still fully present, as the same conscious Henrietta, even if she is now made of parts that once constituted an army of human-killing T-101s.
Does it bother you to think of yourself and your friends as machines? It shouldn’t! Recognizing our mechanical nature does nothing to detract from our capabilities as human beings. If nothing else, consider the amazing feats achieved by machines in the
Terminator
films. For example, the T-101 cyborg has the ability to perceive and thoughtfully interact with things in its environment, as vividly demonstrated through the red-hued “Terminal Vision” first-person camera shots that periodically appear in the
Terminator
films. More significantly, the T-101 can also learn new things. In fact, after John and Sarah Connor flip a switch to enable “learning” on the T-101’s CPU, it appears that he can even learn to value human life and overcome his preprogrammed nature as an indiscriminate killing machine. Here, too, James Cameron’s director’s commentary on
Terminator 2
is instructive. In describing what he sees as a key theme of the film, he says, “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of life, . . . maybe we can, too.” In considering this possibility, being a machine may not be such a bad thing after all.
Machines and Human Nature: Why James Cameron Is a Cyborg
Even if we ourselves are “biomechanicals,” we might still distance ourselves from the machines we produce
as artifacts
. That is, we typically think of ourselves as being the
producers
of the technology that is the
product
for achieving our various ends. Again, this is something we can question. In fact, we’re not fundamentally separable from the machines we make and use in our lives. As the philosopher Andy Clark, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and others have argued, human nature is partly defined by the ability to extend thoughts and actions into useful manipulations and transformations of the environment. Recognizing this facet of our nature, we can see that our various technological devices, from utensils and plows to computers and robots, are actually components of ourselves.
To get a handle on this perspective, let’s consider Richard Dawkins’s idea of the “extended phenotype.” A
phenotype
is the outward expression of a set of genes, like the physical construction of the human body from proteins that we talked about earlier. According to Dawkins, “The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may ‘extend’ far outside the body in which the gene sits, even reaching deep into the nervous systems of other organisms.”
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In other words, what you are as a biological organism doesn’t end at your skin but rather extends out into your interaction with your environment, including the various artifacts you make and use. Consider beaver dams and spider webs, two of Dawkins’s favorite examples. The construction of a beaver dam is simply part of what it is to be a beaver. Dams are no less a part of the expression of beaver genes than is the body of a beaver itself. Similarly, weaving webs is a fundamental part of the life of a spider, inseparable from its biological nature. An analogous situation emerges in
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
, with the ability of the TX to remotely control other machines. When it is in control of them, these artifacts are effectively extensions of it.
Along these lines, the various technologies that we humans produce can be understood as natural extensions of our nature. The machines we create, including even any artificial intelligences or robots we may produce, are not simply independent things. Instead, they can be seen as natural extensions of our incredibly broad, adaptive ability to construct and manipulate the environment into functional artifacts. Ultimately, then, Skynet and the various derivative technologies it produces could be seen as Dawkins’s extended phenotypic expressions of human genes. From this perspective, it doesn’t seem clear at all that Skynet would constitute a fundamentally unnatural or antihuman intelligence. Even if Skynet were to produce a kind of malevolent self-aware intelligence that initiates the Judgment Day scenario, this would itself be a product of human nature (admittedly, a dangerous one) rather than an emergent alien force. This would be like a badly constructed beaver dam that collapses and kills its creators, or a dysfunctional spider web that captures its own weaver. It would be a human-initiated tragedy brought on by human nature itself, rather than the entrance of a being antithetical to human life that wages war according to its own independent interests.
The integration of technology and human nature brings us back to the cyborg. Cyborgs are typically understood as futuristic beings produced by the merger of human biology with mechanical technology. The T-101 Terminator is a prime example of this. But there is another way to understand cyborgs. As explained by the philosopher Andy Clark, we humans can be understood as “natural-born cyborgs,” beings whose nature involves at an early stage the incorporation of technology as an integral component of our minds. As he puts it, “We—more than any other creature on the planet—deploy nonbiological elements (instruments, media, notations) to
complement
our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quite different from those of the naked brain.”
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In short, the human mind is not confined to the skull. As thinking beings, we truly extend ourselves into the various technologies we use in our thought processes. Consider the use of a PC, for example. Whether you are surfing the Internet, embroiled in a role-playing game, or typing an e-mail, the computer-driven activities you engage in can be understood as extended components of your mind at work. Your thoughts and experiences are themselves partly constituted by the computational processes in the PC. Effectively, the person-plus-computer network forms a unified process for knowledge and expression. In this sense,
you are a cyborg
, even though you might not have a single piece of technology integrated into your physical body.
From this perspective, even James Cameron is a cyborg, by virtue of the use he makes of various technologies in delivering the
Terminator
saga. Cameron no doubt utilized a number of technological devices in his creations, from writing the script to postproduction special effects for the films. This utilization of technology, from pencil to camera to cutting-edge computer graphics, can be understood as a fundamental component of Cameron’s thinking. In this case, we would have to admit that when we watch the films, we are viewing a technology-mediated portrayal of his thoughts (and indeed, those of the extensive crew) on the silver screen. So, if we think of the
Terminator
films as an expression of Cameron’s mind in this way, we can see the trilogy as an extension of Cameron himself. To quote Aristotle, who was ahead of his time in this respect, “The work is the maker in actuality.”
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Technology is part and parcel of human nature. It is something that not only extends the horizons of our networked world, but can also be traced back into the core of our being. In essence, thinking beings like us are geared toward using parts of our environment in the construction of our own thoughts and actions. Whether these parts are externally situated or physically integrated into our bodies, the machines we use in life are literal extensions of our thoughts and actions. As Clark puts it, “It is our special character, as human beings, to be forever driven to create, co-opt, annex, and exploit non-biological props and scaffoldings. We have been designed, by Mother Nature, to exploit deep neural plasticity in order to become one with our best and most reliable tools. Minds like ours were made for mergers. Tools-R-Us, and always have been.”
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Seen in this light, the machines that increasingly pervade our lives are deeply rooted in our very nature as adaptive mindful beings. The complex mental functions biomechanically embodied in our brains don’t just rest content in our skulls, but also bootstrap themselves out into the world, resulting in an inseparable interplay between flesh and machine.
Let’s get back to our original question now.
The Terminator
prompts us to ask whether technology is a good thing or a bad thing for us human beings. Will machines, particularly the potentially thinking machines of the future, benefit human existence, or could they be a detriment to human existence, perhaps even bringing about our ultimate demise? What I’ve provided here isn’t a direct answer to this question but a way of looking at our relationship with technology that may make the question an academic one. We do not stand in an “us-versus-them” relationship with machines, one in which we can evaluate whether they intrinsically benefit or harm us. This is because technology in general is an integral feature of human nature itself. If so, then the technology that we produce is a reflection of our nature. We cannot honestly treat machines as an “Other,” but instead must recognize them as extensions of human activity.