Soulless Robots?

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Robots have taken over my life. At least in the short term. As my friend Burke commented on Easter: “Alleluia! The robots have risen… up against us?!” Actually, the robots I encounter are benign and all follow Asimov’s rules. I have mentioned before the phenomenal First Robotics program, a venue to encourage high school students to consider careers in engineering. Team 102, Somerville High School’s robotics team, recently won a regional competition in Hartford, Connecticut. My role has mostly been to watch other people design and construct the robot while occasionally correcting the grammar on written documents. The joke my friend made, however, has at its roots a deep-seated human concern: how do people deal with soulless machines?

Stephen Asma, in his book On Monsters, has a chapter concerning the human fear of a robotic future. Electronic gadgets with uncompromising metal bodies and no consciousness that we recognize present a frightening combination. The question that concerns me more, however, is the concept of the soul itself. The Hebrew Bible has no concept of the soul as it would later be adopted by the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Hebrew Bible a body is a soul; when the soul dies the body dies – people are a monistic unit, not a dualistic entity with a part that hangs around the spirosphere after the biological part rots away. Of course, in Christianity the soul has become an essential aspect of church doctrine and we fear other creatures that lack them. Souls have never been observed in a laboratory and we have yet to prove their existence.

Reading the news and seeing how biological, soul-fueled humans treat each other is a sobering task. Each day I lay the newspaper down with a new kind of dread. Perhaps souls are only mythical beings concocted to shore up a theology that can’t survive without them. Or maybe all living beings have souls. Perhaps even mechanical ones. As Team 102 heads to the national competition in Atlanta in the days ahead, I know that I’ll be rooting for a soulless machine that may be a bold step towards humanity’s continuing evolution.

Sorry for the blur, the robot just wouldn't stop shaking me!

Holi Holidays

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I am the first to admit that I know far too little about Indian religions. As I teach Ancient Near Eastern religions every year, it becomes clear that much of our own modern, western religious tradition owes a debt of gratitude to the ancient traditions of the Far East. Zoroastrianism, substantially connected to early Indic religions, had an immense impact on the major monotheistic faiths that grew out of the ancient Near East.

So it was that I was pleased to see a story in the local paper about the upcoming Hindu festival of Holi. I know little about this festival other than it includes a celebration of color. Having grown up a little too attached to television, a device that was black-and-white in those days, I have retained my fascination with color and the emotion and power it conveys. When color television came to our home, it was an epiphany. Reading about human cognitive development it is impossible to ignore the impact color has on Homo sapiens and their outlook on the world. A master film-maker may convey depth and feeling in the absence of color, but once color is added, the story becomes vibrant. I took my family to a New Shanghai Circus performance at the local community college last night. As stunning as the acrobatics were, the vivid colors definitely enhanced the experience.

While at Nashotah House I found myself being consulted on color. The classrooms were being painted, and as Academic Dean I was asked what the color scheme should be. I consulted a friend who works in architecture, and she gave me a book about the “feel” of colors. My advice was overruled, but a new sensitivity to color had been awakened. Strangely, later that year a local public school brought me in as a consultant on classroom color. My engagement with color is purely subjective, but I know if I see a certain shade of blue I can be literally transfixed by fascination. My minimal exposure to Holi has opened a new window on religion for me. Color. It is an aspect of life to be celebrated.

Courtesy Louisiana State University

Eine Kleine Neanderthal-Musik

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I suffer a limited form of amusia. No, it’s not a fear of amusement, but rather lack of musical ability. I appreciate music very deeply, but I simply can’t make it. I’ve tried lessons and teachers end up turning away in exasperation. The embarrassing part about all this is that music is an integral part of religion – almost all forms of religion have their musical repertoire, and musicologists have demonstrated that the early human impulse to make music has a religious basis. I can only sit in the audience.

That's me on the left

I’m finally getting around to reading Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. A few years back I gave an academic paper suggesting that musical development could be an analog to religious development on a neurological level in the Bronze Age. Since I’m not a neuroscientist I have to rely on others to do the experimental side of the equation. Mithen serves this function nicely. When I read about music and the brain, which I do frequently, I am surprised that more scholars of religion haven’t picked up on this connection. Since music is frequently “background noise” today, many people casually assume that it is insubstantial, a whim. I look at it (listen to it) from a different angle. I seldom listen to background music – if music is playing, I pay attention to it, and something in my unprofessional brain says Mithen is often right on target.

Of course, religion and music is not the main thrust of The Singing Neanderthals, but rather the idea that music was formative for human cognition. Perhaps music even developed before speech. For me this is an important piece of a much larger puzzle: whence did religion arise? Like all inquiries that delve too deeply into the past, the answer is lost among ambiguous artifacts and ancient dust. And yet, those who know more about this than I do seem to be pointing in the direction that both religion and music have their origins in the pre-Homo sapiens stage of our evolution. I’m not surprised. I only wish I could play along.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

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I grew up with robots. Of course they were on the television screen and I was far away in rural-ish western Pennsylvania. They were exotic creatures built by guys much more intelligent than I could ever hope to be, and they were powerful, completely rational, and scary. Now I find myself involved with the FIRST Robotics team in my daughter’s high school where kids a third my age are building a robot. It is a humbling experience.

The more I ponder my small support role in the construction of a robotic creature, the more my thoughts turn to George Dyson’s masterful science writing in one of my favorite books — Darwin Among the Machines: the Evolution of Global Intelligence. I would not have known of this brilliant book had I not met George and a group of his friends several years back while they were discussing some of the ideas raised in his work. The main one that captured my attention was the premise that when we build machines we may be constructing an unrecognized form of consciousness. The greatest minds in neuroscience today cannot agree on what consciousness really is or how far it extends beyond this “three-pound universe” in our heads. Although most would decline to comment on the overtly religious term “soul,” we still know that any difference between consciousness, mind, psyche, and soul is very slim indeed.

Read this book!

Our lifestyle is made possible by robots. We drive cars largely constructed by them, use their chips to communicate over vast distances, and even take a stroll on the surface of Mars with them. My question from Monday’s post may have been whimsical, but it was serious. Where is it that the essence of a creature resides? Does it require carbon-based biology, or do we, unwittingly, create a race of slaves just like the gods of old?

In the Heart or in the Head?

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I don’t have cable television. I don’t even have one of those digital conversion boxes. I’m afraid the costs and technology have gone beyond a guy who grew up with a black-and-white television with the screen the size of an old Mac Classic. I still try to keep a wary finger on the pulse of popular culture, and fortunately the internet provides just about everything in a condensed version. When I want to see a television show I generally do so through DVDs. Again, expense is prohibitive to the underemployed, but kindly family members often help out with occasional contributions. My brother surprised me this Christmas with the first season of the History Channel’s Monster Quest series (brothers sometimes see what you try to hide from the wider world). After a long weekend of class prep, I sat down to watch an episode last night that introduced me for the first time to the work of Dr. Robert J. White, a retired professor from Case Western Reserve University.

I have always been intrigued by the unlimited possibilities, no matter how remote, that science fiction can conjure. This episode, however, was factual and showed footage of Dr. White’s successful head transplant operations on monkeys in the 1970s. I had no idea that such work had ever really been conducted, let alone successfully. Visions from X-Files: I Want to Believe flashed across my cerebrum while I watched the footage. Not to mention the ubiquitous heads-in-jars of many a science-fiction movie! A plaguing religious question was also stirred back into life after having settled at the bottom of the tank for many years – where does the essence of a person reside? Organ transplants are everyday occurrences, and many lives are prolonged by the sharing of body parts no longer used by their original owners. And transplants do not stop below the neck – cornea transplants bring us very close to the brain, the presumed seat of our personality, consciousness, or, if you will, soul.

when a head meets a body

Dr. White’s monkeys that survived seemed to have retained the personality of the original monkey head on its new body, but I wonder if that was just an illusion. In our world where each individual is treated as a discreet unit, the essence of a person is thought to reside in the brain. Our brains, however, recognize our bodies and sometimes bodies reject the very organs intended to save them. Is there really any possibility of preserving the essence in one’s head alone? Or are we, like ants and bees and Portuguese Men o’ War, really all part of a collective organism? Maybe there is a good reason I don’t have cable or a digital conversion box.