2. Replicants and
Little Purple Berries: John Locke vs. the Weeds in my Grandparents'
Backyard
One
Sunday in late summer when I was almost five, our family went to my
grandparents' house for dinner. It was a beautiful evening, so my
two-year-old sister and I went out into the backyard to play while
the grownups sat inside and smoked—all grownups, at that time,
smoked. Anyway, the backyard was getting a little wild as the energy
that used to keep it tidy was no longer present in the house. Along
one side, following the line of the old wire fence, was a garden, or
what had once been a garden, now overgrown with weeds. Weeds are fun
when you're almost five, especially when some of the plants have
little purple berries.
I
know what you're thinking, and yes, my parents had warned me
repeatedly about not eating berries I couldn't identify. And yes, I
had understood these warnings, for instance when my mum had sat me on
her lap and told me quite tearfully how horrible my death would be
for her and my dad. So when I picked the first berry and put it in my
mouth, I had a pretty good idea that I was doing something wrong and
dangerous, or least very much against the rules. Probably, that's why
they tasted so sweet, or at least I like to think so, and probably,
it's why I ate so damned many of them. My sister seemed to enjoy them
as well, at least the few that she had time to eat before the
backdoor opened and my mother came running out.
“Oh
my God,” she said. “How many of these did she eat?”
“Lots,”
I replied, my own hands and mouth momentarily empty. Or at least
that's how I remember it now, though at times I remember the answer
as being “not many.”
No
matter.
“Have
you had any?” she asked next.
“No,”
I replied. This one, I remember precisely.
“Oh
my God,” she may have said again before calling into the house:
“Ron! Joanne's been eating purple nightshade.”
So
that evening, rather than gathering around Grandma Wilkie's excellent
Yorkshire pudding and her typically overcooked roast beef, we went
first to the hospital where the physician gave my sister some
medicine, and then home where she spent much of the night throwing up
into a bowl. Or at least I think she did. Personally, I slept quite
well.
Two
years later, I was lying in bed wide awake. It was dark, and my mind
was wandering. Random voices were drifting into my awareness from
downstairs where my parents were entertaining company. Maybe I'd just
woken up from a doze. Maybe I'd been staring at the ceiling for a
couple of hours. I don't know. What I do know is that at some point,
my mind wandered back to my grandparents' backyard and my thus-far
unspoken poison berry feast. As I lay there, drifting in the grown-up
voices and second-hand smoke seeping under my bedroom door, a line of
thought formed in my head:
I ate a lot of poison
berries.
Poison berries can
kill you.
Maybe they killed me.
What if I'm dead?
But if I'm dead, how
can I be here?
What if I'm not really
here, but only think I am?
What if I died, and my
parents replaced me with a robot?
What if I'm really a
robot who only thinks its me?
I don't want to be a
robot.
How can I be sure I'm
not?
Maybe I should ask Mum
and Dad.
At
this point I got out of bed and headed down the stairs, settling in
my favourite spot three steps from the bottom, around the corner from
the living room. The nearness of voices made me feel more connected,
and for a few minutes, this helped. The relief didn't last, though,
and eventually I went to the bottom of the stairs and stepped around
the corner. The conversation stopped, and after one look at my face,
my mother called me over to her seat at the end of the couch. I
curled up on her lap, and she asked me what was the matter:
“Remember when Joanne
ate all those poison berries?”
“Yes.”
“I ate some, too.”
“Yes?”
“I ate more than her.”
“OK?”
“So did I die? Did you
replace me with a robot? Mummy, am I a robot?”
This
took Mum off guard. I recall her staring at me for a minute, maybe
trying not to laugh or maybe just wondering how to respond. After a
moment during which my parents' guests waited quietly, she hugged me
close.
“No, Sweetie,” she
said. “You're not a robot.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
And
that was that. For the next few decades, I had an amusing story about
my childhood imagination. Then, a few months ago, I showed the movie
Blade Runner (1982) to the
class in Human Nature and Technology that I co-teach with Dr. Andrew
Moore. This movie features artificial beings, called replicants,
outwardly indistinguishable from humans, capable of passing
themselves off a homo sapiens
unless subjected to a psychological examination known as the
Voight-Kampff test. The test confronts suspected replicants with
emotionally charged questions and then assesses their responses as a
measure of their humanity or non-humanity. As a means to prevent
these artificial creatures from posing a serious threat to human
beings, they have been banned from the surface of the planet, and are
used instead as soldiers and workers in various industries and
services off-world. As a further safeguard, the Tyrell Corporation,
which manufactures them, has set a four-year limit to their
lifespans. As a final means of control—a way of mitigating the
violent emotions that might result from such a bleak
outlook—later-model replicants are implanted with memories. In the
case of Rachael, the latest model, with an indeterminate lifespan and
no awareness of her own artificiality, the memories are borrowed from
the niece of her designer, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, founder and CEO of the
Tyrell Corporation. In addition to these transplanted memories,
Rachael has a collection of photographs, also of Tyrell's niece,
which she believes to have been taken in her own non-existent youth.
The unsettling part—rather, one of the unsettling parts, as the
movie abounds in these—occurs when Rick Deckard, the film's titular
blade runner (replicant killer), overhears her playing the piano. At
this point in the film, Rachael has become aware of her own
artificiality and thus knows that she never actually took piano
lessons. And yet, she remembers having taken them, and demonstrably
possesses the skill that the lessons she never had, have in fact
imparted. Rachael's character, then, exemplifies a continuity between
the real memories of Tyrell's nameless niece and her own real
capacities.
So if we want to view
Rachael as a person, and her demonstrations of both emotional and
rational experience suggest quite strongly that we should, how
exactly do we think of her? What are the boundaries of this potential
person? And for that matter, what do we even mean by “person”?
This is a word often taken for granted, as in conversation at least,
its meaning seems self-evident: a human being. But this is not the
only or even the best possible definition, as the ubiquity, at least
in Western jurisprudence, of the insanity defence against a criminal
charge attests: the assertion that, at a given time and for reasons
of mental debility, the accused is not responsible for the crimes
that his or her body committed, i.e. the person of the defendant and
the person who did the actions in question are functionally distinct,
notwithstanding the fact that they share one body.
But
if being human is not sufficient for personhood, what is? I'm
reminded of a passage from John Locke's Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690),
which I'll quote at length. Locke defines the term “person” as
follows:
a
thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can
consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different
times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is
inseparable from thinking. ... Thus is it always as to our present
sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that
which he calls SELF:—it not being considered, in this case, whether
the same self be continued in the same or divers substances. For,
since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which
makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes
himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists
personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far
as consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or
thought, so far reaches the identity of that person. (John Locke.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
II xxvii 11)
Here, Locke takes
rationality, self-awareness, and continuity of memory as necessary
and sufficient conditions for personhood. Interestingly, Locke's
definition leaves open the possibility that personhood need not be
materially continuous. By this definition it is at least
theoretically possible, given reason, self-awareness, and memory, for
a person to begin existence in one material form and then continue it
in another.
When applied to Blade
Runner, Locke's definition offers some interesting possibilities.
As Rachael remembers taking the piano lessons for which her body was
never present, and as the effect of those lessons is her actual
ability to make music, the film suggests a continuity of memory
between Tyrell's human niece and the non-human construct. Rachael's
self-awareness is also telling, particularly in her conversation with
Deckard after saving his life by shooting fellow replicant Leon.
Rachael is visibly upset after the killing:
Deckard: Shakes? Me too.
Rachael: What?
Deckard: I get 'em bad,
It's part of the business.
Rachael: I'm not in the
business. I am the business.
Her
rationality by this point has also been clearly established,
particularly during the Voight-Kampff test, which Deckard administers
on their first meeting, unaware at first that she is not human.
Tyrell introduces her to Deckard by stating, “I want to see it work
on a person. I want to see a negative before I provide you with a
positive.” His use of “person” draws attention to the
discrepancy between his and Deckard's understandings of what this
word might mean, and Rachael's responses are so close to what
Deckard, previously identified as the best of all blade runners,
would expect from a human being, that it takes him over a hundred
questions—more than triple his own average—to identify her
nature. She functions, in other words, as a rational and emotionally
stable human would be expected to function.
So
Rachael the replicant possesses reason and self-awareness, and has a
continuity of memory stretching back to a specific human childhood
that her body never had. She thus is a person who spans not only two
bodies but also two orders of being—one biological and one
technological. There is a continuity of experience and identity
between these two beings, who merge to form one identifiable and
functional self. The situation is further complicated by the fact
that Tyrell's niece may still be alive—the film provides no
information on this question—and so may also constitute a self
composed largely of the memories she shares with Rachael. That is, a
single set of lived experiences has probably given rise to two
distinct persons, both of whom have valid claims for seeing the
associated memories as their own. If such were not the case, the
replicant would not be able to play the piano.
So what does any of this
have to do with the berries in my grandparents' garden? The short
answer is that it completely invalidates the fears of my
seven-year-old self. Consider, for example, the following thought
experiment:
Imagine two parallel
universes. In the first, events played out as I've described, but in
the second, I died—given the number of berries I ate, quite
frankly, I should have—and was replaced, unbeknownst to my parents
and other relations, by a robot in all ways indistinguishable from my
biological self. This robot was now wearing my clothes and honestly
believed that it was me, and the lives of these two hypothetical
Rodgers had proceeded along identical paths. Allowing for the
existence of both of these universes, it would be impossible at any
given moment to know which one I was actually living in. Given the
impossibility of knowing, and given the identity of experience, the
question of which being is the biological version and which the
technological version becomes functionally meaningless.
From the point if view of
personhood, the question is just not worth asking. On the other
hand—sticking with the thought experiment—the psychological
anxiety experienced by both Rodgers would have to be seen as equally
real: their physical make-up is identical, after all, and the sites
of anxiety in each case would necessarily be their brains. Thus, the
anxiety of the being, rather than the substance of the being, becomes
a central consideration: the presence or absence of suffering is more
important than either the physical stuff or the particular origins of
the sufferer. To broaden the spectrum a little further, consider this
parting thought: if the lived experience is real, the reality of the
being who embodies the experience is a given, it being irrational to
assert that an unreal being can have a real experience. Where reason,
self-awareness, and continuity of memory exist, therefore, so does
the the necessity of full inclusion in the moral community of
persons.
“Mummy, am I a robot?”
“Mummy, am I a
simulation?”
“Mummy, am I a clone?”
“I have no idea,
Sweetie, and it doesn't matter anyway.”
Pleasant dreams.
