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.”¹

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.

(http://www.trussel.com/bladerun.htm)

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.

1 The Poison Garden Website (http://www.thepoisongarden.co.uk/atoz/atropa_belladonna.htm) offers the following comments on the toxicity of purple nightshade:

“Symptoms may be slow to appear but last for several days. They include dryness in the mouth, thirst, difficulty in swallowing and speaking, blurred vision from the dilated pupils, vomiting, excessive stimulation of the heart, drowsiness, slurred speech, hallucinations, confusion, disorientation, delirium, and agitation. Coma and convulsions often precede death.

There is disagreement over what constitutes a fatal amount with cases cited of a small child eating half a berry and dying alongside a nine year old Danish boy who, in the 1990s, ate between twenty and twenty five berries and survived.”