5. Well Bless My Cyborg Soul

“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

The speaker of the forgoing quotation makes assumptions that will be familiar to the majority of human beings: that he is alive now and will soon die; that dying will be unpleasant; and that some part of his being will, or at least might, survive his passing. Or in short, he entertains the possibility that he has a soul. Also worth noting is that he is presently suffering. That is, he experiences, and knows himself to experience, pain. This also is a common human phenomenon, as it is largely through reflecting on our own suffering and its causes that we come to understand both ourselves and our world, and the value of a compassionate relationship between the two.

The speaker, however, is not human: these are the final works of the Monster in the 1818 edition of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. The character, then, is a product not of “nature” as commonly understood, but of technology: as a hybrid of biology and technology, he is a cyborg according to any current definition of the term. And as I've mentioned in an earlier posting on this blog (entry # 2), he also meets Locke's definition of personhood, namely the possession of reason, self-awareness, and memory. The question of souls, though, may appear to be a different matter. In my teaching on cyborgs, I've come across some concern on the subject of the soul. Do made beings have souls? Can made beings have souls? Does this question conceivably draw a line between the purely human, if such a being exists, and the bio-tech hybrid? At some point, given a progressive hybridization, might a human be understood to have lost her or his soul? I've long suspected, and in the most recent run of the Human Nature and Technology course at STU had it more or less confirmed, that a major source of discomfort in our society with the image of the cyborg, and the prospect of increasing biotechnological hybridization, centres precisely on the question of souls. And so far in my own reading in the field of cyborg studies, I've seen little explicit mention of the subject.

I suppose the first thing to do is to lay out what I mean by “soul” as the term is almost as slippery as “nature.” While it might be tempting to work with a specifically Christian conception of the term, I am going to avoid this temptation in favour of a more general understanding. After all, nothing in Shelley's novel identifies her own sense of the term with any specific religious doctrine. The Monster, in his final words, seems to appeal to a basic dualism that pervades most cultural traditions, East and West. That is, he at least entertains the possibility that some essential element of our identities is not bound to any physical substance, but rather is metaphysical in nature. It is this basic metaphysical claim that I wish to address. And to be clear, I will not be making a case in this entry for or against the existence of the soul. Rather, I will be making a simple appeal for intellectual consistency.

So ...

Let's begin with the fact that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of the soul. If there were, arguments for the soul would not be metaphysical: they would be physical. So any claim for a supernatural dimension to our being must be based on something other than evidence—whatever that might be. The sheer ubiquity of the belief in some part of us that is not bound to our physical form, moreover, is no argument for the correctness of the position. To accept such an argument is to fall victim to an informal logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad populum fallacy, or in more colloquial terms, the bandwagon fallacy. It is also, as I think anyone reading this blog will recognize upon self-reflection, extremely difficult to imagine a future from which all facets of ourselves are absent. Knowing our bodies to have relatively short expiry dates, it is therefore normal to project a non-physical type of consciousness onto the world both present and future—and in many case, particularly in the East, past as well. And while some particularly brilliant thinkers, such as René Decartes, have argued for the existence of the soul through intensive and systematic skepticism of all outward or physical things as opposed to the apparent existence and unity of the thinking self, such arguments fall apart when confronted with the findings of modern cognitive science, principally that the apparent unity of the mind is, itself, the illusory product of several discrete systems working in the brain. Descartes cannot be faulted for his conclusions here: he simply did not have access to our data, or to the technology that made it possible.

But what does this have to do with Frankenstein's Monster? The Monster is, after all, a made thing: a product of human hands. Here is where the intellectual consistency part of this entry comes in. The Monster's point of view on this matter is essentially our own, with the single exception that he has no illusions of a metaphysical origin: having read the words of his creator pertaining to his creation, he knows himself to be the product of physical mechanisms, much as evolutionary science subsequent to the novel's publication has shown us to be as well. And yet he imagines, and allows for the possibility, of the metaphysical. There is no evidence for his supposition—and he does at least have the intellectual integrity not to assert it as a fact.

So given the lack of evidence for a soul, what is the difference between the Monster and us? Quite frankly, there is none. The Monster has as much claim to a soul as does any human being on the planet. This is not to say that souls do not exist: it is to say that the intellectually honest reader of this novel is faced with a choice between two positions: to deny the Monster a soul is to deny a soul to any human being, while to claim a soul for oneself is to allow the Monster the same.

The next and most obvious question is, “So what?” And I think this is one of the most important questions that the novel raises, because of course the question extends not just to the monster but to any potential intelligent machine as well. That is, when we finally build a machine that has intelligence comparable to our own, we will have no more or no less reason to assume ensoulment with our creation than we do with ourselves. To assert that another intelligent entity does not have a soul while claiming a soul for oneself is to assume for oneself a special or privileged position in the absence of any supporting evidence. This is an essentially racist position—a position that James Hughes in his 2004 book Citizen Cyborg labels “human racism”—and as such is no less morally culpable than racism directed at any other being that qualifies for personhood. Any intelligent machine that we make will be of a kind with us simply by virtue of its intelligence, and thus in community with us. Any a priori assumptions about the presence of a soul in us and its absence in the thinking and self-aware product of our science will certainly lead to a mythically based presumption of superiority—and our own history tells us, over and over again, where that road leads. Further, should such a creation ultimately become more intelligent than us, this discriminatory position would be roughly analogous to a homo habilis asserting its superiority over homo sapiens by virtue of some particular characteristic that it had but that we do not have, without taking into account the many gains that have been made over the last two million years of evolution. That is, to create a definition of “soul” that can only be met by homo sapiens would be to proceed ontologically. Such an argument would have about as much to do with the world outside the arguer's head as does any other ontological argument, for instance those of Anshelm or Descartes.

So ultimately, what am I getting at in this rambling little entry? I suppose it is this: given the equivalence of any argument either for the soul or against the soul where a multiplicity of intelligent beings, born or made, is concerned, the question is utterly irrelevant. If I have a soul, then so do you, and that's just peachy. And if you don't, then I don't either, and that's fine, too. In any case, the question can have no bearing on how we treat or respect each other. Or as Confucius put it in the sixth century B.C., “Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself.” As our machines progress more and more rapidly toward intelligence, this moral admonition becomes increasingly relevant to beings other than humans. There is likely to come a point, quite possibly during the current century, when to hit or not to hit the “off” switch becomes one of our most pressing ethical questions.