Lately, it has seemingly become quite a bit easier for me to locate information on (or an actual source for!) practically anything I get nostalgic about, which is a very weird feeling. I have a fairly thorough and detailed long-term memory for things that have a particular aesthetic to them, and there were a number of books, movies, songs, albums, stories, and objects that I lost or misplaced (or simply failed to record or preserve when I had the opportunity) that existed to me only in my brain for a number of years, to the point where I started to wonder if I'd dreamed some of them.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this was a short-run series on Nickelodeon called The Third Eye. For years and years, I recalled snippets of very eerie music in my mind, images of weird slimy lump-shaped aliens sliding through tunnels under the earth, and a vague notion of a small, impish-looking statue. But I couldn't find any information on the actual shows for years.
Then came the Internet, and message boards, and forums, and perhaps most importantly, search engines. By typing in weird words like "Grinnygog", I was able to reach information that both corroborated and filled in some of the gaps in my rememberances. I was fairly shocked when I found out how long ago the shows had actually aired -- judging from the dates I uncovered, I must have watched such shows when I was between the ages of maybe 3 and 7. And none of them had been released on video or DVD in the USA, so while I at least knew I hadn't dreamed them, I still didn't have any way to re-watch them. I've since found snippets here and there on Youtube and other online sources, and it has been a decidedly bizarre experience to see even small parts of media I'd thought was "lost".
Hopefully I don't sound like I'm over-romanticizing the Internet here or anything -- I'm well aware that most people in the world still don't have flushing toilets, let alone Net access. But there is something very affecting in the realization that I've been able to find pieces of things to confirm and refresh ancient, strange childhood memories as a result of a diffuse but highly-networked peer-to-peer community of individuals (determined to preserve and share their memories of the same things I'd thought were long forgotten).
Some people remember images and melodies and titles the way I did, others remember dates, others have access to old television schedules, and the very, very lucky ones might have crumbling old VHS tapes. In a different sort of world, perhaps these stories would truly have been lost, but in this world, it seems that enough people managed to hold their memories safely until the right sort of platform emerged through which to share and integrate them.
Applied this way, the Internet is a kind of collective scrapbook, and in that sense, there's a kind of beauty to it. Some people seem to view "technological development" as something that (justifiably, if you ask some folks) simply bulldozes the artifacts of the past, chopping them up into the raw stuff from which new things are sure to emerge. But it doesn't have to be looked at that way. I see innovation as additive and enriching, not as a "cleansing flame" set to wash the surface of the Earth anew for the shimmering sterility of crystal spires and togas.
Moving into a realm slightly shinier and more commercial than "pure" nostalgia-mining, I just purchased an MP3 album from Amazon for the first time: Queen II. I was completely obsessed with Queen in junior high and this was one of my absolute favorite albums of theirs...I was less enamored with the 80s stuff where they started getting all dance-y, but their 70s material was most excellently weird and dramatic and flouncy and technically interesting.
Queen II is especially interesting because a lot of the songs have a kind of fairy-tale-like theme in a tone/mindset that reminds me vaguely of the aesthetic of "Labyrinth" for some reason (which doesn't mean it sounds like David Bowie -- it doesn't, really, it's more like the music reminds me of the visual atmosphere of the movie). I remember listening to it in 7th and 8th grade and feeling like I'd discovered a kind of lost, dark, glittery treasure. There was always something about the early Queen albums that made me feel, at least as a kid, like I was listening in on something I perhaps wasn't supposed to hear -- like the soundtrack to someone else's dream, or the looking-glass version of a pop album from some parallel dimension that only intersects with ours every once in a while.
There are a number of songs on this album (like White Queen (As It Began) and (The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke) that I've never heard played on the radio. In fact, I think the only song I've ever heard on the radio from this album is Seven Seas of Rhye, which is a pretty odd tune but which somehow ended up on at least one Greatest Hits albums.
I actually still have the cassette tape of Queen II, which means I also have the insert/liner notes, which is why I figured I would just purchase and download the MP3s. The MP3s, happily, seem to be "regular" MP3s that I can copy and transfer between different folders -- within a few minutes of clicking the "order" button, I had the whole album on my hard drive, on my iPod, and on the media server in my living room. Neat!
And now I'm sitting here with headphones on, grinning like a rather silly person and feeling weird little chills running up and down my spine as I recognize bits and pieces and threads of harmony and guitar and funny jingling noises that haven't entered my ears in close to a decade (I've not had a reliable cassette player in a while, and the tape itself was missing for several years).
As a child I did entertain plenty of daydreams involving jet packs, warp drive, and silver jumpsuits, mostly because those were the motifs of the pictures of "the future" I was given by my culture, but as I've gotten older, it has become clear to me that things are changing in a far less predictable and more organic-seeming manner than I imagined they would initially. I never imagined that I would be able to just think of an album I hadn't heard in a while, punch its specifications up on the screen, electronically transfer funds, and have the music flowing into my ears within the space of a few minutes.
In short: those who scour the world for minute trials in grand and desperate attempts to prove the existence of "magic" or paranormal ability are surely missing out on the real magic that is waking up in the world through the mechanisms of the almost-invisibly mundane.
I am not saying that "machines are going to save us all" and I am quite viscerally aware that only a tiny percentage of the world's population is currently privy to the "magic" of practically being able to wish any known object, verse, or song into their laps or ears almost instantaneously. And I do feel somewhat uneasy taking such delight in making the "magic" analogy when I don't know where the parts of my computer were made, or under what conditions.
But one of the things that actually gives me hope for the future is that in some respects, and in some contexts, at least some people are seeing how the old and the new can coexist uniquely and vibrantly. The new is not consuming or destroying the old, but maintaining a sense of the preciousness of things (even "frivolous"-seeming things like weird British childrens' TV shows), and seeking to bring them into the future in such a way that more people can enjoy them. I like to think that this odd, infrequently-discussed subset of communication and information-sharing is a poetic microcosm of a particular approach to progress I quite favor -- and that is the approach in which it is recognized that the future has room for practically anything one can imagine, regardless of age.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Perception and Impressions: An Experiment
I tried this experiment recently with some friends, and the results were interesting enough to compel me to try it out on Existence is Wonderful. I was thinking recently about the way different people tend to prioritize different features as salient when they form their first impressions of something (or someone, for that matter), and it occurred to me that a small survey involving fairly simple images might serve as an interesting demonstration.
So, if you are so inclined, please choose the option in the poll box below that most closely matches your initial impression: is A or B more like X?
NOTE: In the polling application I'm using for this experiment, merely selecting one of the radio buttons will count as a "vote" -- so please look carefully before choosing, because you can't take your vote back.
EDIT (2/22/08): I would actually greatly appreciate it if people would comment on their reasons for choosing either A or B. You might want to avoid looking at other people's comments before making your own choice so as to avoid unduly biasing your response, and you don't HAVE to state your reasoning in order to vote, but it would be cool if at least a few people offered their thoughts in this regard.
So, if you are so inclined, please choose the option in the poll box below that most closely matches your initial impression: is A or B more like X?
NOTE: In the polling application I'm using for this experiment, merely selecting one of the radio buttons will count as a "vote" -- so please look carefully before choosing, because you can't take your vote back.
EDIT (2/22/08): I would actually greatly appreciate it if people would comment on their reasons for choosing either A or B. You might want to avoid looking at other people's comments before making your own choice so as to avoid unduly biasing your response, and you don't HAVE to state your reasoning in order to vote, but it would be cool if at least a few people offered their thoughts in this regard.
Monday, February 18, 2008
On Spare Parts and Maintenance
I know, I know.
We're not exactly living in the Amazing Exciting Future yet.
But nevertheless, headlines like Women More Likely To Postpone New Knees definitely prompt me to do a double-take (or two) when I see them these days.
Whenever I see stuff like this, I get this weird, funny cartoon image in my head of a group of middle-aged women standing outside a boutique window featuring a display of shiny metal and epoxy body parts. I've had a fascination with "parts replacement" ever since I was a little kid wondering how my Lego minifigure could remain "the same person" if I had to change out his entire torso if I wanted to change his shirt.
But the reality of "parts replacement" in the present is most certainly more about practical healthcare factors like pain relief than about science-fictiony philosophizing. As the New York Times article quoted above states:
Ouch! Sounds rather unpleasant. Fortunately for them, some folks (at least those living in wealthy, industrialized nations and able to access and afford health care) can find relief in total knee replacements, hip replacements, and other internally prosthetic surgeries.
Unfortunately, though (in addition to the lack of wider access to techniques that can have such a profound effect on a person's pain levels), the implants don't last forever. Knee replacement has actually been around since the early 1970s, and while materials and processes have certainly improved over the past three decades (newer replacement joints can probably last upwards of 20 years), the fact still remains that implanted materials such as titanium do not self-repair the way biological tissue can.
So, what I'm wondering regarding the long term is: will we end up developing better and better mechanical replacement parts, perhaps that can be maintained and repaired by the patient over time via injectable materials, or will stem cell and other therapies provide ways to restore ground-off cartilage and/or decrease inflammatory irritation such as that found in severe arthritis? I actually surmise that this is not an either/or prospect -- it is both likely and good that research will continue in multiple directions to help account for different people's individual situations, medical needs, and preferences.
Additionally, without even getting into the issue of what the "maximum possible human lifespan" might be, it does seem safe to note that (a) people in some countries do indeed live longer, on average, than their ancestors did, (b) the elder population is becoming more and more demographically significant, and (c) this trend has a decent chance of continuing in the future. It makes plenty of sense, then, to try and figure out more and better ways to help people stay mobile and pain-free well into several decades of living with a replacement part or two.
Again referencing the New York Times, doctors used to encourage people to wait as long as possible before getting a knee replacement, figuring that the patient would simply "die a natural death" before the part wore out. But some physicians are now re-thinking this advice in the advent of better and safer surgical techniques (that allow quicker recoveries) and in realizing that it doesn't make sense for people to live with terrible pain when there's a way to mitigate that pain.
Which leads me to my final point: while biomedical advances are certainly exciting to research, read about, and think about, even things like changes in physician attitudes can help a lot of people. Even with chronic illness, you can live to be 100, claims a recent MSNBC article -- and according to this article, one of the "secrets" to longevity is that of "Find[ing] a doctor willing to treat late-life symptoms aggressively". This seems like an obvious no-brainer to me: I mean, if you have diabetes or heart disease, why should the fact that you're 80 rather than 18 mean you get a lower standard of treatment by default?
And while I certainly look forward to some of the shiny healthcare advances that could be lingering just beyond the horizon (not just for my own future's sake, of course, but for the sake of family members and loved ones who are accumulating years), I definitely think there's plenty more that can be done now, using existing tools and resources, to help improve healthcare for the elderly and everyone else besides.
We're not exactly living in the Amazing Exciting Future yet.
But nevertheless, headlines like Women More Likely To Postpone New Knees definitely prompt me to do a double-take (or two) when I see them these days.
Whenever I see stuff like this, I get this weird, funny cartoon image in my head of a group of middle-aged women standing outside a boutique window featuring a display of shiny metal and epoxy body parts. I've had a fascination with "parts replacement" ever since I was a little kid wondering how my Lego minifigure could remain "the same person" if I had to change out his entire torso if I wanted to change his shirt.
But the reality of "parts replacement" in the present is most certainly more about practical healthcare factors like pain relief than about science-fictiony philosophizing. As the New York Times article quoted above states:
...osteoarthritis [can] wear down the cartilage in knees and leave sufferers with bone-on-bone rubbing and agonizing pain.
Ouch! Sounds rather unpleasant. Fortunately for them, some folks (at least those living in wealthy, industrialized nations and able to access and afford health care) can find relief in total knee replacements, hip replacements, and other internally prosthetic surgeries.
Unfortunately, though (in addition to the lack of wider access to techniques that can have such a profound effect on a person's pain levels), the implants don't last forever. Knee replacement has actually been around since the early 1970s, and while materials and processes have certainly improved over the past three decades (newer replacement joints can probably last upwards of 20 years), the fact still remains that implanted materials such as titanium do not self-repair the way biological tissue can.
So, what I'm wondering regarding the long term is: will we end up developing better and better mechanical replacement parts, perhaps that can be maintained and repaired by the patient over time via injectable materials, or will stem cell and other therapies provide ways to restore ground-off cartilage and/or decrease inflammatory irritation such as that found in severe arthritis? I actually surmise that this is not an either/or prospect -- it is both likely and good that research will continue in multiple directions to help account for different people's individual situations, medical needs, and preferences.
Additionally, without even getting into the issue of what the "maximum possible human lifespan" might be, it does seem safe to note that (a) people in some countries do indeed live longer, on average, than their ancestors did, (b) the elder population is becoming more and more demographically significant, and (c) this trend has a decent chance of continuing in the future. It makes plenty of sense, then, to try and figure out more and better ways to help people stay mobile and pain-free well into several decades of living with a replacement part or two.
Again referencing the New York Times, doctors used to encourage people to wait as long as possible before getting a knee replacement, figuring that the patient would simply "die a natural death" before the part wore out. But some physicians are now re-thinking this advice in the advent of better and safer surgical techniques (that allow quicker recoveries) and in realizing that it doesn't make sense for people to live with terrible pain when there's a way to mitigate that pain.
Which leads me to my final point: while biomedical advances are certainly exciting to research, read about, and think about, even things like changes in physician attitudes can help a lot of people. Even with chronic illness, you can live to be 100, claims a recent MSNBC article -- and according to this article, one of the "secrets" to longevity is that of "Find[ing] a doctor willing to treat late-life symptoms aggressively". This seems like an obvious no-brainer to me: I mean, if you have diabetes or heart disease, why should the fact that you're 80 rather than 18 mean you get a lower standard of treatment by default?
And while I certainly look forward to some of the shiny healthcare advances that could be lingering just beyond the horizon (not just for my own future's sake, of course, but for the sake of family members and loved ones who are accumulating years), I definitely think there's plenty more that can be done now, using existing tools and resources, to help improve healthcare for the elderly and everyone else besides.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Really Inane Question: Height and Writing
Seriously, this is incredibly inane, but I figured I'd ask it here since I'm guessing at least some of the people reading this are probably interested in things like cultural assumptions, heuristics, and biases.
The average American woman is around 5 feet, 4 inches tall (at least according to most charts I've seen recently). I'm slightly below average height, at 5 feet, 2.5 inches tall. This isn't unusual for my family; most of the women I'm related to are around my height, give or take an inch or three.
And yet...for some reason, a majority of people who first meet me via e-mail or the Web tell me upon meeting me in person, "Huh, I expected you to be taller". When I ask them how much taller, they almost invariably guess 5'8" - 5'9".
So, I'm curious: is there such a thing as a "tall person writing style"? If so, what are its elements? Do I sound too ornery to be a short person or something?
I don't personally tend to assume anything about a person's height by reading their writing -- unless they're actually writing about how tall they are, I figure their writing gives me zero information on what their height might be, so it would seem pointless for me to make any assumptions.
I still feel kind of silly about this post but it just weirds me out a bit that the assumptions of my supposed tallness and the "5'8" - 5'9" guesses are so darn consistent. And I'm curious as to whether anyone else has run into something similar.
The average American woman is around 5 feet, 4 inches tall (at least according to most charts I've seen recently). I'm slightly below average height, at 5 feet, 2.5 inches tall. This isn't unusual for my family; most of the women I'm related to are around my height, give or take an inch or three.
And yet...for some reason, a majority of people who first meet me via e-mail or the Web tell me upon meeting me in person, "Huh, I expected you to be taller". When I ask them how much taller, they almost invariably guess 5'8" - 5'9".
So, I'm curious: is there such a thing as a "tall person writing style"? If so, what are its elements? Do I sound too ornery to be a short person or something?
I don't personally tend to assume anything about a person's height by reading their writing -- unless they're actually writing about how tall they are, I figure their writing gives me zero information on what their height might be, so it would seem pointless for me to make any assumptions.
I still feel kind of silly about this post but it just weirds me out a bit that the assumptions of my supposed tallness and the "5'8" - 5'9" guesses are so darn consistent. And I'm curious as to whether anyone else has run into something similar.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Sci-Fi Recommendations
Escape Pod is a (more or less) weekly podcast featuring original short fiction by a variety of authors, from the well-known to folks who are just starting out. I've been listening to it for just under a year now, and while I definitely enjoy some stories more than others, the sheer variety of styles, themes, plots, and characters presented never ceases to amaze me. Much thanks to host Steve Eley for hosting Escape Pod and keeping it going for the past few years.
Anyway, I am mentioning Escape Pod not just to go all fangirl on it, but to draw attention to the story Friction, by Will McIntosh, which aired February 8, 2008. It's a fairly simple story, with few characters and (seemingly) simple settings, but everything about it just fits together brilliantly and the overall effect is (at least for me) difficult to put into words.
It doesn't exactly correlate with any of the things I usually blog about here, and in some respects it's a bit of a mournful tale, but it's also quite hauntingly beautiful. I don't take life for granted to begin with, but this story made me feel even more the fierce awe of conscious existence. It might not be to everyone's taste but I liked it a lot, and figured I'd point it out.
Other Escape Pod stories I've quite enjoyed (stories quite different in style from Friction, and from each other, for that matter) include:
- Start the Clock, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
- Impossible Dreams, by Tim Pratt
- Anyone Can Whistle, by David Walton
- Save Me Plz, by David Barr Kirtley
Anyway, I am mentioning Escape Pod not just to go all fangirl on it, but to draw attention to the story Friction, by Will McIntosh, which aired February 8, 2008. It's a fairly simple story, with few characters and (seemingly) simple settings, but everything about it just fits together brilliantly and the overall effect is (at least for me) difficult to put into words.
It doesn't exactly correlate with any of the things I usually blog about here, and in some respects it's a bit of a mournful tale, but it's also quite hauntingly beautiful. I don't take life for granted to begin with, but this story made me feel even more the fierce awe of conscious existence. It might not be to everyone's taste but I liked it a lot, and figured I'd point it out.
Other Escape Pod stories I've quite enjoyed (stories quite different in style from Friction, and from each other, for that matter) include:
- Start the Clock, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
- Impossible Dreams, by Tim Pratt
- Anyone Can Whistle, by David Walton
- Save Me Plz, by David Barr Kirtley
Friday, February 08, 2008
Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed
NOTE:This is a tidier edit of the essays first published here and here.
What If My Toaster Burns My Bagels Because It Hates Me?
Given the subjects I tend to focus on in my writing, I'm often asked a lot of questions regarding issues of autonomy, will, cognition, perception, robots, and personhood. These questions tend to be filled with fuzzy, difficult-to-define terms, and what's more, they're commonly asked by people with a clear agenda (whether it be making a case for the existence of "souls" and supernatural superbeings, or asserting that nothing matters because no choice is actually real because individuals aren't really real). And, like the proverbial monsters under the bed, they sometimes keep me up at night trying to hash through all the various contingencies and semantic gymnastics even beginning to address them would require.
But at a certain point, thinking about the monsters (quasi-autonomous robot sort or otherwise) that might be under the bed (and how to avoid them) starts to become more exhausting and annoying than just switching on the light and proving that either there aren't any monsters at all, or just getting to know them a little better if there are. So while this writing will by no means address these questions with "airtight" answers, it should at least give a sense of what goes on in my head when I approach them.
Decisions and Autonomy
Most dictionaries (see here for an example of this) seem to define "autonomy" in terms like independence, freedom, self-direction, and self-governance. I don't have any argument with the dictionary in that regard, however, in this discussion, the "autonomy" I have most in mind is that which describes a discrete and independently-operating locus of consciousness, awareness, and thought.
In this sense, humans and cats and even mice can be said to be "autonomous". Every human, cat, and mouse has some level of wholly private experience that no other entity can directly access. That is the usual sense in which I think about autonomy. There are, of course, other complicating layers and definitions on top of that one -- some involving decision-making ability and legal sorts of independence from external coercion and control -- but the basic unit of "autonomy" for me is the individual mind.
As far as what it means for an entity to be capable of making decisions for itself, that's another question entirely. It's also a question that depends on what you'd consider a "decision" to be, and whether you automatically require explanations of agency in addressing that concept. I would definitely allow that in some respects, entities (we can assume to be) wholly lacking in minds are, in fact, capable of "making decisions".
Say you write a function in C that will output one string if a variable has a value of less than five and a different string if a variable has a value of five or more. Many of us would, at least colloquially, say that the function decides which string to output based on what its input value is. And if this function existed in the context of a program where any of multiple functions might be called in response to higher-level inputs, we might say that the program decides which functions it is going to call.
But if we dig a little deeper, it's clear that the colloquial conventions in which program behavior is commonly discussed do not reflect the (arguably) "ultimate" sources of the program's behavior. The software engineer writing the program in fact decides in advance what the program's outputs are going to be. She decides what inputs will prompt which functions to be called, and she also decides what criteria will determine the outputs of each function.
But say we dig even deeper than that! Say the software engineer is writing her program according to a set of requirements handed to her by her boss. Her boss may not even know the C language himself; all he knows is what he wants the program to do. So he provides "inputs" to the software engineer in the form of requirements, which are probably written in "natural language" as opposed to code or pseudocode. The engineer then takes the requirements and processes them into a C program.
But let's not stop there! Say the boss got the requirements from the customer over the phone. Furthermore, say that the customer speaks only Chinese, whereas the boss speaks both Chinese and English. The boss, in this case, has to translate the customer's requirements into English so that the software engineer (who doesn't know a word of Chinese) can understand them. This entails the boss having to make a lot of decisions regarding what the customer likely meant by certain turns of phrase, and it also entails the boss having to think about what points to emphasize most strongly so that the engineer gets a sense of the customer's priorities.
Now, lest anyone think I'm veering into the realm of cybernetic totalism, let's pause a moment. While one could indeed condense the software engineer herself into a code-producing box into which you put requirements and out of which you get a software package, and while one could reduce the boss into a Chinese-English requirements translation machine, surely it is apparent that there are discontinuities in this instructional chain. That is, as you move further away from any individual program output (let's say, a string printed on the screen that reads either "X is less than five" or "X is greater than or equal to five"), things become less and less easy to determine, and far more subject to uncontrollable variables.
When writing a C program, the kinds of inputs the computer gets are constrained to a relatively narrow set -- the programmer generally uses a keyboard interface to type the code in, and very specific rules of syntax must be followed in order for the program to do anything at all when it is compiled (much less the precise thing the programmer wants it to do). What's more, as far as any of us knows, present-day desktop PCs don't have anything like the "internal life" that we humans do, or like chimps or cats or mice do, even. Neither the computer nor the individual program being written is "autonomous" in the basic sense of having a private vista of self-aware reflection embedded in a larger reality -- notions of the computer and program "making decisions" are found only in a kind of linguistic folklore rather than in literal points of fact.
Certainly one might suggest that "random quantum events" or short circuits or power surges might result in the program being written behaving differently than the programmer specifies it to behave, but essentially, the program's outputs are severely and rigorously constrained by the programmer's textual inputs.
The programmer, on the other hand, is autonomous in the sense defined at the beginning of this writing. She has a mind that nobody else can experience the way she experiences it. She can have thoughts that aren't detectable by any other people or by any measuring instruments. And she can, in the most general folk sense of the word "choice" (the one that ignores the vast and convoluted and seemingly never-ending Free Will Debate), choose:
(a) whether or not to write the program at all
(b) whether or not to come to work in the morning
(c) whether to keep this job or seek another
(d) whether to make one function perform a particular task (or split the task across two functions, one of which calls the other)
...or any number of other options that will affect the nature of the program, up to and including whether or not it comes into being at all.
Similarly, the engineer's boss can make a whole slew of decisions (from the vantage point of his autonomous perspective) that will also affect the fate of the program, albeit not as directly and obviously as the decisions made by the engineer will. He can, like the programmer, make decisions that result in the program not being written at all -- e.g., he might decide not to give her the requirements because he wants her to focus on a different task for the rest of the afternoon.
He might decide to second-guess something the customer said on the basis of a perception that he knows slightly more about programming than the customer does (whether or not this is a wise move is beside the point for now). Etc. And by extension, the customer can choose to describe the requirements in one way rather than another based on how important he or she believes this particular project to be -- e.g., s/he might be more thorough and concerned about making sure the engineer's boss really understands the requirements, or s/he might just rattle off the requirements vaguely and carelessly due to feeling that the project is inadequately funded to begin with.
So far, I've described the program's pseudo-decision-making process -- e.g., the fact that the program branches at certain points, but not due to any kind of internally conscious self-reflection on the program's or the PC's part. I've also described the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, her boss, and the customer.
But there are other factors that can indirectly affect the program as well that come from the human agents in the instructional chain without necessarily "feeling like" choices.
For instance, if the engineer is tired or hungry, she might not consciously decide to make the program sloppier and less modular, but it might come out that way anyway because she's not performing at her best. Similarly, if the engineer is well-rested and cheerfully sipping away at her Mountain Dew (provided generously by the company), the program might come out in a much slicker and more efficient form -- again, without any conscious feeling on the engineer's part that she's choosing for the program to come out that way as a result of sentient and deliberate decision-making.
And if the boss is distracted by other projects when he's taking the customer call, he might inadvertently write down the requirements sloppily. He might make typographical errors by mistake. He might hear the customer say a Chinese phrase he doesn't recognize, at which point he'll look it up in his Chinese-English dictionary, and in doing so discover that there's another phrase he got wrong earlier in the conversation.
In any case, the program is going to be affected by things the boss does and various inputs he might receive and consider on a non-volitional-feeling level. The same goes for the customer -- their instructions might seem to say one thing rather than another based on whether or not the customer has a scratchy throat, or based on background noise in the customer's or boss's office. And so on, and so forth.
Will, Free And Otherwise
Someone once asserted in response to something I wrote: It seems to me that if everything is contingent upon determining material processes, then everything is determined and true decisions don't exist.
Here we encounter the can of worms that is the Free Will Debate. What is a "true decision" seems quite subjective, and I certainly cannot hope to put forth a definition of "true decision" that everyone will necessarily relate to or agree with. The best I can do is describe what things seem most like "true decisions" based on my own interpretation of what it means to make a decision as a conscious, autonomous entity.
In my example above involving the programmer, I'd be plenty satisfied to classify the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, the boss, and the customer as about as close to "true decisions" as humans can assert the existence of. Certainly, one can try and claim that everything about that person's life up to the moment they made the decision about this program actually "determined" its final state, and that there was nothing truly "volitional" about their decision, but one cannot deny that in everyday life, things we do on purpose feel qualitatively different than things we don't do on purpose.
Usually, that is. People can, after all, be coerced (by other people, by physiological inputs registered subconsciously, etc.), and in some cases people might "feel like" they are acting volitionally even when they're mainly responding to deep, low-level impulses like fear and reward. But at the same time, people are also capable of emerging from coercion and being able to look back and identify when they were actually being coerced (or compelled) and when they weren't.
In light of all that, even if you're a "hard determinist" in the "we're all just objects going through the unconsciously-programmed motions that could have been extrapolated at the moment of the Big Bang if only someone had had a big enough computer, and nobody really makes any kind of meaningful choices at all because of this" sense (I'm not one of those, by the way), I don't see why you'd want to ignore the many and various levels of "feelings of volition" and emergence from/descent into coercion that humans and presumably other entities seem to experience.
Clearly, there's something interesting going on in the brain across all these experiences. And there are plenty of philosophical and ethical implications here: personally, I think that an "ideal" ethical state with regard to personal autonomy is the one in which coercion is minimized, and in which the individual is has access to whatever information she might need to make maximally-informed decisions.
Tools and Toys, Bodies and Minds
Tools are a particular class of objects not normally considered autonomous individually, but which are used by agency-possessing individuals in the fulfillment of particular goals. While tools can certainly be anthropomorphized (I know of several people that have named their cars, and most people who use computers regularly can't seem to help but project humanlike emotional maps onto their machines, particularly when said machines seem "cranky").
Still, thinking of tools as a particular class of objects that can serve as extensions of self (or extensions of will, perhaps) -- is very useful, particularly when viewing the "person" as embedded in and part of the environment, as opposed to somehow distant from it.
My notion of personhood, or at least one formulation of it, can be stated thusly: I am a small piece of the universe observing itself.
If I had to sculpt a geometric model of reality (a daunting task if there ever was one!), one possible model might resemble a big rubber sheet pulled to tiny points in some areas, stretched thin in others, pushed to a smooth roundness in still others, etc.
Basically, while parts of the sheet would certainly have their own identities and local characteristics, and while each part would consequently be an entity in its own right, all parts and the interconnections between them would still comprise a larger entity.
Sticking with that model for now, let's say a person is initially represented by a point on the sheet pulled sharply upward. As this person grows, develops, learns, and interacts with the other local surface irregularities, relationships will be established with those irregularities. Depending on the type and nature of each irregularity, the relationship between it and the person will effectively change the shape of the person in some way. Some irregularities might make the person-representing point poke out further from the plane of the sheet, whereas others might smooth it out and draw it closer. Yet all the while, the person maintains a sense of continuity, and certain aspects of his trajectory through time will always show the influence of his initial conditions.
And just as the sheet itself provides fertile ground for a tremendous diversity of individual forms, each person-point is simultaneously capable of evolving in any of a fantastic array of directions and of maintaining a distinct sense of continuous personhood.
Additionally, every person, generally speaking, sees "ownership" and control of his or her body as a precious and deeply-held right. Given the manner in which tools are employed as extensions of will, they are also in many respects extensions of the body -- and most people would be hard-pressed to truly define where "they" end and where their tools begin. It's rather strange to think about it in this way, but honestly, I would feel as if I'd undergone some sort of amputation if my computer's hard drive were suddenly and irrevocably wiped!
But if tools are a special class of object, do they differ from "machines" in general? If they can be considered parts of beings, and subject to the decision-making processes of those beings, what does this in turn suggest about the nature of object-boundaries and agency?
Invoking the "sheet model" again, perhaps tools would represent those irregularities that can be effectively "absorbed" by the person-points to the point of becoming part of them. Similarly, tools can also be discarded and/or removed when the person no longer finds them useful, or when they begin to pose some problem. The "body" over time cannot be said to be a static clod of matter -- rather, the body is a dynamic process that winds its way through spacetime, memory and sensation incrementally bridging the piecewise generations of cellular turnover. In some respects, cells and eyeglasses and hair and prosthetic limbs and tattoos and iPods and lungs are all of the same ilk: things that individually are not persons, but that can be aspects of persons that in turn define those persons -- at least on a moment to moment basis.
Did I Say Overlords? I Meant Protectors...
My earliest concept of what a "robot" was came, unsurprisingly, from science fiction. I basically saw robots as "metal people", and that's often how they were presented on-screen. It didn't even occur to me as a child to question whether or not "robots" had consciousness or agency (but then again, I also tended to see pretty much everything as "potentially alive", so that isn't too surprising). I also had some robot-themed toys growing up; one of them was an educational machine called Alphie II, and I had a number of robotic Star Wars action figures. My brother also had a really neat little gizmo labeled "Robot Factory" that consisted of one large robot with a built-in mechanism that sent several tiny robots on an endless roller-coaster ride along a track that snaked around its body. So basically, I can't remember ever not being around what I'd term the "robot phenotype".
But I didn't learn about "real robots" until I was quite a bit older, and honestly, I was rather surprised at how "primitive" they seemed, as well as at how they were used. I think the first "real robot" I saw was on a TV show about automobile manufacturing (or something along those lines), and it just looked like a multi-jointed yellow mechanical arm-thing that moved according to the motives of whoever had programmed it to build cars.
So basically, every robot I've ever made the acquaintance of in real life has been either an industrial robot, a toy, or an experimental "kit" bot equipped with a few sensors and/or actuators. And even the more impressive robots I've heard of (such as the DARPA Grand Challenge cars) haven't been autonomous in the sense that humans, many animals, and fictional robots (like R2D2) are -- at best, they can do one thing quite well, but they aren't capable of deciding they'd rather do something else, and it seems to me unlikely that they've experienced existential despair over this fact.
Clearly, robots are commonplace today -- just not autonomous robots. And yet, there seems to be a kind of background assumption that not only would autonomous robots be desirable in some contexts, but autonomous robots would somehow represent a more "advanced" robot in some significant way. But would humans actually want to build truly autonomous machines?
Humans tend strongly to use technology prosthetically -- that is, as the collective pool of knowledge about How Stuff Works (and How To Make Stuff Do Other Stuff) grows over time and is communicated more effectively to more and more people, the trend has been toward applications that allow people to assert their ideas, desires, and will over a greater distance, or with greater strength, or with greater precision, than was feasible before the adoption of the application. The trend has not (at least from what I've observed) been toward trying to -- forgive the terminology -- "ensoul" machines, except perhaps in the context of university lab projects, none of which have exactly panned out in that direction so far.
The world is already pretty well populated by autonomous agents (animals), and half the time it seems like humans are more concerned with trying to decrease the autonomy of these agents than with increasing it. Hence, the idea of large groups of humans deciding to create autonomous robots and "release them into the wild" for the sake of allowing new life to flourish seems a mite farfetched.
Plus, there's the ethical problem with creating an autonomous entity in a lab -- as far as I'm concerned, once you've established that an entity is autonomous, you have no right to keep it confined (in a lab or otherwise), nor is it acceptable to subject it to non-consensual or coerced experimentation.
This fact alone makes it seem unlikely to me that truly autonomous robots are going to be a major human goal anytime in the foreseeable future -- right now, robots outside the movies are pretty much thought of as being "tools" (extensions of human will), and people don't want their tools to talk back or say "No!".
Progress, Rights, and Personhood
Part of what is meant by some uses of the word "progress" is a kind of ongoing emancipatory process that involves seeking to recognize more and varied forms of personhood, to develop and provide tools that assist with individual flourishing, and to ensure that new technological developments (or proposed developments) benefit more than a few privileged folks.
So while I certainly enjoy talking and thinking about robots, and while I would be overjoyed to someday wander through bright jungles populated by colorful mechanical fauna who have been set free to flourish as beings in their own right (rather than as means to some "end"), I think it's important to stay grounded in the present when considering what actions would likely lead to the greatest progress in the sense described above.
"Real" autonomous robots would, after all, be non-tools -- and non-tools (people, other autonomous entities, etc.) cannot be used, absorbed, and/or discarded by others in the sense that tools can. One reason I find myself intrigued by "roboethics" discussions these days is actually tied into the very real civil rights struggles faced by already-existing persons. And again with the disclaimer that this is a science fiction scenario, I can't help but wonder whether humans are at the point of being able to recognize very atypical persons (such as sentient robots would be) as non-tools. My guess is "not quite", and I see a potential (if not exactly immanent) danger of people creating entities that are autonomous and sentient, but that are not acknowledged as such. It's not as if there isn't a precedent for this.
Some of the worst abuses in history have been perpetuated as a result of people trying to use, absorb, and ignore or deny the personhood and autonomy of other people. Ethnic minorities, women, children, disabled persons, and individuals of any configuration in positions of disadvantage for whatever reason have all had to deal with being treated like tools (in the sense of being considered non-autonomous, and only worth what they can "produce", whether it be slave labor, sons to carry on the family lineage, or in the case of disabled persons, "proof" of full personhood in the first place).
And this isn't something we're exactly past as a species yet. Regardless of the general sense I still have that all things in reality have a kind of "character" to them, I'm well aware that some things are tools, and that people are not tools, though tools can be extensions of people. Robots, perhaps, are interesting because they stand in a strange area where they have the potential to be considered either non-autonomous things or people (or both, context permitting!), depending on what direction the research goes in.
And given this, I think that anyone who finds himself or herself obsessing over "robot rights" would do very well to learn a bit more about general civil rights. Not only is a much greater consciousness of civil rights gravely needed in the present, but it is going to be vital to broaden the common concept of what a full person is if anyone really wants to see the kind of wide-ranging prosthetically-enabled vibrant diversity that may at least become physically feasible within the lifetimes of many alive today.
What If My Toaster Burns My Bagels Because It Hates Me?
Given the subjects I tend to focus on in my writing, I'm often asked a lot of questions regarding issues of autonomy, will, cognition, perception, robots, and personhood. These questions tend to be filled with fuzzy, difficult-to-define terms, and what's more, they're commonly asked by people with a clear agenda (whether it be making a case for the existence of "souls" and supernatural superbeings, or asserting that nothing matters because no choice is actually real because individuals aren't really real). And, like the proverbial monsters under the bed, they sometimes keep me up at night trying to hash through all the various contingencies and semantic gymnastics even beginning to address them would require.
But at a certain point, thinking about the monsters (quasi-autonomous robot sort or otherwise) that might be under the bed (and how to avoid them) starts to become more exhausting and annoying than just switching on the light and proving that either there aren't any monsters at all, or just getting to know them a little better if there are. So while this writing will by no means address these questions with "airtight" answers, it should at least give a sense of what goes on in my head when I approach them.
Decisions and Autonomy
Most dictionaries (see here for an example of this) seem to define "autonomy" in terms like independence, freedom, self-direction, and self-governance. I don't have any argument with the dictionary in that regard, however, in this discussion, the "autonomy" I have most in mind is that which describes a discrete and independently-operating locus of consciousness, awareness, and thought.
In this sense, humans and cats and even mice can be said to be "autonomous". Every human, cat, and mouse has some level of wholly private experience that no other entity can directly access. That is the usual sense in which I think about autonomy. There are, of course, other complicating layers and definitions on top of that one -- some involving decision-making ability and legal sorts of independence from external coercion and control -- but the basic unit of "autonomy" for me is the individual mind.
As far as what it means for an entity to be capable of making decisions for itself, that's another question entirely. It's also a question that depends on what you'd consider a "decision" to be, and whether you automatically require explanations of agency in addressing that concept. I would definitely allow that in some respects, entities (we can assume to be) wholly lacking in minds are, in fact, capable of "making decisions".
Say you write a function in C that will output one string if a variable has a value of less than five and a different string if a variable has a value of five or more. Many of us would, at least colloquially, say that the function decides which string to output based on what its input value is. And if this function existed in the context of a program where any of multiple functions might be called in response to higher-level inputs, we might say that the program decides which functions it is going to call.
But if we dig a little deeper, it's clear that the colloquial conventions in which program behavior is commonly discussed do not reflect the (arguably) "ultimate" sources of the program's behavior. The software engineer writing the program in fact decides in advance what the program's outputs are going to be. She decides what inputs will prompt which functions to be called, and she also decides what criteria will determine the outputs of each function.
But say we dig even deeper than that! Say the software engineer is writing her program according to a set of requirements handed to her by her boss. Her boss may not even know the C language himself; all he knows is what he wants the program to do. So he provides "inputs" to the software engineer in the form of requirements, which are probably written in "natural language" as opposed to code or pseudocode. The engineer then takes the requirements and processes them into a C program.
But let's not stop there! Say the boss got the requirements from the customer over the phone. Furthermore, say that the customer speaks only Chinese, whereas the boss speaks both Chinese and English. The boss, in this case, has to translate the customer's requirements into English so that the software engineer (who doesn't know a word of Chinese) can understand them. This entails the boss having to make a lot of decisions regarding what the customer likely meant by certain turns of phrase, and it also entails the boss having to think about what points to emphasize most strongly so that the engineer gets a sense of the customer's priorities.
Now, lest anyone think I'm veering into the realm of cybernetic totalism, let's pause a moment. While one could indeed condense the software engineer herself into a code-producing box into which you put requirements and out of which you get a software package, and while one could reduce the boss into a Chinese-English requirements translation machine, surely it is apparent that there are discontinuities in this instructional chain. That is, as you move further away from any individual program output (let's say, a string printed on the screen that reads either "X is less than five" or "X is greater than or equal to five"), things become less and less easy to determine, and far more subject to uncontrollable variables.
When writing a C program, the kinds of inputs the computer gets are constrained to a relatively narrow set -- the programmer generally uses a keyboard interface to type the code in, and very specific rules of syntax must be followed in order for the program to do anything at all when it is compiled (much less the precise thing the programmer wants it to do). What's more, as far as any of us knows, present-day desktop PCs don't have anything like the "internal life" that we humans do, or like chimps or cats or mice do, even. Neither the computer nor the individual program being written is "autonomous" in the basic sense of having a private vista of self-aware reflection embedded in a larger reality -- notions of the computer and program "making decisions" are found only in a kind of linguistic folklore rather than in literal points of fact.
Certainly one might suggest that "random quantum events" or short circuits or power surges might result in the program being written behaving differently than the programmer specifies it to behave, but essentially, the program's outputs are severely and rigorously constrained by the programmer's textual inputs.
The programmer, on the other hand, is autonomous in the sense defined at the beginning of this writing. She has a mind that nobody else can experience the way she experiences it. She can have thoughts that aren't detectable by any other people or by any measuring instruments. And she can, in the most general folk sense of the word "choice" (the one that ignores the vast and convoluted and seemingly never-ending Free Will Debate), choose:
(a) whether or not to write the program at all
(b) whether or not to come to work in the morning
(c) whether to keep this job or seek another
(d) whether to make one function perform a particular task (or split the task across two functions, one of which calls the other)
...or any number of other options that will affect the nature of the program, up to and including whether or not it comes into being at all.
Similarly, the engineer's boss can make a whole slew of decisions (from the vantage point of his autonomous perspective) that will also affect the fate of the program, albeit not as directly and obviously as the decisions made by the engineer will. He can, like the programmer, make decisions that result in the program not being written at all -- e.g., he might decide not to give her the requirements because he wants her to focus on a different task for the rest of the afternoon.
He might decide to second-guess something the customer said on the basis of a perception that he knows slightly more about programming than the customer does (whether or not this is a wise move is beside the point for now). Etc. And by extension, the customer can choose to describe the requirements in one way rather than another based on how important he or she believes this particular project to be -- e.g., s/he might be more thorough and concerned about making sure the engineer's boss really understands the requirements, or s/he might just rattle off the requirements vaguely and carelessly due to feeling that the project is inadequately funded to begin with.
So far, I've described the program's pseudo-decision-making process -- e.g., the fact that the program branches at certain points, but not due to any kind of internally conscious self-reflection on the program's or the PC's part. I've also described the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, her boss, and the customer.
But there are other factors that can indirectly affect the program as well that come from the human agents in the instructional chain without necessarily "feeling like" choices.
For instance, if the engineer is tired or hungry, she might not consciously decide to make the program sloppier and less modular, but it might come out that way anyway because she's not performing at her best. Similarly, if the engineer is well-rested and cheerfully sipping away at her Mountain Dew (provided generously by the company), the program might come out in a much slicker and more efficient form -- again, without any conscious feeling on the engineer's part that she's choosing for the program to come out that way as a result of sentient and deliberate decision-making.
And if the boss is distracted by other projects when he's taking the customer call, he might inadvertently write down the requirements sloppily. He might make typographical errors by mistake. He might hear the customer say a Chinese phrase he doesn't recognize, at which point he'll look it up in his Chinese-English dictionary, and in doing so discover that there's another phrase he got wrong earlier in the conversation.
In any case, the program is going to be affected by things the boss does and various inputs he might receive and consider on a non-volitional-feeling level. The same goes for the customer -- their instructions might seem to say one thing rather than another based on whether or not the customer has a scratchy throat, or based on background noise in the customer's or boss's office. And so on, and so forth.
Will, Free And Otherwise
Someone once asserted in response to something I wrote: It seems to me that if everything is contingent upon determining material processes, then everything is determined and true decisions don't exist.
Here we encounter the can of worms that is the Free Will Debate. What is a "true decision" seems quite subjective, and I certainly cannot hope to put forth a definition of "true decision" that everyone will necessarily relate to or agree with. The best I can do is describe what things seem most like "true decisions" based on my own interpretation of what it means to make a decision as a conscious, autonomous entity.
In my example above involving the programmer, I'd be plenty satisfied to classify the "volitional-feeling" choices made by the engineer, the boss, and the customer as about as close to "true decisions" as humans can assert the existence of. Certainly, one can try and claim that everything about that person's life up to the moment they made the decision about this program actually "determined" its final state, and that there was nothing truly "volitional" about their decision, but one cannot deny that in everyday life, things we do on purpose feel qualitatively different than things we don't do on purpose.
Usually, that is. People can, after all, be coerced (by other people, by physiological inputs registered subconsciously, etc.), and in some cases people might "feel like" they are acting volitionally even when they're mainly responding to deep, low-level impulses like fear and reward. But at the same time, people are also capable of emerging from coercion and being able to look back and identify when they were actually being coerced (or compelled) and when they weren't.
In light of all that, even if you're a "hard determinist" in the "we're all just objects going through the unconsciously-programmed motions that could have been extrapolated at the moment of the Big Bang if only someone had had a big enough computer, and nobody really makes any kind of meaningful choices at all because of this" sense (I'm not one of those, by the way), I don't see why you'd want to ignore the many and various levels of "feelings of volition" and emergence from/descent into coercion that humans and presumably other entities seem to experience.
Clearly, there's something interesting going on in the brain across all these experiences. And there are plenty of philosophical and ethical implications here: personally, I think that an "ideal" ethical state with regard to personal autonomy is the one in which coercion is minimized, and in which the individual is has access to whatever information she might need to make maximally-informed decisions.
Tools and Toys, Bodies and Minds
Tools are a particular class of objects not normally considered autonomous individually, but which are used by agency-possessing individuals in the fulfillment of particular goals. While tools can certainly be anthropomorphized (I know of several people that have named their cars, and most people who use computers regularly can't seem to help but project humanlike emotional maps onto their machines, particularly when said machines seem "cranky").
Still, thinking of tools as a particular class of objects that can serve as extensions of self (or extensions of will, perhaps) -- is very useful, particularly when viewing the "person" as embedded in and part of the environment, as opposed to somehow distant from it.
My notion of personhood, or at least one formulation of it, can be stated thusly: I am a small piece of the universe observing itself.
If I had to sculpt a geometric model of reality (a daunting task if there ever was one!), one possible model might resemble a big rubber sheet pulled to tiny points in some areas, stretched thin in others, pushed to a smooth roundness in still others, etc.
Basically, while parts of the sheet would certainly have their own identities and local characteristics, and while each part would consequently be an entity in its own right, all parts and the interconnections between them would still comprise a larger entity.
Sticking with that model for now, let's say a person is initially represented by a point on the sheet pulled sharply upward. As this person grows, develops, learns, and interacts with the other local surface irregularities, relationships will be established with those irregularities. Depending on the type and nature of each irregularity, the relationship between it and the person will effectively change the shape of the person in some way. Some irregularities might make the person-representing point poke out further from the plane of the sheet, whereas others might smooth it out and draw it closer. Yet all the while, the person maintains a sense of continuity, and certain aspects of his trajectory through time will always show the influence of his initial conditions.
And just as the sheet itself provides fertile ground for a tremendous diversity of individual forms, each person-point is simultaneously capable of evolving in any of a fantastic array of directions and of maintaining a distinct sense of continuous personhood.
Additionally, every person, generally speaking, sees "ownership" and control of his or her body as a precious and deeply-held right. Given the manner in which tools are employed as extensions of will, they are also in many respects extensions of the body -- and most people would be hard-pressed to truly define where "they" end and where their tools begin. It's rather strange to think about it in this way, but honestly, I would feel as if I'd undergone some sort of amputation if my computer's hard drive were suddenly and irrevocably wiped!
But if tools are a special class of object, do they differ from "machines" in general? If they can be considered parts of beings, and subject to the decision-making processes of those beings, what does this in turn suggest about the nature of object-boundaries and agency?
Invoking the "sheet model" again, perhaps tools would represent those irregularities that can be effectively "absorbed" by the person-points to the point of becoming part of them. Similarly, tools can also be discarded and/or removed when the person no longer finds them useful, or when they begin to pose some problem. The "body" over time cannot be said to be a static clod of matter -- rather, the body is a dynamic process that winds its way through spacetime, memory and sensation incrementally bridging the piecewise generations of cellular turnover. In some respects, cells and eyeglasses and hair and prosthetic limbs and tattoos and iPods and lungs are all of the same ilk: things that individually are not persons, but that can be aspects of persons that in turn define those persons -- at least on a moment to moment basis.
Did I Say Overlords? I Meant Protectors...
My earliest concept of what a "robot" was came, unsurprisingly, from science fiction. I basically saw robots as "metal people", and that's often how they were presented on-screen. It didn't even occur to me as a child to question whether or not "robots" had consciousness or agency (but then again, I also tended to see pretty much everything as "potentially alive", so that isn't too surprising). I also had some robot-themed toys growing up; one of them was an educational machine called Alphie II, and I had a number of robotic Star Wars action figures. My brother also had a really neat little gizmo labeled "Robot Factory" that consisted of one large robot with a built-in mechanism that sent several tiny robots on an endless roller-coaster ride along a track that snaked around its body. So basically, I can't remember ever not being around what I'd term the "robot phenotype".
But I didn't learn about "real robots" until I was quite a bit older, and honestly, I was rather surprised at how "primitive" they seemed, as well as at how they were used. I think the first "real robot" I saw was on a TV show about automobile manufacturing (or something along those lines), and it just looked like a multi-jointed yellow mechanical arm-thing that moved according to the motives of whoever had programmed it to build cars.
So basically, every robot I've ever made the acquaintance of in real life has been either an industrial robot, a toy, or an experimental "kit" bot equipped with a few sensors and/or actuators. And even the more impressive robots I've heard of (such as the DARPA Grand Challenge cars) haven't been autonomous in the sense that humans, many animals, and fictional robots (like R2D2) are -- at best, they can do one thing quite well, but they aren't capable of deciding they'd rather do something else, and it seems to me unlikely that they've experienced existential despair over this fact.
Clearly, robots are commonplace today -- just not autonomous robots. And yet, there seems to be a kind of background assumption that not only would autonomous robots be desirable in some contexts, but autonomous robots would somehow represent a more "advanced" robot in some significant way. But would humans actually want to build truly autonomous machines?
Humans tend strongly to use technology prosthetically -- that is, as the collective pool of knowledge about How Stuff Works (and How To Make Stuff Do Other Stuff) grows over time and is communicated more effectively to more and more people, the trend has been toward applications that allow people to assert their ideas, desires, and will over a greater distance, or with greater strength, or with greater precision, than was feasible before the adoption of the application. The trend has not (at least from what I've observed) been toward trying to -- forgive the terminology -- "ensoul" machines, except perhaps in the context of university lab projects, none of which have exactly panned out in that direction so far.
The world is already pretty well populated by autonomous agents (animals), and half the time it seems like humans are more concerned with trying to decrease the autonomy of these agents than with increasing it. Hence, the idea of large groups of humans deciding to create autonomous robots and "release them into the wild" for the sake of allowing new life to flourish seems a mite farfetched.
Plus, there's the ethical problem with creating an autonomous entity in a lab -- as far as I'm concerned, once you've established that an entity is autonomous, you have no right to keep it confined (in a lab or otherwise), nor is it acceptable to subject it to non-consensual or coerced experimentation.
This fact alone makes it seem unlikely to me that truly autonomous robots are going to be a major human goal anytime in the foreseeable future -- right now, robots outside the movies are pretty much thought of as being "tools" (extensions of human will), and people don't want their tools to talk back or say "No!".
Progress, Rights, and Personhood
Part of what is meant by some uses of the word "progress" is a kind of ongoing emancipatory process that involves seeking to recognize more and varied forms of personhood, to develop and provide tools that assist with individual flourishing, and to ensure that new technological developments (or proposed developments) benefit more than a few privileged folks.
So while I certainly enjoy talking and thinking about robots, and while I would be overjoyed to someday wander through bright jungles populated by colorful mechanical fauna who have been set free to flourish as beings in their own right (rather than as means to some "end"), I think it's important to stay grounded in the present when considering what actions would likely lead to the greatest progress in the sense described above.
"Real" autonomous robots would, after all, be non-tools -- and non-tools (people, other autonomous entities, etc.) cannot be used, absorbed, and/or discarded by others in the sense that tools can. One reason I find myself intrigued by "roboethics" discussions these days is actually tied into the very real civil rights struggles faced by already-existing persons. And again with the disclaimer that this is a science fiction scenario, I can't help but wonder whether humans are at the point of being able to recognize very atypical persons (such as sentient robots would be) as non-tools. My guess is "not quite", and I see a potential (if not exactly immanent) danger of people creating entities that are autonomous and sentient, but that are not acknowledged as such. It's not as if there isn't a precedent for this.
Some of the worst abuses in history have been perpetuated as a result of people trying to use, absorb, and ignore or deny the personhood and autonomy of other people. Ethnic minorities, women, children, disabled persons, and individuals of any configuration in positions of disadvantage for whatever reason have all had to deal with being treated like tools (in the sense of being considered non-autonomous, and only worth what they can "produce", whether it be slave labor, sons to carry on the family lineage, or in the case of disabled persons, "proof" of full personhood in the first place).
And this isn't something we're exactly past as a species yet. Regardless of the general sense I still have that all things in reality have a kind of "character" to them, I'm well aware that some things are tools, and that people are not tools, though tools can be extensions of people. Robots, perhaps, are interesting because they stand in a strange area where they have the potential to be considered either non-autonomous things or people (or both, context permitting!), depending on what direction the research goes in.
And given this, I think that anyone who finds himself or herself obsessing over "robot rights" would do very well to learn a bit more about general civil rights. Not only is a much greater consciousness of civil rights gravely needed in the present, but it is going to be vital to broaden the common concept of what a full person is if anyone really wants to see the kind of wide-ranging prosthetically-enabled vibrant diversity that may at least become physically feasible within the lifetimes of many alive today.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed, Part III
(Read Part I) (Read Part II)
G:How do you differentiate a person from his/her/its surrounding environment? Where is the line going to be drawn?
A:I wrote a science fiction story to answer this one.
Warning to vegans: this story contains milk and milk products.
I.
A woman stands in a bathroom looking at a small white stick. The blue lines on the stick are clear and distinct, and while a trip to the doctor will be made for the sake of redundant confirmation (and a checkup), Emma starts considering herself "pregnant" from that moment onward.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Emma starts feeling different. Her appetites shift, her stomach feels uneasy much of the time, and her shape begins to change. She is pregnant, and unmistakably so.
She goes into the kitchen, grabs a small green glass plate from the cabinet, and takes a block of sharp cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator. The cheese is hard, solid and slightly white around the edges. She picks up a knife and carves off two thick slices. She takes a loaf of wheat bread out of the wooden breadbox on the counter and removes two pre-cut slices. She arranges the cheese neatly on one of the slices and places the second slice on top of the layer of cheese.
As she cuts her sandwich into two tidy triangles, Emma is struck by the utter absurdity of what she is doing. Her mind occasionally runs along on strange jaunts that take her, as she calls it, "behind the scenes" -- that is, to a frame of reference seemingly outside and behind that layer of reality ruled by well-known divisions and boundaries.
Sandwich, she repeats to herself. Sandwich. Sandwich. Semantic satiation arrives swiftly. She knows words -- quite a few of them. They were in books, in the mouths and minds of others, on television, and on billboards when she learned them as a child. Now they are in her as well. Part of her, as they are surely represented somewhere physically in the jungle of synapses in her brain. But she does not own them.
Emma looks down at her plate, sees rough lines and angles of brown, bits of yellow, vague shadows and reflections moving across a green gloss surface. She sees voids of varying size and shape; bubbles burst by tiny citizens of the yeast community. She lifts up the corner of one triangular piece of bread and sees a flat piece of yellow, marked lightly with the signature of a knife's serrated blade. The knife sits beside the plate now; bits of cheese pushed snugly like clay between the tiny spikes along its cutting edge.
II.
About eight miles away from where Emma lives, there's a dairy farm. A cow is tearing up grass from the pasture she mills in with her sisters. The grass is slowly, slowly being digested and the matter that made up the grass is being transmuted into cow. Cow considers this, albeit not in words, but in the silent acknowledgment of cow-ness that she knows will instruct some of the matter she ingests to be allocated for muscle, some for the maintenance of organs, some for the production of hormones, and some for milk.
This is an old-fashioned farm -- a small-yield organic operation, one of the last of its kind. Cow is milked by hand; she has heard the whispers about shiny silver machines with lots of tubes and cramped quarters, and she thanks the earth in her cowish way that she lives on this particular farm rather than one of the more modern ones. She is full to bursting with milk; she exhales a long slow breath of relief as she sees the farmer approaching with a bucket. Milk inside Cow is part of Cow; when milk enters the bucket, milk is no longer part of cow. Milk is, however, part of the earth, as is Cow, as is the bucket, as is the farmer.
The farmer finishes milking Cow, and takes the full bucket to the whitewashed kitchen/laboratory where it will be sterilized and processed and properly set up to be turned into cheese. The farmer pours himself a small sample cup of milk once it has been cleaned; milk is now part of farmer, and farmer's internal instructions will transmute milk into muscle and skin and saliva. And farmer and milk and bucket and cow are still part of the earth.
III.
Emma's sandwich is, in one sense, impossible.
There is no hint of inevitable sandwich destiny in any of its components. She could, if she were motivated and equipped with the proper tools, pick apart the sandwich down to the molecular level, and still find no indication of essential sandwichness in any tiny piece. She could also simply rewind the sandwich-making process in her head, and return internally to a few minutes ago when she had bread and cheese and a plate and a knife, but no sandwich to speak of.
But instead, she simply picks up the sandwich and takes a bite out of it. She still has a sandwich at this point, albeit a sandwich with a piece missing. Or perhaps not missing, but assimilated. Emma chews and swallows; the sandwich is absorbed into her. She continues eating, and gradually the immediate notion of sandwich disappears out of matter and returns to the realm of ideas, at least in Emma's house. Emma digests the sandwich, her internal algorithms processing parts of the earth that were once parts of Cow and wheat and air and water into human cells.
IV.
The ball of cells in Emma's uterus has two X chromosomes. Assuming it grows into a baby, the baby will be a girl. It knows nothing yet; it may have rudimentary sensations of heat and pressure and touch and motion, but it does not reflect upon the nature of these things. If it forms memories at this stage, it stores them in wordless massless pictureless forms that will exist perhaps as deep red undercurrents in future tides of thought, but nothing more.
Meandering instructions process matter into more cells -- more cells with DNA identifying them as Yuki's (Emma has already decided on what she'll name the baby if it's a girl).
Boundaries don't make sense at this level, at this stage. Legally, morally, philosophically, people have been attempting to draw them for generations, with the intention of wresting the secrets of what we are obligated to do from nature. But nature gives no answers: she silently seems to mock at times, but in truth she is simply reminding us that we're on our own when it comes to making these choices.
At this stage, boundaries exist only in the weighing of values, in the questions people ask one another, and themselves: Could I live with myself, if...?
Yuki is a wanted baby or ball of cells or fetus; Emma made life on purpose, and would not attempt to take it back. But she understands why some might not. If she was someone else, she might not have named Yuki yet; Yuki would be "tissue". And this would not be harsh or cruel; it would simply be a matter of choice, between the pregnant one and whatever internal sounding boards she might have in her head. Voices, remembered: mothers, grandmothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, characters from books. Her own, standing out by its signature quirks and foibles and talents and turns of phrase.
But Yuki is, again, wanted. Emma has chosen to think of herself as with child, yet she does not deny the fact that Yuki is still a ball of cells and not a laughing, squirming infant. There is a difference, Emma thinks, though she knows some would disagree. She lets them, and they let her. Nothing firm, except her belly as it grows.
V.
Emma gets dressed. Her husband, Rick, is in his home office clacking away on the keyboard. Emma looks at her sweater still lying on the bed. If someone walked in and touched the sweater, rumpling it as it lay still and deflated, Emma would not feel it. She picks up the sweater and slips it over her head.
Rick walks back into the room, playfully tugs on the hem of Emma's sweater, feels her warmth radiating into the thin acrylic. Emma's nerves respond to the feel of the sweater's force vectors changing; it is like a second skin.
She sheds it again, feeling warm, and knowing that some of her cells already adhere to its interior space.
VI.
Yuki arrives in January, in the season of her name. Her hair is dark, her eyes are blue. Ten fingers, five toes. Yuki is a healthy baby, but only one leg developed -- the other seems to have stopped at about mid-thigh, and there is no foot.
Emma is briefly jolted by Yuki's asymmetry, but mostly, she is relieved that her baby is alive.
Yuki lies in her cradle, though she does not yet know the word for "cradle". She hears sounds and sees colors and shadows and light flitting through the room, but does not differentiate this stimuli. Her father comes in; his mouth moves as he points to blurred localities of matter, and he speaks the name-labels of things.
Gradually, Yuki comes to feel not awash in everything, but apart in some strange way. She is learning words: her parents are feeding them to her the way they feed her pureed squash and carrots and applesauce. In some respects, this makes the environment easier to manage, but in another sense it makes everything seem further away and less immediate. Her brain is changing shape, her body is changing size. Her internal engines are busily turning food and milk and water and air into more of her.
On her second birthday, she receives a second leg. She's adept at crawling by this point, but Emma's degree is in robotics, and she's built a leg for Emma the way some parents knit booties. Emma doesn't force the new leg on Yuki; instead, she puts it on the floor in front of her, nearby, the way she would a toy. Yuki crawls over to it, stares at it, picks it up. It's light and finely made, radiating clear and silver smoothness. Yuki holds the leg as she would a tool at first; she waves it at the cat, who sniffs it idly and walks away.
At first, Yuki does not wear the leg. She drags it around the house as she crawls, she uses it to reach under the couch and pull out dust bunnies and rubber balls that have rolled beneath into the shadows. She puts her hand in the socket in the end, and hears a low hum. The leg emits a soft glow then, but this stops after a few minutes. Yuki's eyes are wide and round now, but she does not cry.
VII.
Yuki is in kindergarten now. She's already reading, and is becoming an expert at using the computer. She's picky about her food, and her hair is still dark, her eyes bright blue. She's adjusted to the new leg -- in fact, she's on her third model, which her mother tells her will grow as she does due to the new nutrient-transmission interfaces she's installed in it.
Yuki can still remove the leg when she wants to -- sometimes she does it to scare the boys, sometimes just to look at it, and to look at her own form in its absence. When the leg is attached, her brain is aware of every inch of it, and it is hers as surely as her other fleshborne leg is. And it does grow, its form changing to accommodate new gaits and weight and usage patterns per its feedback sensors and adaptive algorithms.
Yuki feels whole and complete regardless of whether she's wearing the leg or not. Her form is a choice; at any point in time, she may have two legs or one. Her body is a fluid, flowing sequence of matter and decision and subjective boundaries -- she knows this more than most her age. And her sense of rights is solid: she knows her body is hers and no-one else's, regardless of all the bits of world and time and learning that make it up.
VIII.
Yuki is sixteen. Emma is now forty, and Rick is forty-three.
Emma no longer eats sandwiches. She's changed slowly over time, but there's very little of the matter she was made of when Yuki was born at this point.
Rick is mostly flesh, save for the standard phonear model typical of most everyone these days -- the next next next generation of handsfree communication, they call it. He still thinks Emma is beautiful -- in earlier days he'd wondered what she'd look like with wrinkles and long, white hair, and he'd expected that he'd still have found her lovely then. And he finds her lovely now, though her skin may crack and need replacement on occasion, it does not wrinkle.
People change, Rick, she'd said to him. I will change. Will you be with me no matter what? No matter how I change?
Rick told her yes, of course. I'll love you even when I can't tell your face from a prune.
He'd laughed at that. She had as well, but nervously.
Now, Emma's skull is blue resin. She has hair of a sort: long and silvery and equipped with photosynthetic fibers. Instead of making cheese sandwiches, she holds her head out the window of the car as she and Rick drive through the countryside in late spring. She laughs and thinks about her head: the calcium that used to house her brain is probably off forming ionic bonds somewhere, and the housing that now shields her brain came from hydrocarbons, which came from long-dead dinosaurs and fallen leaves.
Something lights up on her chest, deep within, whenever Rick leans close to kiss her. Her lips are still supple and dense with nerve fibers. She is not indestructible: her brain is still a thing of water and patterns, and traditional human frailties have less been transcended than shifted to inhabit new spheres: now she does not worry about sunburn, but about cracking paint and metal fatigue. She does not worry about cancer, but about things like molecular seizure and nutrient-transmission failure.
She also wonders whether a visiting alien would be able to tell the sentients from the landscape -- would her movement patterns stand out as significant, or would the alien minds and eyes that looked upon the earth see her as mere aggregate, indistinguishable from nearby scrap metal and stone? Would they see fit to pull her apart, figuring that her body would serve as raw material for something else?
The thought is unsettling at best.
Autonomy exists: this is a right she fiercely claims, a right she claimed for herself and her daughter long ago, even when people told her she should not have children with her history, when people told her she should not replace her blood with transparent respirocyte fluid, when a superstitious neighbor hummed and clucked upon hearing she was getting a new blue plastiskull equipped with automatic heads-up display and on-board Internet.
So, occasionally, she worries. Worries that she might not have any real claim on self, since everything she is is essentially borrowed: her form, her very mind, are gifts, and she knows not if she has actually earned them.
But she does not worry all the time. She is not worried now, in the car with Rick, Yuki typing busily to her friends on a wireless pad in the back seat, her own earphone pulsing warmly. She is happy, and she is Emma, through and through.
G:How do you differentiate a person from his/her/its surrounding environment? Where is the line going to be drawn?
A:I wrote a science fiction story to answer this one.
Warning to vegans: this story contains milk and milk products.
I.
A woman stands in a bathroom looking at a small white stick. The blue lines on the stick are clear and distinct, and while a trip to the doctor will be made for the sake of redundant confirmation (and a checkup), Emma starts considering herself "pregnant" from that moment onward.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Emma starts feeling different. Her appetites shift, her stomach feels uneasy much of the time, and her shape begins to change. She is pregnant, and unmistakably so.
She goes into the kitchen, grabs a small green glass plate from the cabinet, and takes a block of sharp cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator. The cheese is hard, solid and slightly white around the edges. She picks up a knife and carves off two thick slices. She takes a loaf of wheat bread out of the wooden breadbox on the counter and removes two pre-cut slices. She arranges the cheese neatly on one of the slices and places the second slice on top of the layer of cheese.
As she cuts her sandwich into two tidy triangles, Emma is struck by the utter absurdity of what she is doing. Her mind occasionally runs along on strange jaunts that take her, as she calls it, "behind the scenes" -- that is, to a frame of reference seemingly outside and behind that layer of reality ruled by well-known divisions and boundaries.
Sandwich, she repeats to herself. Sandwich. Sandwich. Semantic satiation arrives swiftly. She knows words -- quite a few of them. They were in books, in the mouths and minds of others, on television, and on billboards when she learned them as a child. Now they are in her as well. Part of her, as they are surely represented somewhere physically in the jungle of synapses in her brain. But she does not own them.
Emma looks down at her plate, sees rough lines and angles of brown, bits of yellow, vague shadows and reflections moving across a green gloss surface. She sees voids of varying size and shape; bubbles burst by tiny citizens of the yeast community. She lifts up the corner of one triangular piece of bread and sees a flat piece of yellow, marked lightly with the signature of a knife's serrated blade. The knife sits beside the plate now; bits of cheese pushed snugly like clay between the tiny spikes along its cutting edge.
II.
About eight miles away from where Emma lives, there's a dairy farm. A cow is tearing up grass from the pasture she mills in with her sisters. The grass is slowly, slowly being digested and the matter that made up the grass is being transmuted into cow. Cow considers this, albeit not in words, but in the silent acknowledgment of cow-ness that she knows will instruct some of the matter she ingests to be allocated for muscle, some for the maintenance of organs, some for the production of hormones, and some for milk.
This is an old-fashioned farm -- a small-yield organic operation, one of the last of its kind. Cow is milked by hand; she has heard the whispers about shiny silver machines with lots of tubes and cramped quarters, and she thanks the earth in her cowish way that she lives on this particular farm rather than one of the more modern ones. She is full to bursting with milk; she exhales a long slow breath of relief as she sees the farmer approaching with a bucket. Milk inside Cow is part of Cow; when milk enters the bucket, milk is no longer part of cow. Milk is, however, part of the earth, as is Cow, as is the bucket, as is the farmer.
The farmer finishes milking Cow, and takes the full bucket to the whitewashed kitchen/laboratory where it will be sterilized and processed and properly set up to be turned into cheese. The farmer pours himself a small sample cup of milk once it has been cleaned; milk is now part of farmer, and farmer's internal instructions will transmute milk into muscle and skin and saliva. And farmer and milk and bucket and cow are still part of the earth.
III.
Emma's sandwich is, in one sense, impossible.
There is no hint of inevitable sandwich destiny in any of its components. She could, if she were motivated and equipped with the proper tools, pick apart the sandwich down to the molecular level, and still find no indication of essential sandwichness in any tiny piece. She could also simply rewind the sandwich-making process in her head, and return internally to a few minutes ago when she had bread and cheese and a plate and a knife, but no sandwich to speak of.
But instead, she simply picks up the sandwich and takes a bite out of it. She still has a sandwich at this point, albeit a sandwich with a piece missing. Or perhaps not missing, but assimilated. Emma chews and swallows; the sandwich is absorbed into her. She continues eating, and gradually the immediate notion of sandwich disappears out of matter and returns to the realm of ideas, at least in Emma's house. Emma digests the sandwich, her internal algorithms processing parts of the earth that were once parts of Cow and wheat and air and water into human cells.
IV.
The ball of cells in Emma's uterus has two X chromosomes. Assuming it grows into a baby, the baby will be a girl. It knows nothing yet; it may have rudimentary sensations of heat and pressure and touch and motion, but it does not reflect upon the nature of these things. If it forms memories at this stage, it stores them in wordless massless pictureless forms that will exist perhaps as deep red undercurrents in future tides of thought, but nothing more.
Meandering instructions process matter into more cells -- more cells with DNA identifying them as Yuki's (Emma has already decided on what she'll name the baby if it's a girl).
Boundaries don't make sense at this level, at this stage. Legally, morally, philosophically, people have been attempting to draw them for generations, with the intention of wresting the secrets of what we are obligated to do from nature. But nature gives no answers: she silently seems to mock at times, but in truth she is simply reminding us that we're on our own when it comes to making these choices.
At this stage, boundaries exist only in the weighing of values, in the questions people ask one another, and themselves: Could I live with myself, if...?
Yuki is a wanted baby or ball of cells or fetus; Emma made life on purpose, and would not attempt to take it back. But she understands why some might not. If she was someone else, she might not have named Yuki yet; Yuki would be "tissue". And this would not be harsh or cruel; it would simply be a matter of choice, between the pregnant one and whatever internal sounding boards she might have in her head. Voices, remembered: mothers, grandmothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, characters from books. Her own, standing out by its signature quirks and foibles and talents and turns of phrase.
But Yuki is, again, wanted. Emma has chosen to think of herself as with child, yet she does not deny the fact that Yuki is still a ball of cells and not a laughing, squirming infant. There is a difference, Emma thinks, though she knows some would disagree. She lets them, and they let her. Nothing firm, except her belly as it grows.
V.
Emma gets dressed. Her husband, Rick, is in his home office clacking away on the keyboard. Emma looks at her sweater still lying on the bed. If someone walked in and touched the sweater, rumpling it as it lay still and deflated, Emma would not feel it. She picks up the sweater and slips it over her head.
Rick walks back into the room, playfully tugs on the hem of Emma's sweater, feels her warmth radiating into the thin acrylic. Emma's nerves respond to the feel of the sweater's force vectors changing; it is like a second skin.
She sheds it again, feeling warm, and knowing that some of her cells already adhere to its interior space.
VI.
Yuki arrives in January, in the season of her name. Her hair is dark, her eyes are blue. Ten fingers, five toes. Yuki is a healthy baby, but only one leg developed -- the other seems to have stopped at about mid-thigh, and there is no foot.
Emma is briefly jolted by Yuki's asymmetry, but mostly, she is relieved that her baby is alive.
Yuki lies in her cradle, though she does not yet know the word for "cradle". She hears sounds and sees colors and shadows and light flitting through the room, but does not differentiate this stimuli. Her father comes in; his mouth moves as he points to blurred localities of matter, and he speaks the name-labels of things.
Gradually, Yuki comes to feel not awash in everything, but apart in some strange way. She is learning words: her parents are feeding them to her the way they feed her pureed squash and carrots and applesauce. In some respects, this makes the environment easier to manage, but in another sense it makes everything seem further away and less immediate. Her brain is changing shape, her body is changing size. Her internal engines are busily turning food and milk and water and air into more of her.
On her second birthday, she receives a second leg. She's adept at crawling by this point, but Emma's degree is in robotics, and she's built a leg for Emma the way some parents knit booties. Emma doesn't force the new leg on Yuki; instead, she puts it on the floor in front of her, nearby, the way she would a toy. Yuki crawls over to it, stares at it, picks it up. It's light and finely made, radiating clear and silver smoothness. Yuki holds the leg as she would a tool at first; she waves it at the cat, who sniffs it idly and walks away.
At first, Yuki does not wear the leg. She drags it around the house as she crawls, she uses it to reach under the couch and pull out dust bunnies and rubber balls that have rolled beneath into the shadows. She puts her hand in the socket in the end, and hears a low hum. The leg emits a soft glow then, but this stops after a few minutes. Yuki's eyes are wide and round now, but she does not cry.
VII.
Yuki is in kindergarten now. She's already reading, and is becoming an expert at using the computer. She's picky about her food, and her hair is still dark, her eyes bright blue. She's adjusted to the new leg -- in fact, she's on her third model, which her mother tells her will grow as she does due to the new nutrient-transmission interfaces she's installed in it.
Yuki can still remove the leg when she wants to -- sometimes she does it to scare the boys, sometimes just to look at it, and to look at her own form in its absence. When the leg is attached, her brain is aware of every inch of it, and it is hers as surely as her other fleshborne leg is. And it does grow, its form changing to accommodate new gaits and weight and usage patterns per its feedback sensors and adaptive algorithms.
Yuki feels whole and complete regardless of whether she's wearing the leg or not. Her form is a choice; at any point in time, she may have two legs or one. Her body is a fluid, flowing sequence of matter and decision and subjective boundaries -- she knows this more than most her age. And her sense of rights is solid: she knows her body is hers and no-one else's, regardless of all the bits of world and time and learning that make it up.
VIII.
Yuki is sixteen. Emma is now forty, and Rick is forty-three.
Emma no longer eats sandwiches. She's changed slowly over time, but there's very little of the matter she was made of when Yuki was born at this point.
Rick is mostly flesh, save for the standard phonear model typical of most everyone these days -- the next next next generation of handsfree communication, they call it. He still thinks Emma is beautiful -- in earlier days he'd wondered what she'd look like with wrinkles and long, white hair, and he'd expected that he'd still have found her lovely then. And he finds her lovely now, though her skin may crack and need replacement on occasion, it does not wrinkle.
People change, Rick, she'd said to him. I will change. Will you be with me no matter what? No matter how I change?
Rick told her yes, of course. I'll love you even when I can't tell your face from a prune.
He'd laughed at that. She had as well, but nervously.
Now, Emma's skull is blue resin. She has hair of a sort: long and silvery and equipped with photosynthetic fibers. Instead of making cheese sandwiches, she holds her head out the window of the car as she and Rick drive through the countryside in late spring. She laughs and thinks about her head: the calcium that used to house her brain is probably off forming ionic bonds somewhere, and the housing that now shields her brain came from hydrocarbons, which came from long-dead dinosaurs and fallen leaves.
Something lights up on her chest, deep within, whenever Rick leans close to kiss her. Her lips are still supple and dense with nerve fibers. She is not indestructible: her brain is still a thing of water and patterns, and traditional human frailties have less been transcended than shifted to inhabit new spheres: now she does not worry about sunburn, but about cracking paint and metal fatigue. She does not worry about cancer, but about things like molecular seizure and nutrient-transmission failure.
She also wonders whether a visiting alien would be able to tell the sentients from the landscape -- would her movement patterns stand out as significant, or would the alien minds and eyes that looked upon the earth see her as mere aggregate, indistinguishable from nearby scrap metal and stone? Would they see fit to pull her apart, figuring that her body would serve as raw material for something else?
The thought is unsettling at best.
Autonomy exists: this is a right she fiercely claims, a right she claimed for herself and her daughter long ago, even when people told her she should not have children with her history, when people told her she should not replace her blood with transparent respirocyte fluid, when a superstitious neighbor hummed and clucked upon hearing she was getting a new blue plastiskull equipped with automatic heads-up display and on-board Internet.
So, occasionally, she worries. Worries that she might not have any real claim on self, since everything she is is essentially borrowed: her form, her very mind, are gifts, and she knows not if she has actually earned them.
But she does not worry all the time. She is not worried now, in the car with Rick, Yuki typing busily to her friends on a wireless pad in the back seat, her own earphone pulsing warmly. She is happy, and she is Emma, through and through.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Facing the Quasi-Autonomous Robot Monsters Under The Bed, Part II
(Read Part I)
In the following, G precedes each of Geoffrey's questions/statements, and A precedes each of my responses.
A: The "Free Will" debate has been raging for years and years and years, and has consumed innumerable forests of paper, gallons upon gallons of ink, and petabytes of server space already. Hence, I don't see it as realistic to presume it can be resolved here in the comments to a blog post.
Furthermore, I try not to get involved in large-scale Free Will Debates very often because it's so easy for them to turn into huge time-sucking black holes of endless argumentation with people who are convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are right and that everyone who doesn't agree with them is either ignorant of the Divine Truth or suffering from a terminal case of wishful thinking. My comments here by no means reflect a fixed, firm position, anyway, and shouldn't be taken to do so. They're just an exploration of the subject given what I think I understand right now. I might change my mind (or be "compelled" to do so) at some point; this doesn't concern me too much, seeing as I'm not a politician.
Geoffrey's definition of free will was stated as follows: Free will is defined as the power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within or coercion from without.
In the purely practical sense, I would agree with this definition -- that is, I agree with it based on the way I usually define "compulsion" and "coercion".
I see "compulsion" as describing an action that is either:
(a) totally involuntary (like a heartbeat or hiccup),
or,
(b) the result of a person's having a very, very strong need to do something to the point where not doing it takes more energy than doing it (like biting your nails out of habit, which "feels" very different internally from deciding to bite your nails because they're too long for your liking and you don't have a nail clipper handy).
Some particular kinds of determinists might consider anything a person does to be a "compulsion", but I don't find this viewpoint very useful for thinking about how minds actually operate.
I see "coercion" as describing a state in which one agent acts in such a way that another agent is restricted in some particular way as a result of the desires and resultant actions of the first agent. It's probably easiest to explain this by way of example: e.g., if someone puts a gun to your head and says, "Give me all your money!", your giving them the money would not represent a freely chosen action on your part, but rather, a coerced one. However, if a friend came up to you and asked to borrow a dollar (without threatening you or trying to trick you in the process), your giving a dollar to your friend would not be a coerced action, but a freely chosen one.
"Choice" in this sense doesn't violate causality, either -- in some respects I think "choice" is what we end up with when the chain of causality leading up to an event is sufficiently complex and not directly reducible to the imposition of one person's (or group's) will on another. The more subtle, low-level influences between a choice presenting itself and a person making a choice, the more of a "true choice" that choice is. In the second example above, your choice was caused by things like your desire to make your friend happy, your perception of your friend's need for a dollar, the fact that you had a dollar to give in the first place, what kind of mood you happened to be in that day, whether you'd eaten breakfast or not...etc., etc., But it was not caused by some direct and immediate threat or manipulation on the part of your friend, and that made it noncoerced.
I guess...in simple terms, I see "free will" as being something that is real in every meaningful sense in this universe, but that need not contradict causality. Obviously, some things cause other things to happen, and I don't see why human (and other) brains should be assumed totally divorced and disconnected from the rest of material reality.
G:It is the faculty of an intelligent being to act or not act, to act this way or another way, and is therefore essentially different from the operations of irrational beings that merely respond to a stimulus and are conditioned by sensory objects. However, how could we determine if a robot had these qualities? I know you said you didn't really want to debate whether we can "manufacture" consciousness, but I'm not sure how this topic can be avoided.
A: The question of whether or not we can or cannot (ever) "manufacture" consciousness is unanswerable per current neurological and cognitive science. We know that our brains are capable of producing the experience of being conscious, but we don't know exactly why or how. Yes, a lot of people have theories, and yes, some of those theories seem to be yielding interesting experimental results, but something tells me I'd have heard about it if some scientist somewhere had discovered the Ultimate True Theory of Consciousness.
I think that in order to really and truly gauge whether a robot had the "qualities of consciousness" indicated in Geoffrey's comment above, we'd need to come up with a way to empirically measure conscious awareness. Obviously we don't have anything like this yet -- sure, we have some guesses related to certain brainwave patterns, but since different brainwave patterns can indicate different things in different people, even that isn't conclusive.
Trust me, if I knew how to invent a device that would allow objective measurement of consciousness, I'd probably be a research scientist getting approved for huge grants rather than a humble blogger with a day job as an electrical engineer.
That said, all we can do in the absence of such a device (in my opinion) is come to terms with the fact that we don't yet know exactly how to detect and evaluate someone else's conscious awareness. While I look forward to seeing what the ongoing research in this area yields over the next few decades, obviously decisions are going to have to be made in the meantime. From an ethical standpoint, I advocate a bias toward presuming self-awareness, though I don't think self-awareness must be presumed in everything -- it's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I personally presume self-awareness in all living animals save for creatures like bacteria and yeast -- not human-like self-awareness, but some form of it nonetheless.
I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be a moth, but I still think there must be something to the experience of being a moth. And, I'd wager, there might very well be something to being a robot. Not a robot that's already been invented, but a robot that might exist someday. Who knows?
I'm not nearly as well-read in fields like cognition, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence as I'd like to be, and maybe I'll be able to offer a more informed opinion once I have more information on which to base such an opinion. Besides, I'm not trying to make any claims anywhere on this blog that are somehow dependent upon the notion of manufacturable consciousness being provably plausible.
In the following, G precedes each of Geoffrey's questions/statements, and A precedes each of my responses.
A: The "Free Will" debate has been raging for years and years and years, and has consumed innumerable forests of paper, gallons upon gallons of ink, and petabytes of server space already. Hence, I don't see it as realistic to presume it can be resolved here in the comments to a blog post.
Furthermore, I try not to get involved in large-scale Free Will Debates very often because it's so easy for them to turn into huge time-sucking black holes of endless argumentation with people who are convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are right and that everyone who doesn't agree with them is either ignorant of the Divine Truth or suffering from a terminal case of wishful thinking. My comments here by no means reflect a fixed, firm position, anyway, and shouldn't be taken to do so. They're just an exploration of the subject given what I think I understand right now. I might change my mind (or be "compelled" to do so) at some point; this doesn't concern me too much, seeing as I'm not a politician.
Geoffrey's definition of free will was stated as follows: Free will is defined as the power of the will to determine itself and to act of itself, without compulsion from within or coercion from without.
In the purely practical sense, I would agree with this definition -- that is, I agree with it based on the way I usually define "compulsion" and "coercion".
I see "compulsion" as describing an action that is either:
(a) totally involuntary (like a heartbeat or hiccup),
or,
(b) the result of a person's having a very, very strong need to do something to the point where not doing it takes more energy than doing it (like biting your nails out of habit, which "feels" very different internally from deciding to bite your nails because they're too long for your liking and you don't have a nail clipper handy).
Some particular kinds of determinists might consider anything a person does to be a "compulsion", but I don't find this viewpoint very useful for thinking about how minds actually operate.
I see "coercion" as describing a state in which one agent acts in such a way that another agent is restricted in some particular way as a result of the desires and resultant actions of the first agent. It's probably easiest to explain this by way of example: e.g., if someone puts a gun to your head and says, "Give me all your money!", your giving them the money would not represent a freely chosen action on your part, but rather, a coerced one. However, if a friend came up to you and asked to borrow a dollar (without threatening you or trying to trick you in the process), your giving a dollar to your friend would not be a coerced action, but a freely chosen one.
"Choice" in this sense doesn't violate causality, either -- in some respects I think "choice" is what we end up with when the chain of causality leading up to an event is sufficiently complex and not directly reducible to the imposition of one person's (or group's) will on another. The more subtle, low-level influences between a choice presenting itself and a person making a choice, the more of a "true choice" that choice is. In the second example above, your choice was caused by things like your desire to make your friend happy, your perception of your friend's need for a dollar, the fact that you had a dollar to give in the first place, what kind of mood you happened to be in that day, whether you'd eaten breakfast or not...etc., etc., But it was not caused by some direct and immediate threat or manipulation on the part of your friend, and that made it noncoerced.
I guess...in simple terms, I see "free will" as being something that is real in every meaningful sense in this universe, but that need not contradict causality. Obviously, some things cause other things to happen, and I don't see why human (and other) brains should be assumed totally divorced and disconnected from the rest of material reality.
G:It is the faculty of an intelligent being to act or not act, to act this way or another way, and is therefore essentially different from the operations of irrational beings that merely respond to a stimulus and are conditioned by sensory objects. However, how could we determine if a robot had these qualities? I know you said you didn't really want to debate whether we can "manufacture" consciousness, but I'm not sure how this topic can be avoided.
A: The question of whether or not we can or cannot (ever) "manufacture" consciousness is unanswerable per current neurological and cognitive science. We know that our brains are capable of producing the experience of being conscious, but we don't know exactly why or how. Yes, a lot of people have theories, and yes, some of those theories seem to be yielding interesting experimental results, but something tells me I'd have heard about it if some scientist somewhere had discovered the Ultimate True Theory of Consciousness.
I think that in order to really and truly gauge whether a robot had the "qualities of consciousness" indicated in Geoffrey's comment above, we'd need to come up with a way to empirically measure conscious awareness. Obviously we don't have anything like this yet -- sure, we have some guesses related to certain brainwave patterns, but since different brainwave patterns can indicate different things in different people, even that isn't conclusive.
Trust me, if I knew how to invent a device that would allow objective measurement of consciousness, I'd probably be a research scientist getting approved for huge grants rather than a humble blogger with a day job as an electrical engineer.
That said, all we can do in the absence of such a device (in my opinion) is come to terms with the fact that we don't yet know exactly how to detect and evaluate someone else's conscious awareness. While I look forward to seeing what the ongoing research in this area yields over the next few decades, obviously decisions are going to have to be made in the meantime. From an ethical standpoint, I advocate a bias toward presuming self-awareness, though I don't think self-awareness must be presumed in everything -- it's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. I personally presume self-awareness in all living animals save for creatures like bacteria and yeast -- not human-like self-awareness, but some form of it nonetheless.
I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be a moth, but I still think there must be something to the experience of being a moth. And, I'd wager, there might very well be something to being a robot. Not a robot that's already been invented, but a robot that might exist someday. Who knows?
I'm not nearly as well-read in fields like cognition, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence as I'd like to be, and maybe I'll be able to offer a more informed opinion once I have more information on which to base such an opinion. Besides, I'm not trying to make any claims anywhere on this blog that are somehow dependent upon the notion of manufacturable consciousness being provably plausible.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
No Singing Allowed: Assumptions and Other Nonsense
This week, an autistic sixth-grader in San Jose was handcuffed and suspended for singing during a physical education class. No, I'm not making this up...you can read the news story yourself.
This is the kind of thing that comes to mind whenever I see people accusing self-advocates of "playing identity politics" (I'm still not entirely sure what that even means, but I know it's often employed in the service of dismissing people's attempts to point out injustices). Regardless of what you want to call the act of pointing this out, the bottom line is that people who appear atypical are vulnerable to having our actions, mannerisms, and responses interpreted improperly. This boy wasn't hurting or threatening anyone, and he wasn't even making more noise than the other students in the PE class -- he was just doing something different from what those around him were doing.
I have no idea what the current generation of advocates is going to be able to accomplish with regard to making the world a more welcoming place for all people (regardless of whatever their individual distinguishing characteristics might be). I don't know what "strategies" are best, and I realize that no strategy is guaranteed. But this kind of incident tells be beyond any shadow of a doubt that more work needs to be done with regard to helping reveal the pervasive and damaging nature of assumptions.
Making unwarranted and fearful assumptions about people based on their mannerisms and responses (and no, I'm not talking about the case in which someone is running at you with a knife...keep your strawmen in the barn, thanks) is just as wrong as making assumptions based on skin color or gender. And while yes, it would be lovely to live in a world where nobody really used these things as a basis for discriminating against people, we don't live in that world yet.
I was misread, misinterpreted, and assumed to be thinking and feeling all kinds of things I wasn't while growing up. I wasn't handcuffed, thankfully, but I was sent out in the hall numerous times, yelled at, and punished for things I didn't even know I was doing. I was punished for intentions I supposedly had based on people misreading my "tone" and "body language" and making assumptions about how someone my age "should know how to act".
Being diagnosed on the autistic spectrum didn't cause any of that, and it was all happening well before I knew my brain was configured the way it is. It was happening long before I had any clue about politics. And I see it continuing to happen to other people whose experiences I can identify readily with -- people who, more than likely, see themselves as a whole, dynamic, and complex being lacking in any desire to "reduce themselves to a single trait" (and I don't think being autistic is a "single trait" to begin with -- it's not a plug-and-play feature, but that's beside the point for now).
I think some people don't like reading or engaging with this kind of thing because to them it seems like an overfocus on differences (likely to prompt concomitant problems like separatism and a "permanent victim" mentality), along with a functional denial of the shared goals and objectives all people committed to progress, freedom, and the securing of more rights and opportunities for all face. And I get that. I really do. I get regularly annoyed when I read things that suggest a "hierarchy of authenticity" -- e.g., people trying to claim that they're more-feminist-than-thou, or more-autistic-than-thou, or more-Californian-than-thou or whatever, and that a person needs to fit some narrowly-defined absolute category in order to get behind relevant goals.
I'm not interested in that kind of thing at all. It's not only unproductive, but terribly tiresome.
For me, "identification" in the political sense is very confusing, and I've actually been rather surprised at the degree to which saying you're anything ends up turning into a political statement. It took me rather a while to even get comfortable publicly admitting to being autistic because of this; I initially saw it as kind of a private issue, but then I realized that all I was doing by not getting involved in the larger discussion affecting people like me was tantamount to agreeing with "don't ask, don't tell" policies. I don't by any means see "female", "autistic", "Californian", "blogger", or "engineer" as being the sum-total of who and what I am, but by the same token, all these things are pervasively interwoven with who and what I am.
I don't think it's fair or logical to engage in knee-jerk armchair psychoanalysis of people who point out examples of improper social assumptions, problems with the status quo, discrimination, and misinterpretation and assume that all such people are just trying to "construct an identity around a single trait" or worse, "construct an identity around victimhood". I'm well aware that no great purpose is served by forging one's entire sense of self around the fact of being oppressed -- after all, oppression is a bad thing, and most of us (I hope) would prefer it to go away!
The way I look at any aspect (or set of aspects) of a person is such that the person will still be that person if all their social and political goals are achieved. And of course that can't happen if a person is so invested in the idea of being oppressed that they consciously or subconsciously work to make sure they remain that way.
It also can't happen if a person lets herself get so attached to how different she is from others that she starts seeing this as something to feel superior about.
And it is most definitely unhealthy for a person to decide, simplistically, that since they're X, and all Xs supposedly do A, B, and C (but not D or E), that they have to restrict their own actions and aspirations to that particular set of supposed axioms. This is actually something I see as a prime goal for advocacy -- getting people to stop putting themselves in boxes whenever possible, and to stop fearing that not fitting the axioms exactly means that they don't have the right to a voice in the larger discussions likely to affect them (regardless of what they call themselves).
So, the kid in the story I linked to is autistic. He's also currently a sixth grader, a Californian, and someone who likes to sing. It's ridiculous, wrong, and frightening that he was physically restrained ostensibly "for the safety of the other students" when he'd provoked no violence and not threatened a single person.
I may write about things under the auspices of "autistic advocacy" or "cognitive liberty" or "morphological freedom" or "disability rights", but all of those pretty much run together in my head when I'm not deliberately squeezing them down for the sake of making the relevant language easier to work with.
Fundamentally, what I want people to understand is that their very definitions of what ranges of cognition, perception, and action exist are probably far more limited than they should be, and that there are more valid ways to be and grow in the world than they can easily imagine.
Why can't we have a world where kids can laugh, chatter, or sing in their PE classes?
Why are kids who bully others not usually pathologized for it, whereas kids who get bullied are so often accused of "having provoked it"?
Why is the present world one in which sitting on a bus and rocking is considered more "dysfunctional" than getting drunk in a club and wandering around puking on the sidewalk afterward?
Why is "society" assumed to be comprised only of people who can get by using only currently-available supports (and anyone who thinks they don't use supports is seriously ignorant), and those of us who might have different needs and ability sets (which sometimes means we need less assistance in some areas than others) are somehow "interlopers" or burdens by default?
I don't think a lot of the answer to these questions has to do with individual people consciously setting out to be mean and nasty. I think very few people actually consciously set out to create evil in the world. More likely, the primary answer lies in the fact that a lot of people never have any good reason to question their assumptions, so they just don't -- in other words, it's plain, old, garden-variety ignorance that isn't anyone's "fault" in particular, and certainly not the result of a deliberate and vast conspiracy. Heck, even the power imbalances I complain about at times (and which I do think are real and important to acknowledge) don't only (or even mostly) necessarily come about due to individual "evil-ness", but due to social and institutional structures that perpetuate those imbalances.
Basically, people who aren't as affected by the pervasive background assumptions that permeate the surrounding culture tend to not see the backgound at all. All I'm trying to do, really, when I write stuff like this is point out the existence of the background to people who might not be aware of it. Not because they're bad people, but because the background isn't something they're constantly banging up against and having to deal with in very real, very tangible ways every day. I don't know if anything I'm doing actually helps in that regard, but that's sort of what I'm attempting. Hopefully at least some of that comes through.
This is the kind of thing that comes to mind whenever I see people accusing self-advocates of "playing identity politics" (I'm still not entirely sure what that even means, but I know it's often employed in the service of dismissing people's attempts to point out injustices). Regardless of what you want to call the act of pointing this out, the bottom line is that people who appear atypical are vulnerable to having our actions, mannerisms, and responses interpreted improperly. This boy wasn't hurting or threatening anyone, and he wasn't even making more noise than the other students in the PE class -- he was just doing something different from what those around him were doing.
I have no idea what the current generation of advocates is going to be able to accomplish with regard to making the world a more welcoming place for all people (regardless of whatever their individual distinguishing characteristics might be). I don't know what "strategies" are best, and I realize that no strategy is guaranteed. But this kind of incident tells be beyond any shadow of a doubt that more work needs to be done with regard to helping reveal the pervasive and damaging nature of assumptions.
Making unwarranted and fearful assumptions about people based on their mannerisms and responses (and no, I'm not talking about the case in which someone is running at you with a knife...keep your strawmen in the barn, thanks) is just as wrong as making assumptions based on skin color or gender. And while yes, it would be lovely to live in a world where nobody really used these things as a basis for discriminating against people, we don't live in that world yet.
I was misread, misinterpreted, and assumed to be thinking and feeling all kinds of things I wasn't while growing up. I wasn't handcuffed, thankfully, but I was sent out in the hall numerous times, yelled at, and punished for things I didn't even know I was doing. I was punished for intentions I supposedly had based on people misreading my "tone" and "body language" and making assumptions about how someone my age "should know how to act".
Being diagnosed on the autistic spectrum didn't cause any of that, and it was all happening well before I knew my brain was configured the way it is. It was happening long before I had any clue about politics. And I see it continuing to happen to other people whose experiences I can identify readily with -- people who, more than likely, see themselves as a whole, dynamic, and complex being lacking in any desire to "reduce themselves to a single trait" (and I don't think being autistic is a "single trait" to begin with -- it's not a plug-and-play feature, but that's beside the point for now).
I think some people don't like reading or engaging with this kind of thing because to them it seems like an overfocus on differences (likely to prompt concomitant problems like separatism and a "permanent victim" mentality), along with a functional denial of the shared goals and objectives all people committed to progress, freedom, and the securing of more rights and opportunities for all face. And I get that. I really do. I get regularly annoyed when I read things that suggest a "hierarchy of authenticity" -- e.g., people trying to claim that they're more-feminist-than-thou, or more-autistic-than-thou, or more-Californian-than-thou or whatever, and that a person needs to fit some narrowly-defined absolute category in order to get behind relevant goals.
I'm not interested in that kind of thing at all. It's not only unproductive, but terribly tiresome.
For me, "identification" in the political sense is very confusing, and I've actually been rather surprised at the degree to which saying you're anything ends up turning into a political statement. It took me rather a while to even get comfortable publicly admitting to being autistic because of this; I initially saw it as kind of a private issue, but then I realized that all I was doing by not getting involved in the larger discussion affecting people like me was tantamount to agreeing with "don't ask, don't tell" policies. I don't by any means see "female", "autistic", "Californian", "blogger", or "engineer" as being the sum-total of who and what I am, but by the same token, all these things are pervasively interwoven with who and what I am.
I don't think it's fair or logical to engage in knee-jerk armchair psychoanalysis of people who point out examples of improper social assumptions, problems with the status quo, discrimination, and misinterpretation and assume that all such people are just trying to "construct an identity around a single trait" or worse, "construct an identity around victimhood". I'm well aware that no great purpose is served by forging one's entire sense of self around the fact of being oppressed -- after all, oppression is a bad thing, and most of us (I hope) would prefer it to go away!
The way I look at any aspect (or set of aspects) of a person is such that the person will still be that person if all their social and political goals are achieved. And of course that can't happen if a person is so invested in the idea of being oppressed that they consciously or subconsciously work to make sure they remain that way.
It also can't happen if a person lets herself get so attached to how different she is from others that she starts seeing this as something to feel superior about.
And it is most definitely unhealthy for a person to decide, simplistically, that since they're X, and all Xs supposedly do A, B, and C (but not D or E), that they have to restrict their own actions and aspirations to that particular set of supposed axioms. This is actually something I see as a prime goal for advocacy -- getting people to stop putting themselves in boxes whenever possible, and to stop fearing that not fitting the axioms exactly means that they don't have the right to a voice in the larger discussions likely to affect them (regardless of what they call themselves).
So, the kid in the story I linked to is autistic. He's also currently a sixth grader, a Californian, and someone who likes to sing. It's ridiculous, wrong, and frightening that he was physically restrained ostensibly "for the safety of the other students" when he'd provoked no violence and not threatened a single person.
I may write about things under the auspices of "autistic advocacy" or "cognitive liberty" or "morphological freedom" or "disability rights", but all of those pretty much run together in my head when I'm not deliberately squeezing them down for the sake of making the relevant language easier to work with.
Fundamentally, what I want people to understand is that their very definitions of what ranges of cognition, perception, and action exist are probably far more limited than they should be, and that there are more valid ways to be and grow in the world than they can easily imagine.
Why can't we have a world where kids can laugh, chatter, or sing in their PE classes?
Why are kids who bully others not usually pathologized for it, whereas kids who get bullied are so often accused of "having provoked it"?
Why is the present world one in which sitting on a bus and rocking is considered more "dysfunctional" than getting drunk in a club and wandering around puking on the sidewalk afterward?
Why is "society" assumed to be comprised only of people who can get by using only currently-available supports (and anyone who thinks they don't use supports is seriously ignorant), and those of us who might have different needs and ability sets (which sometimes means we need less assistance in some areas than others) are somehow "interlopers" or burdens by default?
I don't think a lot of the answer to these questions has to do with individual people consciously setting out to be mean and nasty. I think very few people actually consciously set out to create evil in the world. More likely, the primary answer lies in the fact that a lot of people never have any good reason to question their assumptions, so they just don't -- in other words, it's plain, old, garden-variety ignorance that isn't anyone's "fault" in particular, and certainly not the result of a deliberate and vast conspiracy. Heck, even the power imbalances I complain about at times (and which I do think are real and important to acknowledge) don't only (or even mostly) necessarily come about due to individual "evil-ness", but due to social and institutional structures that perpetuate those imbalances.
Basically, people who aren't as affected by the pervasive background assumptions that permeate the surrounding culture tend to not see the backgound at all. All I'm trying to do, really, when I write stuff like this is point out the existence of the background to people who might not be aware of it. Not because they're bad people, but because the background isn't something they're constantly banging up against and having to deal with in very real, very tangible ways every day. I don't know if anything I'm doing actually helps in that regard, but that's sort of what I'm attempting. Hopefully at least some of that comes through.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)