Final Part 4: Praepositio

"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

Question 4. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ribofunk and Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?

Before we can even start discussing whether or not there is a difference between animals and machines, we must get clear on the terms or we will inevitably equivocate. Unfortunately, which definitions to accept for these terms is a discussion in itself, but at least it will fix the salient feature of the former discussion; if we can come to a consensus on which definitions to use all that remains is to look at the definitions of “animal” and “machine” and see if there are any members of both sets. Here are some definitions for “animal” that I found in the Oxford English Dictionary and on Wikipedia:

1. a. A living being; a member of the higher of the two series of organized beings, of which the typical forms are endowed with life, sensation, and voluntary motion, but of which the lowest forms are hardly distinguishable from the lowest vegetable forms by any more certain marks than their evident relationship to other animal forms, and thus to the animal series as a whole rather than to the vegetable series.
2. In common usage: one of the lower animals; a brute, or beast, as distinguished from man.
3. a. Contemptuously or humorously for: a human being who is no better than a brute, or whose animal nature has the ascendancy over his reason; a mere animal.
Wikipedia: Animals are a major group of mostly multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa.

The important distinctions in these definitions seem to be 1. Animals are a certain set of living organisms that exclude plants, fungi and single-celled life forms, 2. Animals are “alive” (whatever that means), 3. Animals can sense; that is, they have a brain or central nervous system that responds to input from their sensory organs, 4. Animals are capable of voluntary motion, 5. Animals are different from human beings in that they lack “reason,” which must mean certain cognitive capacities. What “life” means is an even bigger controversy, with viruses and other outlying extremophiles throwing a wrench in any simple and generalized definition, but I’d like to set that concern aside. It could be the case that animals really aren’t alive in any meaningful sense just as easily as it could be the case that life is an emergent feature of complex systems and thus be attainable by any sufficiently-developed machine. Whatever the case may be, there are other easier to define features animals may have that machines do not. The ability to sense does not seem like such a good candidate, as most computers function according to similar procedures: input, processing, storage (optional), and output. The two features that seem most applicable to the debate are belonging to a certain, strictly defined set of living beings based on their genetic code, and being capable of voluntary motion, depending on what “voluntary” turns out to mean. I will return to these points once we get some definitions of “machine” on the table.

Here are some definitions for “machine”:

I. A structure regarded as functioning as an independent body, without mechanical involvement.
II. A material structure designed for a specific purpose, and related uses.
III. A mechanical or other structure used for transportation or conveyance. (Later senses here are influenced also by IV)
IV. An apparatus constructed to perform a task or for some other purpose; also in derived senses.
Wikipedia: A machine is any device that uses energy to perform some activity.

Wikipedia helps further clarify why some definitions of a machine require mechanical parts and others do not: “Historically, a device required moving parts to be classified as a machine; however, the advent of electronics technology has led to the development of devices without moving parts that are considered machines—the computer being the most obvious example.”

On the face of it, it seems plausible that a machine defined loosely enough could be considered an animal. I see many of the themes in Ribofunk and Life Extreme as playing with this idea. With the invention of genetic engineering the simple definitions that we once used to differentiate animals and machines have broken down. DNA or at least RNA were once sufficient to determine that something was an animal and biologists interested in cataloging the world found that these genes were the organizational equivalent of putting an ISBN bar code on every living thing on the planet. Now we have learned to take apart that code and discovered that it was the chemical equivalent of a Turing machine. In Life Extreme we see examples of how we have rearranged this code to form novel new life forms. These life forms function the way we genetically program them to just like software.

But are these life forms animals? Genetically speaking they are, but as we have just discovered this should no longer be a defining feature. Can they move voluntarily would be the next question to ask, but this is where we have trouble. What does it mean for something to perform some action voluntarily? We could turn it into a huge free will debate at this point, but I think we can answer the question without having to do any heavy metaphysical lifting. We know that machines, as they are currently constructed, do not perform actions voluntarily (whether they can be made to or not is yet another issue that I want to avoid as there are no practical examples of this yet). They are programmed to accept input, process it in a certain way, and produce output. Animals do this most of the time as well, but the issue here is whether they are capable of producing output that is not determined by the input or the way in which they process it. We would be asking the same question in a debate about human free will: most of the time we do act in very predictable ways, but can we act freely?

I think a plausible way to answer this question is by asking whether or not the animal is identical to its body. It seems to me that if we want to grant animals the ability to act voluntarily they should be able to do so even if we introduce small changes in their bodies (large changes like removing all of its legs or half of its brain would be unfair, as even humans’ abilities to act freely might be hampered by this). With people we tend to grant that there is something more to them than just their bodies, namely their minds. Now to clarify this controversial position, it is true that there is a theory of mind called Identity Theory that some people find appealing in which this is not the case (the brain is taken as identical to the mind), but in contemporary philosophy even most Physicalists, who believe that there are no immaterial things such as Cartesian minds, do not think this is the right approach. Mainly, Identity Theory fails to account for the wide range of qualia (subjective qualities of conscious experience, such as what redness “looks” like) that our minds are capable of experiencing. What even Physicalists will agree to though is that the mind is some sort of emergent feature of the brain (of course, they wildly disagree on what that feature or exact relation between mind and brain is).

The reason I bring up all of this theory of mind talk is that for many animals it is not clear that some form of Identity Theory doesn’t hold. While it seems possible that the most intelligent animals such as dolphins or chimpanzees could have some sort of emergent mind, the vast majority of non-mammals do not seem to have cognitive capacities approaching anywhere near humans. If animals are just their bodies (which include the brain) and their bodies are determined by genes, it follows that animals are determined by genes and cannot, contrary to our last discerning feature, act voluntarily.

Thus, I am prepared to conclude that there really isn’t any significant distinction between animals and sufficiently advanced machines. Furthermore, I think the discussion about the human mind provides an excellent explanation of why humans differ from animals despite a common ancestry. The reason humans can act freely while animals cannot is, I think, closely related to machines. Our ability to make and use tools and machines allow us to transcend the limitations imposed on us by our genes: we can write down our thoughts and thus allow the next generation to take the theories we spent our lives working on as rudimentary or basic, we can develop medicine that allows us to live over 50 years longer than our genes should permit, and we can even build machines capable of calculating faster and more complex equations than our tiny minds allow us to.