5. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 5 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Five — Advice From a Caterpillar
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’ [26]
For more than three decades the Turing test, named after the mathematician Alan Turing was widely accepted as a model for thinking about the line between machines and people [27].
In an elaborate setup that Turing called the Imitation Game, somebody poses a question through a computer terminal to an intermediary whose identity — human or machine — is not revealed. If the person talking to the computer believes they are talking with another person, then the machine is said to be intelligent. It passes the Turing test [28].
As we become increasingly intertwined with technology and with each other via technology, the distinction between what is specifically human and specifically technological becomes more complex [29].
Our new technologically entwined relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we have become a mixture of biology, technology, and code — the traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain.
When a young child sees clouds moving across the sky, they may seem alive and independent, even dangerous. But if the clouds are seen as little fluffy lambs, a metaphorical chain begins to neutralize the fear. The clouds may still be considered alive but they are no longer terrifying.
Repression and neutralization through a metaphor are one possibility. But there is another. Faced with the moving clouds the child can theorize about their movement; clouds only move when pushed by the wind, and what cannot move without a push from the outside, is not alive.
In the 1920’s psychologist, Jean Piaget saw that children develop their theories of how the world works through their interaction with the objects around them [30]. When children are between three and eight, they ask themselves questions:
What makes this work?
What is motion?
What is alive?
Piaget demonstrated that in the world of non-computational objects, children use the same distinctions about how things move to decide what is conscious and what was alive.
It seems that we have come to the end of such easy symmetries.
In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle describes how children, when confronted with interactive computer toys, were not always sure whether they should be called alive or not alive [31]. But was also clear, even to the youngest children, that movement was not the key to the puzzle. The children came to understand the toys, not as physical or mechanical, but as psychological.
“Children were drawn into thinking psychologically about computer toys for two reasons. First, the computer was responsive; it acted as though it had a mind. Second, the machine’s capacity kept children from explaining its behavior by referring to physical mechanisms and their movement.” [32]
For children the boundary between people and machines is intact, it’s what they see across that boundary that has changed. It seems children are comfortable with the idea that inanimate objects can both think and have a personality, but they are no longer worried that the machine is alive.
However, the concept of the machine has been expanded to include having a psychology. As children make these discriminations they also grant new capacities and privileges to the machine world on the basis of its animation, if not its life.
The machines of the original Star Trek series evoked people’s visions of advanced computing from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Between humans and machines stood logical robots that when faced with a paradox would slowly emit smoke and then explode.
This provided an opening for Captain Kirk to make the point that humans were superior to machines because they could be flexible.
By the late 1980s, the popular image of computing had changed.
In the character of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, we saw science fiction become science fact. Unlike the replicants in the film Blade Runner, which are passionate, sexual, and physically perfect, Data is pale, polite, and well-meaning. He is a transitional android — enough like a person to have his company and opinions appreciated, but different enough to leave unchallenged a sense of human superiority.
In the 1982 film Blade Runner, Rick Deckard is a specialist using a highly revised version of the Turing test [33]. In order to distinguish replicants from humans Deckard measures their physiological response when faced with emotionally charged subjects: for example, a replicant might not show an adequate amount of disgust at the thought of flesh rotting in the sun.
During the course of the film Deckard’s emotions towards the replicants change from, “Is this organism a machine?” to questioning, “How should I react to an organism, machine or not, who has just saved my life?”
We are a far cry from this dilemma, but not so far that we cannot identify with some aspects of it. How does one treat machines that perform roles previously reserved for humans, machines whose practical differences from people in these roles are becoming harder to discern?
Perhaps the most important aspect of Blade Runner was to show Deckard how good it feels to be alive, and how much we take life for granted [34].
So after several decades of asking what it means to think, the question at the end of the twentieth century is: “What does it mean to be alive?”
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she soon got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual.
‘Come, there’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into the beautiful garden — how is that to be done, I wonder?’ [35]
Next: Chapter Six — Pig and Pepper
References
[25] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.59–60.
[26] Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 434–460. Turing’s article has been widely reprinted; for example, see Edward Feigenbaum and Juliam Feldman, eds., Computers and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp.11–35.
[27] Turing predicted in 1950 that by the turn of the century, in an unrestricted conversation lasting 5 minutes, a machine would be able to fool an average questioner 70 percent of the time. In 1991, Hugh Loebuer funded a competition offering $100,000 for the first program to pass this test. The year 2000 is upon us, but a program to pass the test is not.
[28] See, for example, Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's,” Social Review 80 (March-April 1985): pp.65–107.
[29] See Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of Number, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952); The Child’s Concept of Space, trans. F. J. Langdon and J. L. Lunzer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). These studies are also reported in Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1960). See especially Chapters 5, 6, and 7: “Consciousness Attributed to Things,” and “The Concept of Life,” pp. 169–252.
[30] Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984); A view of Turkle’s early studies of the relationship between children and computers from the perspective of the 1980’s, pp.29–30.
[31] The quotation is from Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p.81.
[32] Ridley Scot, Blade Runner (1984).
[33] The Director’s Cut includes a scene not in the original release. It is a dream sequence, showing Deckard’s dream of a unicorn. It could be said that Gaff (another detective Deckard worked with) left the origami unicorn outside Deckard’s apartment because he knew that Deckard had dreamt of a unicorn. If Gaff knew what Deckard was dreaming then we can assume Deckard was a replicant himself. But if all the main characters become replicants, then the contrast between humans and replicants is lost.
[34] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), p.74.
