android deluge

Months ago I recalled an obscure catalyst of my gradual de-conversion: wrestling with the arguments of the "emerging church". But I recall another one too that isn't usually featured in de-conversion stories. My hazy thinking was prodded forward by a deluge of androids. I'm referring to machines intended to exhibit a gamut of person-like characteristics, from appearance to creativity to desire. At the time in 2008, the specific instances with the greatest prominence to me were in Battlestar Galactica (2004) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. These two aren't uniquely important—obviously so, given that they were revivals of decades-old creations. The deluge of androids started in fiction long before these two. And it certainly has continued since, across a variety of media. By my estimate it's not lessening in strength...

It hardly needs saying that I'm not claiming that imaginary android characters proved or disproved anything. The critical factor they contributed was to broaden and direct imagination. They implicitly and explicitly highlighted the standard philosophical thought-experiments. "If an android were sufficiently advanced in its duplication of human thought and behavior, would its 'mind' be like ours? If not, why not? Is there a coherent reason why it becoming sufficiently advanced is impossible?" Some of these questions have been connected to "zombies" instead of androids, but the gist is the same.

As the unreal androids kept nagging me with the questions, my reading was providing me with corresponding answers. I was busy digesting two well-grounded premises, each of which are routinely confirmed. First, the elemental ingredients of humans are no different from the elemental ingredients of non-human stuff. The human form's distinctiveness arises from intricate combinations of the ingredients at coarser levels and from the activity those combinations engage in. Second, like I said in the preceding blog entry, information is encoded in discrete arrangements of matter (and/or energy flows). Ergo the details of the matter used in the arrangement aren't relevant except for obligatory requirements on its consistency and persistence. Information is perpetually copied/translated/transformed from one arrangement of matter to another. DNA molecules house information without having consciousness. The ramification of fusing the two premises is that because hypothetical androids are made of matter like people are, they're capable of manipulating information like people. This doesn't imply that it'll be easy to construct androids that encode information with comparable subtlety.

To admit this much is to invite the next epiphany. The perspective is reversible. If they're enough like us, then we're like them. Presuming that androids' intellects can function as artificial variations of people's intellects, couldn't someone with a twisted mentality—a sufficiently advanced android maybe—regard people as the original biological templates for androids? Calling the suggestion dehumanizing misses the point. Being a "conscious machine" all along, constructed from cells in place of gizmos, doesn't subtract from our subjective experience one bit. The experience of freedom is accessible to self-virtualizing robots.