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| The Philosopher |
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| In Disney's animated masterpiece "Fantasia" there is a scene in which Mickey Mouse, as the Sorcerer's helper, is left alone to experiment with magical spells which have the effect of bringing the items around him to life: the brooms begin to sweep on their own, the buckets to fill with water, and so on. Except that the magic goes out of control. Mickey is unable to harness the forces that he has unleashed and everything begins to collapse around him. Just then, the Sorcerer returns, manages to control those magical forces with a wave of his arm and restores order. All of this takes place to the accompaniment of Dukas' lovely music, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." This cinematic scene is a fitting metaphor for the plight of Western societies today. Upon Nietzsche's pronouncement of what had become obvious by then, that God (our Sorcerer) was "dead" and that "You" and "I" had killed Him, Western civilization embarked on the culminating phase of a colossal scientific and technological adventure that has resulted in such marvels as ... well, computers and virtual encounters with others in cyberspace. The environment that many of us now inhabit in the advanced industrialized societies is filled with a seemingly magical new technology. As Arthur C. Clarke once remarked: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We live in an electronically enchanted garden. We take so much for granted that would have astonished our grandparents. Like most middle class residents of New York city, for example, I have a large television set, with dozens of cable channels available, a CD player and VHS, with DVD player too, all of which are part of an integrated system. With the touch of a remote control, bewitchingly, my environment comes to life. During the course of a normal day I have a number of interactions with mechanical devices of one sort or another, often without giving them a second thought. I do my banking with a cash machine named "Daisy" -- which is always nice enough to remember my name and to ask how I feel. "She" unfailingly says "good morning" and "have a nice day." I try to "say" the same to her, even when I am not feeling particularly cheerful. (Daisy is certainly a lot more pleasant than the dour old lady who used to work as a teller at this particular bank branch.) My car has a built-in computer which tells me when "she" needs oil and whether I can make it home without stopping for gas. It will flash a pleasant "farewell" on the dashboard as I turn it off for the night. If anyone gets too close to it while I am away or asleep, the automated security system will deliver a taped message: "You are too close to the car! "For many people (and this is very sad) the most meaningful interactions of the day take place with computers. Ironically, the people around me, this is New York remember, seem to have become less human as the machines have become more so. Persons grow more distant, relate to others primarily in terms of their professional roles, are more guarded with co-workers than with their devices. They feel threatened by others, according to therapists, but not by their gadgets. Unlike a spouse, a television set will always be there. I expect any day to read in the newspapers that an effort is underway to grant the status of "persons" not only to our animal friends, something which has indeed already been suggested, but also to television sets and computers. Such machines may now have become "man's closest friends." According to the American science fiction novelist Phillip K. Dick: "[We] find ourselves in a world of our making so intricate, so mysterious, that as Stanislas Lem ... theorizes, the time may come when, for example, a man may be restrained from raping a sewing machine." When that moment comes, "one can only hope that the sewing machine will be female and over the age of consent. "All of this is a way of raising issues that are unique to us, to persons living at this moment in history, but which touch on some of the deepest problems in philosophy. For example, in thinking about personal identity, it is now necessary to ponder the ways in which technology alters the social landscape and, hence, the self placed within that landscape; changes in the forensic and moral concept of a "person" also result in a new plasticity in the concept of the moral self; and to a new awareness of the ways in which the philosophical concept of a person is increasingly different from the biological concept of a human being, giving a new twist to the old chestnut concerning the relationship between the cerebral and the mental -- that is, the mind/body problem. It has been pointed out by a number of thinkers that we are witnessing an increase in the momentum of the living toward reification, and at the same time there is a reciprocal entry into animation by mechanical devices. Signs of this phenomenon can be observed even in the popular art of our time. It is a recurring theme in sci-fi films, for instance, in the work of directors like Kubrick ("2001, A Space Odyssey") and Spielberg ("A.I." 2001). Several philosophically interesting consequences follow from this: just as many species change their behavior and appearance depending on the environments in which they are placed, so we can expect that persons whose primary interactions with others are mediated by technology will be different from the sorts of persons their ancestors were. Some of these changes will seem desirable and others just the opposite. We need to think about what these changes are likely to be and how we can make the future, as President Clinton used to say, "our friend and not our enemy." I am suggesting that reality is becoming a sort of "space" that is only partly physical, but also electronic and media-saturated, that is to say, a space that we share with non-human entities that we create and which are, silently but steadily, re-creating us. This gives rise to the most intriguing and speculative questions of all -- questions that interest scientists and artists as much as philosophers. We may be arriving at a moment that human beings have yearned for from the beginning of history: the encounter with another entity capable of subjectivity, another "higher" intelligence, leading to the possibility of shared moral meanings and moral growth. Except that it is not God whom we are meaning, not even little green men from outer space, but the things that we have made ourselves and which may yet transcend us. Thus, the environment that we inhabit is indeed now animated, almost magically, by "things" that are no longer merely "things." We ourselves are becoming more "thing-like" as we alienate and project increasing portions of our humanity to these objects, while the reality that both persons and objects share is becoming more malleable, more plastic, lending the whole of our postmodern society a Disneyworld kind of quality. I now understand how that poor Sorcerer's apprentice must have felt. Will we manage to control these technological forces? Will the Faustian bargain with technology be deemed worthwhile in the long run? Will all of this innovation result in a new partnership between humans and conscious machines, if there ever are any such machines? Or will machines capable of moral conduct prove to be as flawed as we are? Let us hope not. |
| Magic, Technology, and the Self |
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