The Best of Sci-Fi-5

Let’s try a little “truth-table” of the order that logicians sometimes use, and that advertisers are becoming fond of. We can try various suggested tests, and check off how the various entities we’re trying to distinguish compare.

You can, of course, continue to extend this, with all the tests you care to think of. I believe you’ll find that you can find no test within the entire scope of permissible-in-our-society-evaluations that will permit a clear distinction between the five entities in the table.

Note, too, that that robot you want to follow the Three Laws is to modify the Second Law—obedience—rather extensively with respect to children and idiots, after you’ve told it how to distinguish between humanoids and chimpanzees.

There have been a good many wars fought over the question “What do you mean… human?” To the Greeks, the peoples of other lands didn’t really speak languages— which meant Greek—but made mumbling noises that sounded like bar-bar-bar, which proved they were barbarians, and not really human.

The law should treat all human beings alike; that’s been held as a concept for a long, long time. The Athenians subscribed to that concept. Of course, barbarians weren’t really human, so the Law didn’t apply to them, and slaves weren’t; in fact only Athenian citizens were.

The easy way to make the law apply equally to all men is to so define “men” that the thing actually works. “Equal Justice for All! (All who are equal, of course.)”

TEST Idiot Robot Baby Chimp Man with prosthetic aids.

Capable of logical thought. No Yes No No Yes

“Do I not bleed?”

(Merchant of Venice test.) Yes No Yes Yes Depends.

Capable of speech? Yes Yes No No Yes

“Rational Animal”;

this must be divided into

A. Rational No Yes No No Yes

B. Animal Yes No Yes Yes Partly

Humanoid form and size Yes Yes No Yes Maybe.

Lack of fur or hair * Yes Yes Yes Maybe partly

A living being Yes No Yes No Depends on what test you use for “living”.

*A visit to a beach in summer will convince you that some adult male humans have a thicker pelt than some gorillas.

This problem of defining what you mean by “human being” appears to be at least as prolific a source of conflict as religion—and may, in fact, be why religion, that being the relationship between Man and God, has been so violent a ferment.

The law never has and never will apply equally to all; there are inferiors and superiors, whether we like it or not, and Justice does not stem from applying the same laws equally to different levels of beings. Before blowing your stack on that one, look again and notice that every human culture has recognized that you could not have the same set of laws for children and adults—not since the saurians lost dominance on the planet has that concept been workable. (Reptilian forms are hatched from the egg with all the wisdom they’re ever going to have; among reptiles of one species, there is only a difference of size and physical strength.)

Not only is there difference on a vertical scale, but there’s displacement horizontally—i.e., different-but-equal, also exists, a woman may be equal to a man, but she’s not the same as a man.

This, also, makes for complications when trying to decide “what is a human being”; there have been many cultures in history that definitely held that women weren’t human.

I have a slight suspicion that the basic difficulty is that we can’t get anything even approximating a workable concept of Justice so long as we consider equality a necessary, inherent part of it. The Law of Gravity applies equally to all bodies in the Universe—but that doesn’t mean that the force of gravity is the same for all!

Gravity—the universal law—is the same on Mars and a white dwarf star as it is on Earth. That doesn’t mean that the force of gravity is the same.

But it takes considerable genius to come up with a Universal Law of Gravity for sheer, inanimate mass. What it takes to discover the equivalent for intelligent entities… the human race hasn’t achieved as yet! Not even once has an individual reached that level!

This makes defining “human” a somewhat explosive subject.

Now the essence of humanity most commonly discussed by philosophers has been Man, the Rational Animal. The ability to think logically; to have ideas, and be conscious of having those ideas. The implied intent in “defining human-ness” is to define the unique, highest-level attribute that seta man apart from all other entities.

That “rational animal” gimmick worked pretty well for a long time; the development of electronic computers, and the clear implication of robots calls it into question. That, plus the fact that psychological experiments have shown that logical thought isn’t quite so unique-to-Man as philosophers thought.

The thing that is unique to human beings is something the philosophers have sputtered at, rejected, damned, and loudly forsworn throughout history. Man is the only known entity that laughs, weeps, grieves, and yearns. , There’s been considerable effort made to prove that those are the result of simple biochemical changes of endocrine balance. That is, that you feel angry because there is adrenalin in the bloodstream, released from the suprarenal glands. Yes, and the horse moves because the cart keeps pushing him. Why did the gland start secreting that extra Charge of adrenalin?

The essence of our actual definition of humanness is “I am human; any entity that feels as I feel is human also. But any entity that merely thinks, and feels differently is not human.”

The “inhuman scientist” is so called because he doesn’t appear to feel as the speaker does. While we were discussing possible theological ramifications of the humanness question, we might have included the zombie. Why isn’t a zombie “human” any longer? Because he has become the logical philosopher’s ideal; a purely rational, non-emotional entity.

Why aren’t Tregonsee, the Rigellian, and Worsel, the Velantian, to be compared with animals and/or robots?

Because, as defined in E. E. Smith’s stories, they feel as we do.

Now it’s long since been observed that an individual will find his logical thinking subtly biased in the direction of his emotional feelings. His actions will be controlled not by his logic and reason but, in the end, by his emotional pulls. If a man is my loyal friend— i.e., if he feels favorable-to-me —then whatever powers of physical force or mental brilliance he may have are no menace to me, but are a menace to my enemies.

If he feels about things as I do, I need not concern myself with how he thinks about them, or what he does. He is “human”—my kind of human.

But… if he can choose his feelings, if his emotions are subject to his conscious, judicious, volitional choice…? What then? If his emotional biases are not as rigidly unalterable as his bones? If he can exercise judgment and vary his feelings, can I trust him to remain “human”?

Could an entity who felt differently about things—whose emotions were different—be “human”?

That question may be somewhat important to us. Someone, sooner or later, is going to meet an alien, a really alien alien, not just a member of Homo sapiens from a divergent breed and culture.

Now it’s true that all things are relative. Einstein proved the relativity of even the purely physical level of reality. But be it noted that Einstein proved that Law of Relativity; things aren’t “purely relative” in the sense that’s usually used—”I can take any system of relationships I choose!” There are laws of relativity.

The emotional biases a culture induces in its citizens vary widely. Mores is a matter of cultural relativity.