Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

Science fiction writers dally with panpsychism from time to time. My favourite in this collection is «Tomorrow Is Waiting» (2011) by Holli Mintzer, who also makes jewellery (Philip Dick, a famous panpsychist dabbler, would approve).

Some argue that Mind (spirit, soul, what-have-you) is a kind of juice. A spirit. An aether. An ectoplasm. You either have it or you don’t and no-one knows the location of the tap. The idea hasn’t much philosophical currency, but it clings on in science fiction, where it powers those tiresome scenes in which a clone/quantum double/android replica agonises over the discovery that it is a copy/echo/ «not really real». As though being really ourselves was ever anything more than a story we tell ourselves, every time we wake up!

We know it is like to really, genuinely, not feel like ourselves. We call it schizophrenia. But if I woke up in a robot body tomorrow, and felt like myself, then I would still be me, even if there were a hundred "me"s. And I frankly can’t see any reason why I and my doppelganger (should I ever have the good fortune to run into him) wouldn’t get on like a house on fire. The robots in Adam Roberts’s story "Adam Robots" would surely agree with me.

The other way of explaining mind is to say that it emerges. That’s it: the totality of the explanation. We dress it up of course, in all manner of medieval garb (as in: mind is an emergent property; as in, mind arises out of complexity ). But this idea of emergence is even worse than panpsychism because it presupposes a completely arbitrary moment at which a non-conscious being miraculously becomes conscious.

Science fiction sticks lipstick on this pig, too, mostly by equating real, human consciousness with the capacity to feel emotion. Enter Brent Spiner’s Lieutenant Commander Data, surely the biggest waste of an actor ever perpetrated by Star Trek: The Next Generation (and that’s saying something). Behind Data’s emotionless android efficiency lies the very 1980s assumption that emotion arrives rather late in the evolutionary process, as a sort of special sauce, spicing up the cold hard business of existence. We can replicate much of life, runs the argument, but the final ingredient, emotion , remains tantalisingly just out of our grasp.

One can only assume that the writers who perpetuated this dumb idea never owned dogs. Dogs, I hope we can all agree, have minds rather simpler than our own. Well. these minds contain nothing but emotion. Dogs are rubbish at trigonometry, but they are Zen masters of grief, loyalty, rage, and disappointment.

Emotions come first – cognitive categories through which our physiological responses can be emulated, predicted and controlled. Cold reason comes after – and if you disconnect logic from its emotional foundations, well, good luck to you (and don’t even get me started on Mr Spock).

Emotion runs very near the surface of many good robot stories, but rather than commend some sweet tales (you can find them for yourselves) I’m inclined to point interested readers towards Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s "I Made You" (1954) which features one of the few genuinely terrifying robots in the literature. This coldly functional creature, with its narrow, simplistic grasp on the world, inevitably behaves like, thinks like – hell, becomes – a whipped dog, frothing with rage. Making a similar point, but in the service of pathos rather than terror, comes Mike Resnick’s "Beachcomber" – another personal favourite.

Peter Watts hardly had to invent the tortured robot protagonist of his Conradian war story "Malak" (2010). Rather, he reveals his skill in the way he conjures up a working mind out of the logical protocols of contemporary war machines. Is Watts right about the cadet minds we are even now sending on sorties over the earth’s most intractable conflicts? I hope not. And I am comforted by the thought that no thinking being we know of actually thinks in isolation. All the brightest creatures on our planet are social creatures, and individuals separated from those societies don’t amount to much. A single mad mind is unlikely to cause us much trouble.

Honest.

The story of the Golem, created from clay and given life by a Rabbi to protect Prague’s Jews from persecution, is nearly half a millennium old, product of a creative flourishing when Habsburg imperial policy was showing remarkable tolerance toward Jews and Protestants alike. In 1914 the folklorist Chayim Blochpublished a fictionalised version of the story, gathering his material, so he said, through ethnographic research on the Russian front. Bloch’s stories were soon translated into English and were widely distributed in the United States under the title The Golem: Legends of the Ghetto of Prague . In 1939 Bloch moved to New York where he remained until his death in 1973.

As mentioned before, Rabbi Loew made it a custom, every Friday afternoon, to assign for the Golem a sort of programme, a plan for the day’s work, for on the Sabbath he spoke to him only in extremely urgent cases. Generally, Rabbi Loew used to order him to do nothing else on Sabbath but be on guard and serve as a watcher.

One Friday afternoon, Rabbi Loew forgot to give him the order for the next day, and the Golem had nothing to do.

The day had barely drawn to a close and the people were getting ready for the ushering in of the Sabbath, when the Golem, like one mad, began running about in the Jewish section of the city, threatening to destroy everything. The want of employment made him awkward and wild. When the people saw this, they ran from him and cried: "Joseph Golem has gone mad!"

The people were greatly terrified, and a report of the panic soon reached the Altneu Synagogue where Rabbi Loew was praying.

The Sabbath had already been ushered in through the Song for the Sabbath day (Psalms xcii). What could be done? Rabbi Loew reflected on the evil consequences that might follow if the Golem should be running about thus uncontrolled. But to restore him to peace would be a profanation of the Sabbath.

In his confusion, he forgot that it was a question of danger to human life and that in such cases the law permits, nay, commands the profanation of the Sabbath in order that the people exposed to danger might be saved.

Rabbi Loew rushed out and, without seeing the Golem, called out into space: "Joseph, stop where you are!"

And the people saw the Golem at the place where he happened to find himself that moment, remain standing, like a post. In a single instant, he had overcome the violence of his fury.

Rabbi Loew was soon informed where the Golem stood, and he betook himself to him. He whispered into his ear: "Go home and to bed." And the Golem obeyed him as willingly as a child.

Then Rabbi Loew went back to the House of Prayer and ordered that the Sabbath Song be repeated.

After that Friday, Rabbi Loew never again forgot to give the Golem orders for the Sabbath on a Friday afternoon.

To his confidential friends he said: "The Golem could have laid waste all Prague, if I had not calmed him down in time."

(1914)

Vina Jie-Min Prasadis a Singaporean writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her short stories "Fandom for Robots" and "A Series of Steaks", both published in 2017, were nominated for the Nebula, Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. She was a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. "Harry Potter was the first series that got me really interested in fan discussion and fanworks," she explained, in an interview with the magazine Uncanny in 2018. "I got into the fandom during what’s known as the ‘Three-Year Summer’ – the three-year-long gap between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix . The ending of book four opened the universe up so much, and it was such a cliffhangery point to leave off, that I signed up for forum accounts and started reading fan theories and fanfiction about what book five might be like in order to quench my thirst for new canon." Prasad argues passionately that fan fiction is worthwhile in its own right, saying: "I’m very proud that I got my start in it."