Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am Read Online Free PDF Page A

necessity as the automatic reflex that causes Dr. Silberman’s face to contort into a grimace when Sarah Connor wallops his arm with a nightstick, breaking one of the “two hundred and fifteen bones in the human body.” 4
     
    Centuries before the term “cybernetics” had even been coined, Descartes’ idea of the bête-machine or “Beast-Machine” dared to erase the difference between biological and mechanical things. He denied that there’s any essential difference between animal bodies and “clocks, artificial fountains, mills, and similar machines which, though made entirely by man, lack not the power to move, of themselves, in various ways.” 5
     
    Many of Descartes’ contemporaries, however, balked at this idea. One of those skeptics was Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), who expressed his reservations concerning the bête-machine in this way:
     
    It appears incredible how it could happen, without the intervention of any soul, that light reflected from the body of a wolf onto the eyes of a sheep should move the extremely thin fibers of the optic nerves, and that, as a result of this motion penetrating into the brain, animal spirits [“electrochemical impulses”] are diffused into the nerves in just the way required to cause the sheep to take flight. 6
     
     
    We’ll have more to say shortly about Arnauld’s reference to the animal “soul.” For now let’s just note the similarity between Descartes’ explanation of how light reflected from the wolf sets the sheep’s limbs in motion and what we might suppose happens inside a Terminator when light bearing the image of John Connor strikes its optical sensors. The only difference is that the Terminator’s limbs are stirred to attack, not flee.
     
    Descartes responded to Arnauld’s criticisms with a reminder of how many of our own actions, such as shielding our heads with our arms when we fall, are carried out mechanically, without any conscious exercise of mind or will. But what persuaded him that everything an animal does is just as mechanical as those automatic reflexes? And if animals are machines, where, if anywhere , do the mechanistic worldview and mechanistic explanation find their limits?
     

The Thing That Separates Us from the Machines
     
    In the premiere episode of the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (“Samson & Delilah”), we’re introduced to Catherine Weaver, the icily beautiful CEO of high-tech ZieraCorp, whose elegant comportment, somehow both fluid and robotic, coupled with her disconcertingly intense interpersonal style, alerts us that she may not be exactly what she seems. Our suspicions are confirmed at the episode’s end, when she skewers a disgruntled employee through the forehead with a metallic baton that grows from her finger. In an earlier scene, Weaver directs her gaze out the huge picture window of her high-rise office onto the streets and sidewalks below and comments on the throngs of people who course along these public arteries: “They flow from street to street at a particular speed and in a particular direction, walk the block, wait for the signal, cross at the light, over and over, so orderly. All day I can watch them and know with a great deal of certainty what they’ll do at any given moment.” Contemplated from the Olympian heights of an executive suite, the flow of human crowds seems as orderly and predictable as the “animal spirits” that dart through the nerves of Descartes’ bête-machine . Still, observes Weaver, human beings aren’t machines, something she believes is very much to our disadvantage.
     
    Weaver’s speech recalls a famous passage from Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy , in which the philosopher reflects that “were I perchance to look out my window and observe men crossing the square, I would ordinarily say that I see the men themselves. . . . But what do I see aside from hats and clothes, which could conceal automata? Yet I judge them to be