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

men.” 7 For Weaver, the pedestrian traffic she views from her window resembles the orderly workings of a machine. By the same token, Descartes peers out his window at what for all he knows could be machines in disguise. How can he be sure they’re not bête-machines —apes or bears walking upright, decked out in human apparel—or maybe even humanoid-machines , early prototypes of the T-101? This possibility feeds our suspicion that even if we made the imposters doff their hats and other garments, we might still have trouble deciding whether they’re machines, since the human tissue under their clothes might also be part of the charade.
     
    The lesson here, according to Descartes, is that we can’t judge whether something is a machine on the basis of superficial appearances, as he believes most people do when they take animals to be more than mere automata. As he wrote to one of his many correspondents:
     
    Most of the actions of animals resemble ours, and throughout our lives this has given us many occasions to judge that they act by an interior principle like the one within ourselves, that is to say, by means of a soul which has feelings and passions like ours. All of us are deeply imbued of this opinion by nature. 8
     
     
    From the outward conduct of certain animals, we begin to believe in the presence of an “interior principle,” something that operates in a manner entirely different from billiard balls, cogs, and gears. While these things obey laws of motion, the “interior principle,” which Descartes calls the “soul,” moves the body from within, guided by a conscious awareness (“feelings”) of what’s happening around it and a will (“passions”) to persist in existence and achieve some degree of well-being.
     
    Most of Descartes’ contemporaries took it as a given that every animal had some sort of soul, although they denied that any nonhuman animal had a rational soul . In believing this, they were following in footsteps of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) as well as being good Christians, since they claimed that our rational souls made members of our species uniquely eligible for a heavenly existence in the glorious hereafter. Still, observing the care animals take for their survival and well-being, most thoughtful people found it hard to shake the impression that there must be something in there, something at least analogous to a human soul, elevating even the lowliest beast above the mindless matter of an automaton. But what seemed obvious to most people seemed to Descartes like a prejudice born of a failure to appreciate how well the whole gamut of animal behavior might someday be explained through mechanistic principles without ascribing to animals any awareness or will (or so, at least, he believed). In the meantime, though, he thought it was crucially important to identify correctly the signs of the soul’s presence, for otherwise we end up fudging the line that separates ensouled beings from mere machines.
     
    In her voice-over narration at the beginning of the SCC episode “The Demon Hand,” Sarah Connor also refers to “the soul” as “the thing that separates us from the machines.” For both Sarah and Descartes, having a soul doesn’t necessarily imply that there’s some mysterious part of us that literally survives the death of the body, active and alert in its postmortem existence. “Gone is gone,” says Sarah in that same voice-over, making her position on the matter perfectly clear. When asked by Cameron (not James Cameron, but the female Terminator of that name played by Summer Glau) whether she believes in the Resurrection, Sarah scoffs and replies that faith is no more a part of her “programming” than it is of Cameron’s ( SCC , “Samson and Delilah”).
     
    Descartes, on the other hand, goes so far as to argue that it’s at least possible for the soul to survive apart from the body. But he’s quick to add that personal immortality might be