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

the sort of thing that requires God’s active cooperation, something about which he declines to speculate further. Whether faith was part of his programming we may never know for sure. 9 But the important thing about the soul for both of them is that it serves as a kind of bulwark against our total subjection to the machines. For Sarah, the soul is the locus of our endangered humanity, threatened both by Skynet and, no less, by the sacrifices and moral compromises that are part and parcel of the fight against Skynet. For Descartes, the soul represents the limit of mechanistic explanation, since he insists there are things human beings can do by virtue of having souls that lie outside the capacity of any possible machine. For both Sarah and Descartes, the soul is something intangible that we discern only on the basis of certain outward signs, although they part company as to what those signs are.
     
    Descartes offered us a little sci-fi fable as a way to overcome an obstacle that he believed prevented many people from accepting his doctrine of the bête-machine , the force of habit . Our belief that animals have souls has been ingrained in us by a lifetime of making, and acting upon, that judgment. To get past this, he invited one of his correspondents to consider someone whose childhood experiences were very different from ours. Although Descartes didn’t give this child a name, let’s call him Danny Dyson and make him the son of Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson.
     
    The child in Descartes’ fable has been raised in a workshop, surrounded since birth with the most ingenious man-made automata imaginable. So let’s imagine our Danny growing up at a time when the project of reverse-engineering the T-101 from its recovered remains is well under way, since in our story the Connors never tossed those remains into a vat of molten metal or blew the Cyberdyne lab to smithereens. Let’s also imagine that Danny had never ventured outside the Cyberdyne Systems compound, so that, as Descartes puts it,
     
    he had never seen any animals except men; and suppose he was very devoted to the study of mechanics, and had made or had helped to make, various automatons shaped like a man, a horse, a dog, a bird, and so on, which walked and ate, and breathed, and so far as possible imitated all the other actions of the animals they resembled including the signs we use to express our passions, like crying when struck and running away when subjected to a loud noise. 10
     
     
    Descartes’ scenario meshes with the Terminator saga remarkably well, except for the little detail about crying, since we learn in Terminator 2: Judgment Day that Terminators (who are, after all, big boys) don’t cry. But dry-eyed androids aside, we can’t help but marvel at this seventeenth-century philosopher’s dream of “mechanics” progressing to the point where we can construct “machines having the organs and shape of a monkey or of some other animal lacking reason,” simulating them so perfectly that “we would have no way of knowing they were not of the same nature as these animals.” 11
     
    Continuing our slightly embellished version of Descartes’ story, would Danny, having been raised alongside both “real men” and reverse-engineered T-101s with “only the shape of men,” find it equally impossible to tell them apart? Certainly not, says Descartes. For “if there were any such machines that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as far as this is practicably feasible, we would always have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not at all, for that reason, true men.” 12 We’ll describe those means in a moment. But, to cut to the chase, Descartes predicts that should Danny ever come across real animals, as opposed to the Cyberdyne bête-machines he grew up with, he’ll discover that they lack the same features that distinguish human beings from machines, forcing him to conclude that biological animals, no less than