"Awakenings" and its connections

While watching the movie "Awakenings" with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams yesterday it seemed pretty relevant to the idea of trances brought on by technology, trances like we watched in the video of people's faces as they played video games.  This movie is about Robin Williams and his effort to help a group of people who have been catatonic for many years after suffering from an encephalitis epidemic. A new doctor in a psychiatric ward, Robin Williams' character is disturbed by the amount of comatose patients who have had no sense of hope for the majority of their lives.  Robin Williams is convinced that these people are living inside and works to find a drug to bring them out of their comatose states. Over time Williams' character finds a chemical that is able to bring one of the patients out of his coma named L-Dopa.  This chemical continues to work but must keep being administered to the patient to keep them out of their coma. Over continued use the drug is less effective and the patient needs more and more of the drug to stay out of their normal catatonic state.

This movie got me thinking about the trance like states brought on by engaging with different forms of media.  When listening to radio, watching television or playing a video game it can be seen that a human gets in some sort of trance even if it is very subtle.  The intensity of the trance is due to the reality of the media that one is engaged in.  Because a book on tape or a story told over the radio is easy to dismiss as not real, the trance it brings on is perhaps less intense than the heavy trance sometimes brought on by very realistic video games or a 3-d movie.  In the video of people playing video games watched in class some of the kids seemed to be in a very heavy trance. For example the child who's eyes were watering was in such a heavy trance that he would not even blink when his eyes needed moisture. Other kids in the video were effected differently by interacting with media, such as the boy who was muttering almost about stabbing and killing.  No matter what kind of state of mind a realistic form of media puts a human in, the human on the receiving end of the media becomes farther and farther away from real life.  Even though the argument could be made that a trance state that a video game brings on is an equal form of life as walking around and engaging with the natural environment, I do not think it is.  If someone believes this is true than they would also believe that spending 16 hours a day playing World of Warcraft would be more worthwhile than reading a book.

If human daily involvement with technology continues to become more realistic, the catatonic states of humans will also deepen.  If humans enter deep comatose states due to increased realistic technology it is no different than the group of catatonic humans living in a psychiatric ward in "Awakenings."  On a large scale, this would lead to a nation full of comatose humans living in another world, away from their human bodies and possibly only able to be woken up by a huge dose of L-Dopa.

Polygenism: Machines Humans and Their Same Origin

Polygeny is the theory that different races of humans evolved from separate sets of ancestors. This theory came into mainstream use in the United States when slave owners used it to justify slavery. The idea that different races are from different origins, making their genetic make-up separate, is no longer used because it has been proven there is more genetic difference within race than between race. If machines are developed to act like humans, or even become humans through mixture of man and machine, the act of classifying them as different is not far off from polygenism used to justify slavery. 

Humans and machines are both made up of atoms and those atoms are made up of sub-atomic particles, therefore making their deepest of origins the same. I cannot think of a more precise way to trace a being's origins by looking at the smallest unit of what the being is made of. This idea can be stretched to say that everything is the same on the smallest base level therefore making the classification of different beings worthless.  I do not necessarily believe that classifying plants different from animals and humans from machines is pointless; what I do believe is that one must look at classification as a human invention that focuses on difference between species, allowing humans to avoid the idea of being just another substance, just the same as everything else. 

I couldn't find a machine versus human classification sheet to compare the above with but I imagine it wouldn't look much different than this.

 

Percent of a Species

The idea of machines mixing with humans to make people who are as much machine as human and machines who are for the most part human, creates many different problems in categorization of species.  Mixing two different types of life results in a creation of an ambiguous being, and in the end the categorization or percent make up of these beings does not matter.

Measuring the exact percentage of human vs. machine in a being is not only a ridiculously difficult, and tedious task but also one that is not worth doing.  To some extent it is desired to know where a certain living being came from, but only a general knowledge of the origins of some thing are needed, extensive looks into where exactly some thing came from is overkill. For example, if a human happens to be part French, German, Hungarian and Scandinavian tracking the percentage of each heritage is not worthwhile. Even though this person may have a mix of different origins and having ancestry in these certain places may affect the way they speak or act breaking down this person into some percent French versus some percent Scandinavian is irrelevant.  Even though this percentage of a human's heritage may be able to be found it is trivial. 

At the point where humans and machines are being mended together into one creature, crossbreeding or cross manufacturing, the differences between human and machine will slowly decrease. Before technology reaches a point where machines and computers surpass human life, machine life will be very close to human life. As technology increases, the gap between human and machine will be slowly closed to a point where human and machine are almost the same. The difference between human and machine in the future may be so little that it mirrors the difference between a person with French heritage and a person with Scandinavian heritage.  If it is known that a being is part machine and part human and their actions do not distinguish the being as either one specifically, then the percentage of human versus machine simply does not matter.  This is a scary thought though, thousands of people with indistinguishable origins, and almost no way of tracing them.  As startling as this may be to human life, this idea of a whole planet filled with unidentifiable machine-people must be accepted before machines are mended with human life. To accept the combination of human and machine, it must also be accepted that the human race and machine life is no longer separate at all, but combined in all aspects, and indistinguishable from each other.

However, this period of indistinguishable life between man and machine is only temporary.  The amount of time that it takes for this period of ambiguity to pass is dependent wholly on human development as well as development of technology.  Looking back to what I proposed earlier, just as the gap between human life and machine life will slowly be closed to the point of being the same, once human life and machines become equal, machines will surpass the intelligence of human life, unless there is a great development in human intelligence, which I see as unlikely. After the equality point, machine life will become more and more different from human life again but, as superior. This makes the difference between humans and machines easier to distinguish, but still difficult to pinpoint when it comes to percent human and percent machine.  Even if a being that is more machine than human that is easily viewed as superior, it is difficult and almost pointless to try and figure out the percentage of how much of this being is human and how much is it machine.  This enforces the idea that the percent human versus percent machine simply makes no difference in the long run because of the development of technology and the changing relationship between human life and machines.  

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Pinpointing the Root of Disgust

When asked why is something disgusting it seems almost impossible and unreasonable to pinpoint the root of the disgust.  That is until you realize that different things disgust different people and therefore disgust is not universal but personal. When looking up disgust in the dictionary it defines it as a "feeling of revulsion or profound disapproval by something unpleasant or offensive." This leads to the question of what makes something offensive.  The answer cannot be simply found in the dictionary because under offensive the definition loops back around to repulsive and disgusting. 

One idea that I pondered over is that disgust roots itself in something that is unusual, something that a person who is offended does not see everyday. In the case of Burroughs and "The Ticket That Exploded" he writes about situations that a human does not encounter from day to day, or maybe even ever.  These ideas can cause shock, which in some cases is offensive and therefore makes the reading material disgusting. The idea of a "Happy Cloak" consuming a human while they are hidden from what is going on in their pleasure is a situation the average reader does not come across from day to day.  What furthers the disgust in the reader is the fact that this idea, although not literally convincing that it would happen to the reader, mirrors situations that the reader faces in life.  For example, a reader may make the choice to abstain from certain addicting substances that have the potential to consume a human while they are masked in their pleasure from the substance, just like the idea of the happy cloak. But if a reader finds the idea of the happy cloak disgusting due to the fact that it is a near real idea, they should be equally disgusted by substances that have the same consuming effect (meth, alcohol, and other drugs).  If this is true than perhaps fear is a better word to use than disgust.

Thinking further about the root of disgust in situations that are not familiar I started thinking about things that disgust me.  The other week I was encountered with a clogged disposal at my house, after letting it drain and a weeks worth of garbage food sitting in the drain un-disposed of I was disgusted at the idea of reaching my hand in and clearing the clog.  I ended up not having to which was good because I would have definitely gagged, or been bodily disgusted.  Being disgusted at clearing soggy food that I eat every day discredited my idea that disgust comes from unfamiliarity.   I also realized there are many different levels of disgust.  Burroughs' book does not give me a sense of bodily disgust like the disposal in the sink. By bodily disgust I mean physical symptoms, gagging, feeling uneasy. This almost seems as if it is an innate reflex. Burroughs' book on the other hand does not cause me to gag but be disinterested.  The disgust in this book leads me to set the book down rather than feel sick or gag.  However, I cannot pinpoint why it is disgusting.