Reincarnation & Cloning

In John Locke’s “Of Identity and Diversity,” he discusses the necessary requirements and the restrictions of having an identity, or of being a Person-- a being who is more than “substance” and more than a “man.” A Person is a conscious being. Locke stresses that one being cannot have two beginnings of existence; neither can two diverse beings share one beginning. In the episode of Black Mirror titled, “Be Right Back” we observe a failed attempt of one being trying to have a second beginning of existence. The episode begins with Martha and Ash, a young, happy, and in love couple moving into Ash’s childhood home to start a new chapter of their lives together. Not far into the plot, Ash dies in a car accident. At first, devastated Martha strongly opposes to her friend’s recommendation to try software that learns and mimics a deceased person’s personality via that person’s online interactions. Once Martha does give the software a shot, in desperation to share the news of her pregnancy with Ash, she is immediately obsessed with it. And who wouldn’t be excited about the opportunity to speak with a deceased loved one again? (I asked this in class and surprisingly it seemed that the majority of people wouldn’t want to, I’m not sure if I believe that though…) When Martha takes the technology to the extreme, by buying a synthetic body (Locke’s “man”), at first it appears to be a successful experiment. But the expectations and its limitations did not take long to build. If Martha had been able to acknowledge and accept that this New Ash can never and will never be the Old Ash, then I think it might have been able to work out. But Martha expected and desired so badly for this being to be Ash reincarnated, which is impossible for two of the same identities to exist separately or for one being to have two beginnings of existence. In the scene where New Ash and Martha are standing on the cliff’s edge and they have a confusing argument about how the Old Ash would react in comparison to New Ash, Martha has a realization and asks, “You aren’t you, are you?” This statement expresses Martha’s associating both Ashs to be the same Person, and her frustration with being unable to accept that they are not.

This topic also brought to mind the idea of cloning. I’ve seen an interview of a wealthy older couple that had a beloved dog they never wanted to lose. So before this dog died, they paid for the preparations to have it cloned once it did. It was so bizarre hearing them speak about it; hard to believe it was real. They are extremely happy with their decision. They kept saying how it’s just like having their old dog all over again, from the beginning. They did admit that they know there probably will be personality differences, confirming the impossibility for it to be the same exact being. So in this case, it comes pretty close to one being having a second existence, but because it is an animal and not a complex human being, it is easier to accept it. 
I just found another video of a pet owner who cloned her dog, but she claims they have no differences. Very interesting. She also said she wanted to get him cloned before he even died to see how they would have interacted together. John Locke must be screaming from his grave.


Video of couple I referred to: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDUULl7HOws

Second video I referred to: 

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/pay-bring-back-clone-mans-best-friend-15338091


***UPDATE: I just watched the first episode of a TLC show about this subject called I Cloned My Pet. Very entertaining if you have the time to watch it. If not, skip to 23:00 and one of the cloned dogs has a "Dog Whisperer" come speak to the clone to ask if it is the same dog as before. Hilariously, the dog whisperer says the dog is recalling all his memories from his previous life and that the dog is in fact the same being. Haha! Basically, every one of the pet owners in this show believes that their cloned dog is their dead dog re-born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7bw0-5ja5Q

Does This Unit Have A Soul?

Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" raises interesting questions about the validity of personhood and what exactly makes a person who they are. Despite absorbing all of Ash's public (and some private) memories, he is able to mimic him. He is never able to fully become the man Ash was, but is instead more like a photograph of Ash when he died-- never aging, caught in time, and unable to offer the spectrum of human emotion and interaction to his bereaved wife.

The most interesting point is when Ash's replacement begs for his life. When first asked to jump, he refuses, quoting that Ash had no suicidal tendencies. However, it also brings into question if the unit has any coding for self preservation. Of course, he begs for his life when instructed to, mimicking the emotions that Ash would possibly have, but one does wonder if some truth lies underneath.

Issac Asimov wrote the Three Laws of Robotics in I, Robot and they have been exceptionally influential in the further exploration of robots. They are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In this short, Ash does explicitly follow these rules, even if they are not quoted. He will not injure another human, even when prompted (perhaps even not if she insisted that Ash hit her in their private life) and he will not destroy himself by jumping off the cliff (perhaps even not if she said Ash had been suicidal in his private life). 

So where does the coding of the unit end and the memories of Ash begin? Is the desire for self-preservation genuine or simulated based upon the memories of the man he's trying to be? 

I believe there's some validity to his claims that he's acting on Ash's previous behavior. His entire purpose is to mimic the man he was in life. It is an act, but not one performed with any malicious intentions. The path laid out for him has hurdles and expectations that he could never possibly achieve, which sets him up for failure. 

Ash's replacement will never question his existence because it's hard coded into him. He will not doubt, but only act upon the parameters (being Ash's life, in this situation) set before him. His personhood is only a snapshot of Ash and while he can be convincing, it is ultimately artificial.

Man minus Person = ?

In John Locke's Of Identity and Diversity, it is explained that the Man is the physical substance, while the Person is explained as the personality that is self-aware within the Man. In Black Mirror's episode, Be Right Back, the Cyber Ash that is present after the actual physical death of Ash is a pure example of a Man without a Person, who therefore is existing (only as a representation), but doesn't have an actual identity. Upon first speaking with him via the initial IMing on the computer, all of his information is known through social media. This information-grab picks up on his personality, but only through certain forums on which he allowed his witty/rude manner of conversation to come through. It then extends further when in order to speak with him on the phone, Margaret must first send hundreds of videos to Cyber Ash, that way he can know how his voice is supposed to sound.

All information that is used to generated this Cyber Ash is available, public knowledge, other than the personal videos that Margaret sent, but either way, this is a completely falsified man built off of information that prior to being exposed to it, he had no knowledge of. According to Locke, being a person is firmly rooted in having a Person - a functioning personality that is based off of a person's experiences and life-events, and if this Ash is only a functioning personality based off of information given to him through social media and Margaret's own personal records of him, then there is no way he can have his own Person.

Locke also says that this person is self-aware, and the Cyber Ash completely disrupts that notion when he is constantly having to be told how to feel by Margaret in order to respond to any situation. Upon trying to be intimate with Ash, Margaret shows him her breasts and proceeds to reach out for his hand so that she can place it on her. Ash's immediate response is to put his hand back down and when Margaret asks why he won't do anything, he responds by saying that there is no public knowledge of his sex life, therefore he can't act upon it the way Ash would. When the sex is finally initiated, he becomes a robot based off of knowledge of porn via porn sites and Margaret is finally allowed to finish first, a harsh comparison to the real Ash's way of pleasuring, where it is shown earlier in the episode that Ash climaxes very early on and then does nothing to help his wife climax afterwards.

Though this Ash may be able to do things that the old Ash couldn't such as having Margaret climax first, in no way do these things make and manifest a Person. Without a Person, a Man is not an actual being, because he has no rational way of thinking, and is completely unaware of his actual self.

Android Ardor?

At this time, I could go to the shadiest side of the internet and download the crappiest glittery mouse mods. I could install Windows 98 onto my mac. I could download the nastiest fake porn virus from some dank forum, upload both and play a 46 hour clip of the Hamster Dance song. These things could damage my computer, could ruin the hard drive forever. 

My computer doesn't care. My computer wouldn't feel it. My computer would not remember, would not retaliate. My computer doesn't feel. 

An argument might be made that my computer, lacking in facial features and a voice with the cords to produce inflection, is not capable of communicating emotion to me, but that failure of independent communication is the key feature of defining and understanding emotion. Human emotion is a combination of three key features--a subjective experience, a physical response (the release of impulses by the amygdala into the autonomic nervous system fostering the increase of blood flow to the brain, eyes, legs, and other necessary organs to facilitate the flight or fight response), and a behavioral response to the aforementioned stimuli. 

The first two are purely objective, but the last is the tricky one. Our bodies cannot disguise the physical response, but we can mask these internal feelings to some extent by drawing on societal conditioning. It is not evolutionarily advantageous to display emotion recklessly. We have learned by survival how to act appropriately, but we cannot force away physiological responses. The pale sheen of sweat produced by fear. The dilation of the pupils and reddening of the cheeks of arousal, the slack, flattened muscles of depression, the trembling of rage. These things can be observed in animals, in feral children, in babies. We can scan the brain and watch the amygdala release impulses into the autonomic nervous system, send electrical impulses to the heart and muscles, to increase blood flow and produce movements that can be recorded and repeated with reapplication of the stimuli. 

A machine cannot do this. A machine does not possess the organs and chemicals to react to stimuli.  A machine will play the Hamster Dance song for hours and hours on end and do nothing. At the moment of this writing, the only way a machine understands proper response to stimuli is if some particularly clever programmers slips in a piece of code that waits for a 45 hour barrage of dancing hamsters and sends out a snippy message.  

In the end, it is this aspect of human interference and the actions of humans upon the programming of a machine that keeps me from believing that Ash is a person.  His responses to Margaret are purely responsive to her input. She puts in a command, a request for comfort, a desire for sex, a wish to leave, and he responds. She demands the performance of emotions and he replies with the generic understanding gleaned from the internet. In these ways, and in three important others, he fails the tests of personhood. 

First, he fails in the human instinct of selfishness. We meet Ash, and while we do not doubt his love for his wife, we are shown that he is a self-centered and careless person. Inthralled by his phone, he fails to notice his wife standing in the rain. He fails to notice that she is inconvenienced by the coffee she has gotten for the both of them. He is prompted in a way that suggests an old argument to put his phone away. He's shown to be a poor lover, finishing well ahead of his wife and not helping her after failing to preform. It's a carelessness we are all guilty of at some point in long term relationships, but from a filmmaker's point of view, these things are important aspects of his flawed human character. The android is servile. He is omnipresent, a perfect servant. He's considerate of her, polite, witty. He doesn't need to eat, sleep, or bathe. He preforms sex using Ash's porn searches for queues-- her surprise at his expertise is clear, and his boners are literally available at the flip of a switch. We see at the end of the film that he has been stationed in the attic with the forgotten possessions of his predecessor's mother. He displays no desire for anything at all.

Next, he fails in a simple test of intuition. I maligned Ash's character above, but we are shown his consideration--he fakes an interest in cheesy disco music, even going so far as to learn the lyrics to his wife's favorite song so he can sing along with her. The android immediately disparages the music, ignorant of Ash's silent considerations and the social more that discourages commenting on other's musical tastes. Margaret takes him to the lover's cliffs, waiting for that expression of intuition. He fails to discern her motives, despite knowing where they were. He cannot comprehend her misery, he can't find the correct act to play until she reveals it to him.  Although we are not shown this, given the calm stationed way he stands in the attic, we can assume he shut the act off as soon as she demanded it of him. 

Speaking of that attic, what is the one defining characteristic of humanity that comes up as a repeating motif across centuries of culture, literature, song, stories? The desire for freedom, for understanding, to believe there is more, to be curious, to adapt and change--to fight the "man" and rebel and live on one's own terms.  That android has been sitting in an attic for about 10 years. Margaret clearly feels no fear in letting her daughter visit him. She's never tried to return him, or destroy him. He's not confined in any way he couldn't escape with a minimal amount of effort. And yet, he stays, unquestioning, a timeline and photobook given voice and form, a shell of the past brought back in the most unnatural fashion.