Aristotle is the inventor of the science of the soul among other topics in philosophy, and it is worthwhile to consider his work on the soul when determining futuristic humanoid robots’ place in society if for nothing else but a bit of fun. According to Aristotle, a soul is what would plainly be described today as the essence of something. Further, only living things have souls and there are different subdivisions of the souls something might have. These are described in detail in Aristotle’s De Anima. In book I chapter 2 of De Anima, the four main types of souls are listed as the nutritive soul, the sense-perceptive soul, the locomotive soul, and the thinking or intellect soul. [1] The type of soul something has is determined by one or more of these faculties. [2] Man has all of the types of souls because he possesses the faculties necessary for each. Since artificial intelligence of the future will likely acquire the same main characteristics of human beings, maybe even the fine details, it follows that artificial intelligence will be of the same essence as human beings. If this can be proven to be the case, humans should consider extending the same or very similar treatment to artificial intelligence as they do to one another. Treatment may only differ because of robot-specific needs or desires. Treatment here will mean the way fair-minded humans typically wish to be treated. This includes a general respect for life.
Some background on the soul will aid in the complete understanding and application of the subcategories of souls. An Aristotelian view of a soul is the actuality in the way that something has the capacities to be. Actualization can be explained by an example of a creature who is a knower. A knower is the sort of creature with the capabilities necessary to know. Once a creature of this sort begins to contemplate about something, the creature is exercising its knowledge; it is actualizing its knowledge. This example would be one characteristic of the intellectual soul, but every type of soul is the actualization of certain capacities. [3]
The most basic of the types of souls is the nutritive soul. Every living thing possesses a nutritive soul; nutrients allow for life and reproduction (which is the most natural function for something living). In book I chapter 4 of De Anima, Aristotle associates this soul with the capability of being nourished by food. He says that growth is also quite necessary but that growth can simply be the maintenance of the self, whatever it is. Nourishment is relative to the ensouled being it is nourishing. [4] In book III chapter 12 of De Anima, Aristotle says that anything that is born has to grow, mature, and then decline (or decay), all of these things are impossible without proper nourishment throughout the life. [5] Robots will certainly require specific things for life, depending on the type of robot. A classic machine-like robot will require some type of battery; it will use electricity. This is what would nourish the robot. A cyborg, or a mix between a man and a machine, may even use the same nutrients that a human being would. A robot may not grow bigger, but he must maintain his body. It may be possible for a robot to acquire new parts and attach them; this would contribute to growth. Since nourishment is described as relative, whatever is required to power or run the artificial intelligence would be deemed the form of nutrition. Because futuristic artificial intelligence will require nutrients of some sort, or of multiple sorts, it will be necessary for their human counterparts to consider acknowledging robot-specific needs. This could include, but is definitely not limited to, seeing that there are opportunities for robots to gain nutrients just as there are for humans. If futuristic robots run on batteries, there should be locations designated for robots who are out and about to recharge themselves in order to make it through their days successfully. [6]
The perceptive soul is in all animals but not in all living things; it is also referred to as sense-perception throughout De Anima. In book I chapter 5 of De Anima, Aristotle says that part of perceiving is being affected by something. [7]All animals have this type of soul because all animals have, at the very least, the sense of touch. Aristotle claims that if something has this sort of perception, then it also has desire and imagination. [8] If robots have the ability to feel pain and pleasure they will desire to feel pleasurable (or painless) feelings as opposed to painful feelings. Robots will likely imagine which sorts of objects, forces, or elements have potentials to cause pleasure or pain. If the artificial intelligence is logical and wishes to preserve himself, then it will desire to stay away from the things imagined to cause harm. Conversely, artificial intelligence may be programmed to seek out experiences that are imagined to be pleasurable. Pleasure and pain will be most primitively and ultimately determined by the sense of touch. Scientists all over the world have begun developing synthetic skin with infrared sensors that can detect an object as a robot touches it. Information about the size, shape, and feel of the touched object will be recognized after the information reaches what is the brain of the robot once this technology is perfected. Scientists in Japan are creating synthetic skin with numerous pressure sensors built in to allow for the sense of touch. It is predicted that eventually robots will be able to differentiate between affectionate touches and normal touches received from others. [9] Futuristic robots will undoubtedly have the ability to feel. The sense of touch is only one of the many senses bound to be developed. Once the sense of touch is able to be sent to robots’ brains and interpreted, there will be undeniable perception present. Robots would need not the senses required to see colors, smell, or even hear in order to be of the sense-perceptive soul. This is because sight, smell, and hearing are not nourishing and cannot provide growth or start decay. Touch; however, is nourishing by the simple fact that touch is necessary for nutrition. For humans, touch is necessary for eating food. For futuristic robots, touch will be necessary for either eating or charging. Without touch, independent survival is impossible, even with eating or charging aside. With no perception of touch, an individual is unable to decide which occurrences are harmful and which are helpful. [10] Another thing to note is that touch is the only sense that too much of which can destroy the entire creature. For example, too much sound will only destroy the hearing organs but too much force of an impact or too extreme of a temperature has the potential to destroy the creature. Even if only the organ of touch is destroyed, the creature will surely die because the sense of touch is a vital component of life. So, even though it is likely that there will be technology available to incorporate senses other than touch into robots, they can only be added bonuses and are not necessary for the sense-perceptive soul of a feeling futuristic robot. If a type of robot is to exist as having sense-perceptions of touch similar to human beings’, humans should take their feelings into consideration. Wantonly causing harm to feeling robots may need to be regarded as an act similar to causing harm to a feeling human. If a robot is similar to a human in these perceptive respects, they should be treated as though they are similar.
The locomotive soul appears as having two sources, desire and practical thought or intellect. An individual must first desire something before he moves to it. This is the starting point and the key to the production of movement. After a desire is acknowledged, thought produces the body’s locomotion. Though desire and thought or intellect can work together to produce movement, the desire is what drives the thought to move. If both a desire and thought were required in order to produce locomotion, they would have some common form. They do not have any common form because once again, a desire to move is what fuels a thought to make the movement happen. Logical or practical intellect is always right, but certain desires have the potential to object logic. [11] Making a decision to move from place to place is a task that requires reason, even if it is minimal reason. So, anything that is locomotive is also something with a certain amount of reason. [12] Robots that may not even be considered highly intelligent already have locomotive capabilities. For example, Fenway the TUG robot can navigate the Veterans Administration hospital in Massachusetts. Fenway has a digitalized map of the hospital and light whiskers with sonar, infrared, and laser technologies that detect people and other obstacles that he needs to avoid colliding with. [13] These TUG robots are made by a company called Aethon and distributed to provide “scheduled and on-demand” deliveries of items such as medications and meals between patient units in hospitals. [14] Robots such as these have desires to successfully deliver items to specified destinations. They have desires to avoid obstacles that are in the way of their destinations. They most certainly move from place to place, having the locomotive souls Aristotle speaks of in his De Anima. Robots of the future may have the potential to possess less generalized desires of simply completing programmed tasks. It is likely that someday robots will have specific characteristics or personalities that lend to specific desires correlating with the characteristics or personalities. It is at this time the locomotive soul of artificial intelligence will be even more recognizable and similar to human beings’.
The highest level in the hierarchy of the souls is that of the intellectual soul. Unlike perception, which is possible by external objects, the object of the intellectual soul’s function is an internal object. This internal object is contemplation. Because the object of this soul’s function is thought, thought is what causes the soul to be actualized. [15] In book II chapter 3 of De Anima Aristotle says that “men and anything else which is similar or superior to man” have the soul of intellect. [16] The intellectual soul is compared to sense-perception in certain respects because it does seem to perceive and process information, but it lacks a physical organ such as the skin or the inner workings of the ear. The intellect, as well as the other types of souls, is mere potentiality and does not exist in actuality until thinking has begun. [17] Futuristic robots may certainly be deemed similar to man in the ways that they will be able to process information and stimuli. Aristotle even leaves it open as to what can have this type of soul when he says that anything like man or better than man has this intellectual soul. The intellect is the most difficult to define of the souls and it is a bit obscure. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that artificial intelligence has the power to think. By virtue of its name, artificial intelligence is more or less intelligent. One way of determining if artificial intelligence or a machine is intelligence is by issuing the famous Turing Test. The test was designed by Alan Turing to test whether or not machines can think. The test details in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” were published in 1950 in the philosophy journal called Mind. The test simply consists of a human at a teletypewriter who asks questions to and receives answers from a computer, but the man is unaware that he is conversing with a computer. If the man cannot tell that he is asking questions to and being answered by a computer as opposed to another human being, then the computer in question should be regarded as being intelligent. [18] If a computer is able to pass itself off as a human, then it may even be similar enough to a human in order to be included in Aristotle’s potential group of things or individuals which are “similar or superior to man.” A test such as the one proposed by Alan Turing may not be necessary to grant that a robot is intelligent. It will likely be possible to tell from a robot’s actions whether he is intelligent or intellectual. His intellect may show through by a love for learning which he may do through a number of different ways, all of which will probably be similar to the ways humans learn. Association and trial and error are examples of this. A futuristic robot may even be able to read by scanning pages of a book and then store and maintain massive amounts of information. This is undoubtedly intelligence and creatures with intelligence should be treated and regarded as such.
According to Aristotelian thought, futuristic robots will have life and will be possessors of the same souls as human beings are. A time will come when humans will be faced with determining how other similar beings should be treated. If humanoid robots show themselves to be not-so-different, maybe even a little better, than human beings it is only right that they experience beneficence and at the very least non-maleficence from their human social counterparts. It would be merely biochauvanist to deny that equitable treatment should at least be considered. It has been shown that robots now have or have the potential to be of the very same essence as human beings. The essence is the core of the life and if this core is common between robots and humans, there can be nothing more primitive to prove as commonality. The depth and breadth of Aristotle’s metaphysical work is unable to receive justice here as there are countless Greek words that have been translated and thoroughly contested themselves. Nevertheless, it is obvious that futuristic robots will have the capacities for all four subcategories of souls. They will obviously need nutrition, even if it is battery power, to sustain their bodies and they will be mobile. Technology will likely lend to the development of sentient robots who will, at the very least, have senses of touch. Intelligence is already found in the simplest of machines, and this will only advance as time progresses. A time will come when humans will be faced with questions how other similar beings should be treated.
[1] David Bostock, Aristotle Metaphysics: Books Z and H (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 141.
[2] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11.
[3] Michael V. Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988) 15.
[4] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 21.
[5] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72.
[6] It is interesting that Microsoft Word underlines in green the word “who” in reference to “robots” and suggests changing “who” to “that.” You might be a philosophy major if it offends you that your word processor does not recognize the possibility that robots may in fact be whos, too.
[7] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22.
[8] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12.
[9] David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 163-164.
[10] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 74.
[11] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69.
[12] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72.
[13] David Teeghman, Coming to Hospitals Near You: Self-Navigating Robots, Discovery, http://www.news.discovery.com/tech/coming-to-hospitals-near-you-self-navigating-robots.html (Dec. 7, 2010).
[14] TUG®: The Automated Robotic Delivery System, Aethon, http://www.aethon.com/products/logistics.php (Dec. 7, 2010)
[15] Michael V. Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (Binghamton: Veil-Ballou Press, 1988) 17.
[16] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15.
[17] Aristotle, De Anima, trans. D.W. Hamlyn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 58.
[18] Charles Petzold, The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing), 194.
Bibliography
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