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DEUS EX MACHINA

part one

Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) and Borg Queen (Alice Krige) in Star Trek First Contact directed by Jonathan Frakes (1996)

by Riccardo Notte

EMPTINESS IN MIND AND SENSE FULFILLNESS

The idea of developing a path of open research in artificial life fulfilment and vision has stemmed from a matured experience in that special research field called “media studies”, a somehow privileged field because it is the only one, within humane disciplines, structuring a way of thinking presumably defined as a “way to the artificial life”. How and why has this happened? I have suddenly realized that the subject of my working out is not concerned with the relationship between communication tools and man as their author and product at the same time. On the contrary, the “founder reason” was in the ontological perception aroused by such retroactive process. According to this meaning, either the artificial life is like an unattended flower blooming from a seed, or even more, is like the image of those holometabolous that, after metamorphosis do not preserve the “vestigia” to a larval state.

What is the meaning of an artificial life? May life not be enough to herself? What is behind the idea of building an entity like man or even higher than himself? Something not generated but created? As you have seen in the First Part, the reflection considers only the hypothesis of an artificial life, not the cyborg. This happens because I consider the cyborg a concept and a fragment of a myth showing a moment of arrest, a retrocession from Universe of pure, absolute beings that can be - all alone - the myth actors. As a matter of fact, the mingling between man and the machine has already occurred and not some decades ago but thousands of years, with a rapid acceleration in recent times. The cyborg is, furthermore, the image of continuity, of continuum. Mathematicians and physicians appreciate it, but it means very little to philosophers interested in discontinuity. It is obvious and even banal that the human being not only depends on inventions he has created, but he has also expanded on a large scale, at a physical and mental level. Not only are we often assembled with artificial parts substituting damaged or destroyed organs but in more than one meaning our eyes are today similar to television cameras, our ears to sonars and parts of our brain to computer cards. Behind all this, there is an idea of continuity, the same leading a famous scientist like Moravec to rave to the future probable wiring of the brain structure in a similar artificial organism.

Contrary to such theory, the robot is artificiality at a pure state. Furthermore, it is pure anatomy. It is not possible to discuss on robots if a very important theme is not previously hinted at: I will examine more deeply in the third part speaking about neural networks and in the forth discussing on interconnectivity principles. It concerns, as a matter of fact, discontinuity. The robot is the son of discontinuity, a universe vision seemingly in low concern but, as a matter of fact, continuously emerging somewhere. Ancient atomism is a famous example of ontology based on discontinuity, and diametrically opposite to dominant models of contemporary physics. Anyway, discontinuity still remains where she mirrors itself on quality. For this reason any qualitative speech is nowadays forbidden by philosophy, causing her to nearly approach and attempt suicide, pointing a gun to her temple. Therefore, discontinuity against connection. Technologies have always created structures of communication, forms of connection. This has caused a wide range of symbolic relationships and models of reality. Artificial life instead, and the robot as her symbol, is based on an opposite cognition; separation, extraneousness, incommunicability, chain crash. An example is given by food chain, linking any human being to life global organization and making him both a prey and a predator, a searcher and source of food, following an apparently never- ending series of giving actions. The robot is differently out of such generative logics but, since it is not part of a food chain, it cannot have access to the chain of reflected and reasoned attitudes coming finally from the same primordial coral matrix. In films like Matrix the desire to create a basic and food circle can be seen: it will become a sample of a myth that is not able to accept. Normally a robot is conceived as a complex but rigid mechanism, an image of life producing but not conceiving actions, a stereotyped rigid being, unable to distract from its role, therefore obtuse. This idea stems also from TV images of industrial robots: machines building other machines, serf-mechanisms planned for a stereotyped aim. Why, then, literary and cinematographic inventions found a myth of the robot diametrically opposite to what is presumed to be in reality? It is a question of perception. The branch of studies on forms of communication going from Havelock and Innis up to McLuhan, Goody Ong and de Kerckhove suggests that dominant mental structures have spread today from three millennia of progressive dominion of linear and logical-sequential forms. A reasoning and consequential forma mentis has emerged, but also a predisposed brain during the psycho-sensorial maturity to accept closed forms, in particular, coherent spaces and logical-linguistic connection between objects. The left hemisphere, source of language and the no-ethic economy of writing has influenced so much our way to see the world to impose its functional rationality to those border experiences opening sensorial unexpressed doors.

Nonetheless, the dominion of typographical structures of thoughts is already strongly contrasted by the increasing relevance that our images are conquering in our universe. Historical vanguards had built the bases for retinal destruction, availing themselves of the dominion of the left hemisphere of brain on all aesthetic and cultural entities. But the growing strength of images today corrects the supremacy of logical thought, re-establishes the visual intelligence to its own place (Robertson, 2002), re-establishes partially the balance between the structured environment built by the predominance of the alphabet and the perception of hidden relationships given by pure visionary nature.

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