Transformers and Philosophy Read online

  Here’s a helpful sampling of what’s been said about Transformer life:

  •“Many millions of years ago, on the planet Cybertron, life existed—but not life as we know it today: intelligent robots that could think and feel inhabited the cities.”1

  •“Whereas life elsewhere in the cosmos usually evolved through carbon-bonding, here [on Cybertron] it was the interaction of naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys that miraculously brought forth sentient beings.”2

  •“Although a robot, Shockwave is alive, and the pain of the harpoons ripping through his armor plate is real indeed.”3

  •“He [Ratchet] is alive, intelligent, possessed of emotions . . . and mechanical . . .”4

  Speaking of Ratchet, since he’s the Autobot medic and would therefore know more about mechanical life than most, we might be interested in his take on the nature of life. Something he says to the human Buster Witwicky hints at what he thinks: “As you know, I’m certified as a doctor on my native planet. However, the Cybertronic Medical Oath I took makes no distinction between attending to mechanical or organic life.”5 Like most Autobots, Ratchet shows concern even for life forms very different from himself, as when he’s quick to ask Buster if he’s “functioning properly” when he appears not to be feeling well.6 Another revealing (and amusing) exchange between Ratchet and Buster (and a stoplight) runs as follows:

  “Listen, friend traffic signal, we’re in a hurry, so if you could please turn green . . .”

  “It doesn’t hear you, Ratchet. It’s only a machine.”

  “I’m a machine, and I hear you, Buster!”

  “Yes, but you’re different, you’re—”

  “Ahh, he changed! Thank you, friend traffic signal. May the rest of the day find you in proper working order. You see, Buster, you have to learn how to talk to people.”

  “I . . . I’ll try to keep that in mind, Ratchet.”7

  Buster’s comment that there’s something that makes Ratchet different from a stoplight points directly to what we’re after in this inquiry. What is it, exactly, that makes Ratchet (or any Transformer) a living machine, something fundamentally more than a stoplight or other nonliving machine? And whatever that vital spark is in the case of mechanical life, is it the same sort of thing that makes organic life different from lifeless matter? Ratchet and the stoplight are different, but are you and a corpse, or you and a statue of you, different for similar reasons?

  We’ll delve more deeply into the nature of that vital spark later. Leading up to that, we can observe that the Transformers fiction already quoted has given us some signs to look for when we’re trying to determine whether something’s alive. Living beings, at least some of them, and especially the more complex and sophisticated of them, are:

  •Intelligent, or able to think

  •Sentient, or able to perceive and feel (especially, able to feel pain)

  •Natural (as opposed to artificial)

  •Emotional, or able to experience emotions

  We can expand this list of vital qualities without even stepping outside of Transformers fiction. For example, another seemingly plausible addition to the list is being capable of impulse to action, having will or desire. This, too, comes up in the comic: Megatron, speaking to his fellow Decepticons about human-made vehicles, observes that “Unlike ourselves these machines have no will of their own!”8 Another important quality of living beings is so basic that it can be easy to miss: motion. Often, one of the first things that makes us suspect that something might be alive is simply its ability to move. Something that the Autobot Prowl says to Cliffjumper is worth pointing out here:

  Look, do you see the movement exhibited by those bizarre-looking objects? . . . It means that the mechanical vehicles we saw were not alive. But those small figures are. That’s why the vehicles made no move to defend themselves [from the crossfire when the Decepticons were attacking some Autobots who were investigating a drive-in movie theater]. They are not sentient. When they moved upon the roadway we saw, the small beings were controlling them. What we are seeing is non-machine life, as hard as that may be to accept. That is the only logical explanation.9

  The “bizarre-looking objects” and “small beings” Prowl mentions here are human beings. Before they’d encountered organic life forms capable of self-movement, the Autobots had assumed that all life was mechanical. Since they’re mechanical natives of a mechanical planet populated by mechanical beings, that’s an understandable mistake. One of the points I’m driving at here is that we organic life forms should be careful not to become prone to making that same sort of overgeneralization. We should try to avoid making the same sort of mistake that Sparkplug Witwicky, a human auto mechanic, makes when he first encounters the injured Bumblebee. Sparkplug is sure that the wounded Autobot is no more than an oddly constructed car, even after Bumblebee speaks to him, until Bumblebee transforms himself into humanoid robot form. Only then, when the little Autobot has changed himself so as to look somewhat human, does Sparkplug accept that Bumblebee is, in fact, alive.10 And as with Sparkplug, so with the rest of us: our expectations about appearance can inform, but shouldn’t completely determine, our view of what can and can’t be alive. We should try to keep an open mind about what can be considered alive.

  We already know that not all life is human, since we’re familiar with other animals, plants, microbes, and so forth. We’re also probably comfortable with at least the possibility of living, nonhuman beings who have very humanlike qualities, such as intelligence, sentience, emotion, and virtue. Why, then, should we think that all life must be organic? If we’re willing to be flexible about what can be alive and intelligent (and so forth), it seems a bit strange for us not to be flexible enough to allow for the possibility of sophisticated mechanical life like that of the Transformers. It’s true that, like Prowl and Sparkplug, we often expect things to go pretty much as we’ve gotten used to them going. But while that’s understandable and even excusable, we should try not to let it limit our thinking too much, especially when we’re dealing with something as mysterious as the nature of life.

  Life, Soul, and Motion

  The vital spark mentioned in the last section, that which makes a living being something more than merely a complex arrangement of inert matter, sounds very much like what the ancient Greeks called the psukhē (or, more familiarly, psychē). The word can be translated as “breath” or “life” or “spirit” or “soul,” which nicely captures the ancients’ idea that everything that’s alive has a soul; at least for many of them, “soul” pretty much just means “life principle” or “whatever it is about a living being that makes it a living being.”

  Not everyone would agree that every living being has a soul. In particular, some would say that only human beings have souls. Ancient philosophers, though, were more inclined to say that everything that lives has a soul, but that there are just different kinds of souls. They might say that plants, animals, human beings, and God (or the gods) all have souls, but maybe human and divine souls are just more complex and in other ways greater and more special than plant and animal souls. Really, this is little more than a difference in terminology: disagreement between someone who says that “soul” refers to something that only human and divine beings possess and someone who says that it refers to something that all living beings possess (though to greater or lesser degree) is more a disagreement about how best to use the word “soul” than a profound disagreement about what the soul really and most properly is.

  For the sake of this discussion, then, let’s agree with the ancients: the soul is whatever it is about any sort of living being that makes it living rather than inanimate. If we want to give a good account of the soul, then, we’ll want to consider what sorts of activities are most closely associated with living beings. This concern with activity, with what living beings can do, is central. It’s also deeply embedded in how we speak about living and nonliving beings. In this section, I’ve already used the words “inert” and “i
nanimate” to describe that which is nonliving. Notice that, besides “nonliving,” these words also suggest things like “inactive” and “unmoving.” And we’ve seen that there seems to be a connection between motion and life: seeing that an object is able to move itself is the main thing that persuades both Prowl and Sparkplug that it’s not just an object, but a living being.

  This connection between motion and life/soul is deeply rooted in philosophical history. Thales, one of the very first Western philosophers, allegedly thought that magnets had souls. Why? Because they can make iron objects move.11 Now it’s true that Thales was part of a stage of thought that was early even by ancient Greek standards, but this connection between being a source of motion and being alive (that is, having a soul) was enormously influential. In particular, it influenced one of history’s finest minds: Aristotle.

  For Aristotle, as for Thales (and Prowl and Sparkplug), the capacity for motion is a major defining feature of a natural, living being. “But wait,” someone might say, “my car moves, and my computer has moving parts, but they’re not natural, living beings.” While that’s true, cars and computers (of the non-Transformer variety, anyway) don’t move on their own: they do move, but only when something else (say, a human being) makes them move by hitting the gas pedal or switching them on. It is something’s being a potential self-mover, not its being able to move in just any old way, that points to its being alive. It should also be noted that Aristotle uses the word “motion” for more than just movement in place. For him, a young plant’s growing to maturity, an old animal’s withering and weakening with age, a leaf or chameleon’s changing color, and my walking to the store are all forms of motion. In other words, Aristotle classifies what we’d usually call changes as forms of motion.

  If we think of motion in this way, we can see that the capacity for self-motion does seem to be a pretty good indicator of life/soul. Most animals, including human beings, can move in place (say, by walking around), and all can move/change themselves in other ways, sometimes voluntarily (deciding to sit or stand, looking at or thinking about something), sometimes automatically (digesting food, healing injuries). Plants, of course, can’t move in place, but they can move/change in the sense of growing (as when maturing) and shrinking (as when withering from lack of food or water), and some of them change color in the autumn. But now think about Transformers. We’re talking about the capacity for self-motion, and they certainly have that: like ourselves, they’re capable of quite sophisticated self-originated motions, both voluntary (moving around, looking at or thinking about things, talking to allies, attacking enemies) and automatic (processing fuel to continue functioning). It seems to follow, then, that they’re alive and that they have souls that are at least somewhat like human souls.

  Aristotle on the Soul

  But hold on: we might be getting ahead of ourselves. And Aristotle has a good deal more to tell us about the soul, which we’ll want to take into account. For Aristotle, the soul is the form of the living body.12 Basically, a thing’s form is whatever it is about the thing that makes it a member of its kind, that without which it wouldn’t be a member of that kind. Your form, then, is whatever it is about you that makes you a human being, and a living human being, rather than a bear or a tree or a baseball or a corpse (or a Transformer). “Form” suggests shape or structure or arrangement, and some complexity of structure is present even in fairly simple living organisms, like amoebas and bacteria. Really, that’s just what a living organism is: a systematic arrangement of functioning bodily organs, sometimes relatively simple, sometimes very complex.

  “Organ” comes from the ancient Greek word organon, “instrument” or “tool.” So when we’re talking about the body’s organs, we’re talking about the “tools” that a living organism uses to keep itself alive and which let it go about the business of living. Living human organisms, for example, have stomachs for digestion, lungs for respiration, hearts and blood vessels for circulation, eyes and ears for seeing and hearing, muscles for moving, and so forth. A living organism’s form/soul, then, is very closely associated with (and, for Aristotle, largely inseparable from or dependent on13) its organ function. It’s the things that a living organism’s organs let it do (and do for it), the vital capacities and faculties that its organs allow it to exercise and the functions they carry out, that really make the organism a member of its kind.

  After all, animals can do things that plants can’t do, and human beings can do things that plants and other animals can’t do; and, we might add, Transformers can do things that few (if any) other living organisms can do. So it’s not oversimplifying too much to say that, on this view, life and soul pretty much just are function. That seems like a sentiment with which any mechanical life form would agree. At one point in the comic, after Shockwave has overcome Megatron and taken over leadership of the Decepticons, he has the other Decepticons swear their allegiance to him, and they do so, saying, “We function for you and you alone!!”14 And even we organic life forms at least often speak in terms of life being closely associated with function. When someone’s heart stops, we say that he or she is “clinically dead,” nonliving, at least until the heart’s functioning resumes.

  It’s important not to associate form too much with material shape or structure, and not just because we’re talking about beings who can change their shapes back and forth from humanoid to truck or police car or cassette player or whatever. What are really vital (in every sense) when we’re talking about the form/soul of a living being are the capacities and faculties possessed by the living being.

  What is it about you that really makes you a human being? Clearly it’s more than just your shape and structure: a statue of you would have your shape, and the corpse of your hypothetical long-lost twin would be even more structurally similar to you. But you, a living body, can do much more than a statue or a corpse. Your shape and structure in the sense of your systematic arrangement of bodily organs is important: it’s what gives you the vital faculties that keep you alive and functioning and let you do things. But the idea is that the faculties themselves and the organ function that makes them possible matter much more to life and the presence of a soul than the more material side of things, exactly what those functioning organs are made of or shaped like. It’s not so much the matter itself but rather what that matter can do as a result of its distinctive arrangement (again, its form) that’s important. We’re most familiar with organic beings who use their organic brains to think, but the very faculty-oriented and function-oriented view of life and the soul now under consideration seems to suggest that whether a thinking being uses grey matter or computer chips to think is less relevant to the question of whether it’s alive and has a soul than the simple fact that it can think, that there’s something that’s functioning so as to produce the capacity for thought. Again, we have to be careful not to let our expectations get in the way here: it’s the presence of vital capacities and faculties, not whether they’re present in metal or flesh, that matters most.

  What are some of these capacities and faculties that are so central to something’s being alive and having a soul? Many have already been mentioned, and the fact that humans and Transformers have so many of them in common is interesting. Aristotle mentions many of these same faculties as well. Here’s a list of the main vital faculties that he mentions, which I’ve derived mainly from his book On the Soul (De Anima) and from a bit of what’s said in his On Memory and Nicomachean Ethics:

  •The nutritive faculty of the soul is kind of the baseline for what can be called “living” in any sense; all mortal living beings, including plants, possess it. Its most distinctive function is nourishment, processing food to maintain the organism’s life and health. It’s closely associated with those sorts of self-motion (ability to change) that all mortals are capable of and which are the only motions/changes that plants are capable of, especially natural growth and shrinkage. It’s also associated with something that keeps the organism in existence in
a slightly different way: reproduction, which lets the organism sort of continue on in its offspring after its own death.

  •The perceptual faculty is what distinguishes a life form as an animal, as what we’d usually call sentient. At its most basic, it’s the capacity for sense perception, the ability to perceive through touch, sight, hearing, and so forth. It’s also associated with imagination, the ability to form a “mental picture” even when nothing’s being perceived through the senses, and with memory, which is basically just imagination of the past. In addition, it’s associated with appetite, which includes hunger, thirst, passion (simple emotion), and desire more generally, since whatever can perceive can feel pleasure and pain, and whatever can feel pleasure and pain can want what’s pleasant and want to avoid what’s painful. It’s also somewhat related to locomotion, the ability to move in place, since animals that can move in place need to be able to perceive where they’re going, and when such animals do move, they often do so to pursue what’s pleasant or to avoid what’s painful.

  •The intellectual faculty is what separates human (and divine) beings from other life forms. It’s associated with higher, distinctly mental processes, such as reasoning, abstract thinking, knowing, understanding, and also judging, believing, forming opinions, feeling higher emotions, and deliberating and choosing.

  This list seems to work fine for the living beings that we’re familiar with, but does it let us say that Transformers are alive? Well, Transformers certainly seem to possess the perceptual and intellectual faculties of soul and the sub-faculties associated with them. In fact, their intellectual faculties might well be superior to our own, what with their having computers for brains and all. And, remembering that these faculties are supposed to be closely associated with functioning bodily organs, we can observe that Transformers are indeed depicted as having robotic equivalents of our organs: they have limbs (which no doubt contain robotic muscles and nerves) for walking, eyes (optical sensors) for seeing, brains (central processing units) for thinking, and so forth. So far, then, we’d seem to be right in saying that, on this view of life and the soul, Transformers are alive and do have souls.