Transformers and Philosophy Read online

  Maybe we secretly fear an even more terrifying future, in which we never meet anyone else and float cold and lonely in the middle of an expanding universe going nowhere. We want, and fear, First Contact. Short of meeting God, this First Contact is now driving humanity’s compulsion to gaze skyward. Our imaginations conjure up dreams and nightmares. The Transformers scenario is just one of many, and arguably a prophetic one.

  Still, we don’t feel ready, and we shouldn’t, no matter how long we look up. There’s more than meets the eye, out there.

  EPISODE TWO

  _________________

  Seeing and Believing

  3

  Object Lessons

  KEVIN S. DECKER, KARL ERBACHER, and GABRIEL RYE

  Technologically speaking, the closer you get to trying to do something that’s really, accurately human, the farther away it’s actually going to be.

  —GALYN SUSMAN, Technical Director for Pixar’s Toy Story1

  In 1984, Autobots and Decepticons invaded western culture and heralded a new phase of America’s love affair with Japanese toys and children’s culture. For the philosopher, this is a good thing, because philosophers love robots. In western philosophy, defining the difference between the human or “natural” and the created or “artificial” has inspired thinkers from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky.

  Robots are not only useful conceptual guinea pigs when considering questions in the philosophy of mind. As technology becomes more seamlessly integrated with our daily needs and concerns, our examination of artificial intelligences and humanoid mechanisms allow us to ask questions about what it genuinely means to be human. Happily, the mythology of the Transformers generally gives positive responses to these questions. For example, episodes of the Transformers animated series that take place after the events of the 1986 animated movie show the Autobots as key to humanity’s achieving its utopian ideals through advanced technology. This seems to confirm J.P. Telotte’s view that the positive depiction of robots in media shows “how our technological creations might help us deal with the world we are in the process of making, help us draw back from the apocalyptic direction in which we seem to be headed, by leading us toward a new and deeper sense of self.”2

  In the Transformers’ memorable tag lines, “more than meets the eye” and “robots in disguise,” we discover an entry point for a different philosophical approach to these variously benevolent and malevolent visitors from Cybertron. In the universe of the Transformers, human nature is linked to the future of these alien beings—the most recent example of this being the presence of the All Spark on Earth in the movie Transformers. Perhaps the most bizarre emergence of this theme is the Japan-only line of “Transformers Kiss Players,” the idea behind which is that Transformers are powered by snogging with young girls!3

  Is it possible to learn something of human nature, and specifically about the relationship of the human mind and body, by considering the nature of the Transformers’ robotic existence as “more than meets the eye”? Does the fact that the Transformers have capacities hidden from perception have a bearing on the way we envision the objects of our human senses? In providing some answers for these questions, we hope to steal a little fire from Primus, the Transformer god, to further illuminate what it means to be human.

  “I bought a car—turned out to be an alien robot! Who knew?”

  In the history of philosophy, questions about the relation between mind and body have sometimes been posed as questions about perception—that is, questions about the way in which the minds of subjects relate to the objects of the world. The very word ‘objectivity’—meaning a neutral way of viewing the world aside from people’s idiosyncrasies—is closely tied to the word ‘object’. But what is an object? Simple and non-controversial examples of objects would be this book you hold in your hand, the maple tree outside, and that battered yellow Chevy Camaro that mysteriously appeared on your lawn last night.

  But how do we know that this book is a book (and not, say, a book-shaped box for holding valuables), and specifically, a book entitled Transformers and Philosophy? How do we know that that is a tree, and not a hedge; that the Camaro is merely an inanimate vehicle, and isn’t a moonlighting robot who saves the world? We know these things because of our perceptive capabilities, which allow us to become aware of something through the use of the senses.

  Consider simple, automatic perceptions such as hearing the whine of Starscream’s F-22 Raptor missiles or smelling oil and ozone when Ironhide’s about. The difference between these perceptions, on the one hand, and visually perceiving objects like the book, maple tree, or robot-in-disguise Camaro, on the other, is that three-dimensional objects have hidden aspects to them that are not immediately perceptible. What exactly does this mean?

  For one thing, no one can both see the facing and the reverse side of something in front of her. So I cannot, unaided by technology, stand directly in front of the hood of Bumblebee’s Camaro form and simultaneously view his trunk. But there aren’t just two perspectives on every object—obverse and reverse, trunk and hood—but actually a large, potentially unlimited, number of perspectives (from beneath, from above, right fender, left fender, and so on). Each of these perspectives reveals a different aspect of the object, making it appear slightly differently to us. From no single one of these individual aspects of the thing could we say that we had a comprehensive view of the object, and it’s also true that our senses don’t allow us to take in all the possible perspectives. We could even come up with a down-to-earth definition of the “objectivity” of an object by defining it in terms of this “view from everywhere”—the all-inclusive perspective on it that is greater than any single person’s perceptive capabilities can handle.4 With this limitation, we could conclude that we can never fully know the appearance of even the simplest object!

  But this seems to go against what we normally assume. Let’s look at two different attempts in the philosophy of perception to overcome this unexpected and unwelcome result. First, there was the effort by René Descartes (1596–1650) to engineer a solution to the problem of how we see the world “right side up” when our eyes actually function to invert our visual field. Imagine a blind man holding up two sticks crossed in an “X” shape in front of him. The blind man cannot see the ends of the sticks, but he knows conclusively that the stick held in his right hand ends near his left ear, the stick held in his left hand near his right. How is this simple bit of knowledge produced, if not from sense experience? Descartes’s explanation was that certain simple rules of geometry are innate to the human mind, and can be known a priori, or without the benefit of sense perception at all. According to Descartes’s way of thinking, both the blind and the sighted need native but unconscious processes to occur in the mind so that we can triangulate objects in the world.

  Philosophical empiricists such as George Berkeley (1685–1753) rejected the central belief of Descartes, namely that there were innate ideas that made perception possible. The empiricists believed that all our knowledge of objects is gained through sense experience, the information provided by the five senses. They produced detailed and often convincing arguments against the principles Descartes treated as independent of past sense experience, principles vital to comprehending the “hidden” parts of an object.

  Empiricists claimed that Descartes’s rules of the mind were not innate at all, but instead an accumulation of basic sensory interactions with the world. Like a good empiricist, Berkeley proposed that anything we sense at a distance, which accounts for nearly every experience of seeing, hearing or smelling, is less certain than “close up” tactual experiences, when touching things. But there’s a problem here: there are many things that we have reliable sensory knowledge about that we cannot touch (like the moon) or wouldn’t want to touch (like the disgusting Scorponok or Tarantulas from Beast Wars). Berkeley deals with this conundrum by saying that we “cross-reference” uncertain visual experiences with bodily motions—like the movements of muscles, or the b
ody as a whole—that we experience directly and with certainty. The cognitive scientist Zygmunt Pizlo explains:

  . . . when an observer looks at an object binocularly, the line of sight of each eye is directed toward the object, forming an angle called “vergence.” The observer is aware of the angle by feeling the state of his eye muscles, and when the observer walks toward the object, the angle changes and the sensations associated with change are noticed. The relation between the sensations form the eye muscles and the number of steps required to reach the object is learned, stored, and used later by means of what we would call today a “look-up table” to provide the mechanism underlying the perception of distance. (3D Shape: Its Unique Place in Visual Perception, MIT Press, 2008, p. 14)

  We might call what is going on in Berkeley’s thinking “associative learning,” which is very different from doing geometry, as Descartes said. In fact, some Transformers seem to be capable of associative learning: in the animated series episode “Attack of the Autobots,” Jazz and Bumblebee must rely on both sensory experience and memory to uncover the truth that the other Autobots have been tampered with by Megatron to make them more aggressive (the change to red eyes is always a dead giveaway!).

  What’s most important for our purposes in Berkeley’s advance over Descartes is that it points to the fact that all human experience is made possible by the fact that we have a body. In the history of philosophy, the human body has either been overlooked, or in some cases has gotten a bad rap from thinkers like Plato and Descartes. It’s important that we begin to think about how important having a body is to being human, to being a person at all.5 Beyond this, we mustn’t forget that all associative learning based on the senses is gained by action, that is through motor experience, testing things out in the world by bumping bits of our body up against things in different ways to produce different sensations for further “cross-referencing.” In an excellent recent study called How the Body Shapes the Mind, Shaun Gallagher sums up this discovery: “The shape and size of objects are perceived not simply in phenomenal terms (phenomenal size of an object depending on distance from the perceiver), but in pragmatic terms (as something I can grasp or manipulate).”6

  Yet the importance of this central insight may, like the nature of the Camaro on the lawn, not be immediately intelligible. Clearly, more must be said about the relation between mind and body, and accordingly how we know about objects’ hidden traits.

  “Is it fear or courage that compels you, fleshling?”

  Of all the objects we encounter on a daily basis, the human body may be the most remarkably adaptable, certainly more so than the Transformers! Whether dancing or scuba diving, typing or hiding in a tight space from Megatron’s latest rampage, the human body is the paradigm of adaptable usefulness, next to which all the objects invented to take over our work pale by comparison. But this way of treating the body as “useful” rests on a central presupposition that Descartes and many empiricists shared: that the body and the mind were essentially two different things, related in such a way that the body stands as a tool or instrument for accomplishing the purposes put forth by the mind. Contrast this with what happens to Spike Witwicky in the animated Transformers episode “Autobot Spike” when Spike’s mind is transferred into an Autobot body, with the result being extraordinary confusion and conflict for this new “hybrid Transformer.” This episode implies that the mind and body are so interconnected that it makes no sense to say that they could be separated from each other (yet the reverse phenomena—Autobot “minds” transferred into human bodies in “Only Human” doesn’t seem to produce such confusion).

  This hierarchy of mind over body has been challenged by the school of thought called phenomenology. Phenomenologists concentrate on the study of consciousness and the way things appear to us directly: Edmund Husserl, its founder, described it as the adoption of the “natural attitude” of simply describing objects without applying any philosophical or scientific theories to them.7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) even went beyond this, insisting that the body is absolutely essential to “the way things appear to us directly.” Merleau-Ponty refused to accept the dualism of mind and body. For him, the problems that concerned Descartes and Berkeley were the direct result of reducing what is essentially human to a mere element of scientific theory. Against this idea, Merleau-Ponty declares, “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world.”8 For him, there is a more basic science—phenomenology—that deals with the way we “enact” our living on an everyday basis.

  Because they attempt to “go behind” current scientific theory to the appearances of objects themselves, phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty try to take nothing for granted. So when I say that I know about an object’s hidden qualities—a robot inside a gun, a tank inside a robot—they would not take it for granted that I know what I am talking about. Let’s turn to Merleau-Ponty’s frankly cryptic response to Descartes and Berkeley about how we know the hidden sides of things. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tells us, “To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other or behind me. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it.”9 Transformers can “display themselves,” because they are animate, just like us. But what about trees and books? And what does it mean for us to “inhabit” an object?

  Without assuming that there is an all-encompassing, “objective” perspective from which all hiddenness of objects is revealed, Merleau-Ponty takes up the challenge of Descartes and Berkeley, agreeing with both that our perception of an object is much wider than what we actually sense about it. Yet he disagrees with Descartes that geometry provides an explanation for this gap, and with Berkeley that “cross-referencing” what we do see with muscular motions allows us to fill in the gap. What we see, for a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty, is “determinate,” which means we can give a straightforward account of how it appears to us. By contrast, the hidden qualities of objects are “indeterminate,” we cannot give a good account of them. When we consider an object as an object, and not merely a set of potentially disconnected appearances, “there occurs here an indeterminate vision,” Merleau-Ponty writes, a “vision de je ne sais quoi” (a vision of “I do not know what”).10 This “indeterminate vision” is not guesswork or mere, confusion, however; it is a description of how our visual perception works in terms of 1. a focus of attention and 2. its contrast with a background. Since we are focusing on a particular object or area of our field of vision, the rest of our field (the background) is present, but not the center of our attention. It is indeterminate.

  As an illustration of this, consider Sam Witwicky’s situation when he first sees Bumblebee in his robotic form in the steelyard in the movie Transformers. This is an ideal example, since director Michael Bay clearly filmed this short scene in a way that ambiguously portrays the focus of attention for both Sam and the audience; we are not clear what exactly we are seeing. Clearly, the colossal robot standing far away is the focus of attention; but why does Sam not think that this is a nondescript piece of forge equipment? What allows him to distinguish Bumblebee from the rest of the junk in the steelyard? And more to the point, how is he so sure the next morning that this robot is his Camaro, albeit transformed?

  This is plainly a situation in which our perception of an object is much wider than what we actually sense about it. Since we, like Sam, don’t see a complete shift from vehicle to robot form, the “hiddenness” of Bumblebee within the Camaro is not something we directly experience. Knowing that the robot casting the Autobot signal to the skies is the car requires a kind of logical connecting of the dots. More than this, it requires a process to occur in both Sam and us (the audience) that we are typically unconscious of, and that involves an interplay between focus o
f attention and background. A situation that illustrates this fact is found in the animated episode “Dark Awakening,” when Spike and Daniel Witwicky encounter the cold, lifeless shell of Optimus Prime in a tomb. In this morbid situation, Optimus is no longer the reassuring figure we’ve come to expect.

  For Merleau-Ponty, our sense-perception of an object is not limited to what our attention is focused on. The way the object appears to us is also affected by the other objects and environment that surround it—lights, reflective surfaces, dominant colors, similar objects. In the case of Bumblebee in the steelyard, the lack of good lighting means that Sam’s perception of the robot is more ambiguous than, say, his perception of Megatron under the actinic lights of the Hoover Dam bunker. Equally, the inanimate machines in the steelyard make it difficult for Sam to know if he is simply mistaking a crane, for example, for an Autobot. While it isn’t right to say that the lighting and the steelyard equipment are part of Sam’s focus of attention (they are, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, part of the “indeterminate” background), they aren’t irrelevant to what he perceives. Instead, as Merleau-Ponty scholar Sean Dorrance Kelly says, in cases such as this, “The lighting context presents itself not as a determinate quality but rather in terms of how well it enables me to see the thing I’m looking at.”11

  The language used here is carefully chosen: by “how well [the background context] enables me to see the thing,” Kelly wants to say that our perception of a thing is founded upon an understanding of what the background would need to be like for us to have an “optimal” (no pun intended) perceptual experience of it. Sam needs to move closer to the robot, get through the haze of concrete dust between them; this urge is, for Merleau-Ponty, part of the perceptual experience, in the same way that some people feel compelled to touch statues or “kick the tires” of a used car.