Transformers and Philosophy Read online

  Sam’s father takes him instead to Bobby B’s, a small dump of a used car lot. Though they don’t realize it, Bumblebee is following them, and the beat-up yellow vintage Camaro turns into the lot as well, where it will wait for Sam to find it. Unfortunately, Bobby B prices the car at a thousand dollars more than Sam’s father is willing to pay.

  When Bobby B tries to get Sam interested in the Volkswagen Beetle next to Bumblebee, suddenly the Camaro’s passenger door flies open, putting a huge dent in the side of the Volkswagen as Bumblebee pushes the rival car away. The Camaro’s radio comes on and we hear a static-laced voice declare “greater than man” before a piercing sound blows out the windows of every other car on the lot. Bobby B drops Bumblebee’s price.

  Of course, as members of the movie audience, we are in a privileged position to know that what looks like an old beat up yellow Camaro is something else. But why doesn’t Sam or his father or Bobby B seem to realize this? Bumblebee is not behaving like a car, and yet they assume that this object in front of them is indeed a car. Okay, Bobby B may have his doubts, otherwise, why drop the price? But neither Witwicky seems to consider the possibility that this old Camaro is more than meets the eye.

  Ignoring the fact that Transformers is a movie, and that there are certain conventions of movie-going such as suspension of disbelief that are at play in order to create dramatic tension, the fact that Sam and his father do not initially perceive Bumblebee as anything other than what he seems to be—a worse-for-wear 1976 Chevrolet Camaro—may be explained in part by the fact that Sam, like us, is constantly bombarded with sensory information, more than he can possibly process, and therefore he prioritizes this sensory input, often ignoring data that does not support his initial assessment or interpretation of the situation. In other words, Sam sees what he expects to see. Even later, at the lake, when the Camaro’s radio once again comes on by itself (blasting The Cars song, “Drive”), Sam doesn’t think of Bumblebee as anything more than a car. This is because most of his perceptions support the notion of Bumblebee as a car, and he ignores any data that seems to contradict that perception.

  We could also argue that Sam and his father have succumbed to the context of the situation: they are on a used car lot, and Bumblebee looks and feels like a car, surrounded by cars with “for sale” signs and prices stenciled on their windows. This context of the used car lot, the goal of buying a car and the preponderance of sensory information overshadow for the Witwickys the fact that Bumblebee doesn’t behave like a car.

  Because our context is different, we are able to more quickly understand Bumblebee’s true nature. We are after all watching a movie called Transformers, and the odds are that we came into the theater with some understanding of the story’s basic premise. But also, the film is shot in such a way that we are positioned to see, however quickly, that Bumblebee has been following the Witwickys as well as manipulating the situations with Sam. Here is a case where the car literally does pick the driver, and we as the audience are aware of that fact before Sam is.

  “I Can’t Be Any Clearer than How Crystal Clear I Am Being.”

  Sam’s initial perceptions that Bumblebee is just a car get challenged when he wakes up in the middle of the night to the sounds of the Camaro starting up and driving away. Sam gives pursuit, calling 911 to report that his car has been stolen. He follows the car into a junkyard industrial area, only to discover that the vehicle has transformed into an erect metal being beaming a light into the night sky. Sam furtively records the event on his cell phone before being apprehended as the car thief, because, well, he’s the only one with the Camaro when they find him.

  Just because Sam has begun to realize that his initial perceptions are unreliable and that Bumblebee is more than meets the eye doesn’t mean that the people around Sam yet see Bumblebee as anything other than a car. In fact, at the police station, the interrogating officer accuses Sam of taking drugs. This seems to be the only explanation for Sam’s statements that his car is alive. And drugs are certainly one of the ways we account for the possibility of one’s perceptions being unreliable. The police officer’s assumption influences his ability to believe Sam’s story as well as determines the way he treats Sam, accusing the teenager of wanting to take the officer’s gun. Let’s face it, if your son came home and told you his car was alive, the possibility of his taking drugs wouldn’t be that far of a leap.

  Generally we accept that a variety of conditions can affect our perceptions, including not just the influence of drugs but also illness, psychosis, and unusual transient physical states, such as extreme fatigue, sleep deprivation or dehydration. In the Transformers’ story world, the primary condition that is affecting Sam’s perceptions is deliberate deception on the part of the Transformers. In other words, there’s nothing about his physical state that suggests his perceptions might be inaccurate.

  Other factors that can affect our ability to accurately perceive objects and events include social conditioning. Sam does not live in a world where he is used to seeing cars or other objects as possibly robots. C. Blakemore and G.C. Cooper conducted and reported on a particularly intriguing experiment in 1970 regarding the role of social conditioning on perception. Though their results are cited in a variety of sources, Peter K. Smith, Helen Cowie and Mark Blades’ book, Understanding Children’s Development, provides a succinct but thorough summary of the experiment wherein two groups of kittens were each raised in a different environment, one consisting of only horizontal lines and the other of only vertical lines. After several months, the kittens were brought into a normal room, and the researchers discovered that those kittens that had been raised in the horizontal environment were unable to perceive vertical lines and vice versa. I should point out that their research suggests that this may not be due just to conditioning or learned recognition, but might also have a physiological component. Either way, it does point to the impact of environment and context on perception and perceptual limitations. We often see what we’ve been conditioned to see and what we expect to see.

  This contributes to Sam’s confusion about what his senses are telling him. Who expects his car to be lying to him? When he’s recording Bumblebee sending a signal to the other Autobots, Sam reports that his car is alive, but then when the Camaro attempts to rescue him from the guard dogs, he talks as if there is a driver—“keep the car”—and later tells the arresting officers that there’s someone in the car, that he’s not the thief. Both sets of Sam’s perceptions are in conflict with each other and don’t become fully reconciled for Sam until he is later pursued by a Decepticon masquerading as a patrol car. When Bumblebee comes to rescue Sam and Mikaela from that Decepticon, they witness both vehicles transforming into what we assume are their true forms for what Mikaela describes as a giant droid death match.

  “You Know What I Don’t Understand? Why if He’s Supposed to Be, like, This Super-advanced Robot, Does He Transform Back into This Piece-of-Crap Camaro?”

  After their rescue and while being driven home, Mikaela ponders why a super advanced robot would transform into a “piece-of-crap Camaro” (her words, not mine, Bumblebee). Apparently offended, Bumblebee dumps Sam and Mikaela on the side of the road and drives off, only to return moments later as a shiny new 2007 Camaro prototype. But though some of the details have changed, Bumblebee still primarily presents himself as a car.

  Much in the way that we can talk about Sam and Mikaela experiencing the illusion of the Transformers as motor vehicles, movies operate in some ways for the audience like an illusion. While watching a film, we can experience physiological changes—increased heart rate, the release of adrenalin in our bloodstream—as well as emotional shifts, such as anxiety or sadness as we engage with the plight of the characters. Many of the techniques and properties by which films affect us have been accidental discoveries. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note in their book, Film Art, that while filming a bus passing before him at the Place de l’Opera, pioneer filmmaker Georges Melies’s camera jammed.
By the time he got it running again, the bus was gone and a hearse was now passing in front of the lens. Upon later screening the film, Melies discovered that the moving bus seemed to transform into the hearse because when watching a film, we tend to perceive the images as continuous. Many of the breaks in time that occur while filming are virtually invisible to our perceptions. This discovery served as the foundation for many of Melies’s special effects, which were essentially tricks in perception by starting and stopping the camera during production.

  The director of Transformers, Michael Bay, is particularly known for his use of special effects, particularly for finding ways to enhance their believability. His goal is to create a more seamless illusion that, in the case of Transformers, results for the audience in these robots seeming to be as real as Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, the actors who play Sam and Mikaela.

  Though there has been some question about whether illusions and hallucinations really are indistinguishable from states of true sensory perception, much has been made of the role of perceptual errors in understanding how we know the world we perceive.

  “I Think Direct Contact.”

  Unlike idealists or skeptics, who would question whether an external world even exists outside our mind, realists argue that indeed there is an external world that we encounter, and that the important area of inquiry is one of how we perceive that world, whether directly or indirectly. A lot of this debate centers on the questions that get raised by the presence of illusions and hallucinations.

  Hallucinations are generally understood as perceptions of a real mind-independent object when in fact there is no mind-independent object present to be perceived. The assumption is that hallucinations are subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical perception. However, there is some debate about this assumption, and to paraphrase J.L. Austin, watching a movie about driving a car is nothing like the real experience of driving a car.

  An illusion, on the other hand, is the misperception of a mind-independent object that is indeed present but appears other than it really is. Bumblebee does exist, but Sam perceives him as a simple car when in fact he is something more. By these criteria, Sam’s perception of his Camaro is not a hallucination but rather an illusion. However, the nature of the Transformers and their motivations introduce that additional aspect of deception, wherein one is deceived into believing that things are other than they are. No matter how you view it, though, Sam and many of the other characters in Transformers (even Optimus Prime, in his interpretation that Mojo is “leaking lubricant”) are experiencing perceptual errors.

  So why make a big deal about this notion of perceptual error? I mean, why can’t we just chalk it up to a simple, “Sometimes our senses are wrong?” Most of us can identify experiences where our senses seem to tell us one thing that we later realize is incorrect—just think of seeing someone in the distance who is walking towards you. For a moment you think you know them but as they get closer, you realize they’re not who you thought they were.

  Epistemologists have theorized that our acquisition of knowledge can occur through two different processes, reason and experience. Sam’s knowledge of the Transformers doesn’t come from reason, but from his experiences with Bumblebee and the other Autobots and Decepticons. These experiences shape what he knows, via the accumulation of data that comes through his senses. Therefore the reliability of his sensory experiences—and the process by which he experiences the world—becomes an important consideration because it is the way in which he knows the world.

  Though there are some refinements and variations on each of these, we can identify two primary realist theories on how we experience the external world. One of these theories, currently called direct realism and closely aligned with what was previously known as naïve realism or sometimes common-sense realism, says that we are in direct contact with the world we perceive, and that our perceptions are correct and unmediated by any representation in our consciousness. In other words, we perceive the world immediately and directly.

  On the other hand, indirect realism or representational realism suggests that we are not in direct contact with the world that we perceive. Instead, there is an internal process that mediates our experience, so that what we actually experience is an internal representation. We can know only our ideas or interpretation of objects in the world, not the external objects themselves, which is why this mediation or filter is sometimes described as a veil of perception that exists between the mind and the external world. We might compare it to the difference between seeing Bumblebee in person versus seeing Bumblebee in a movie. Representational realism would argue that when we encounter Bumblebee in the external world, our perceptions are actually of an internal representation (a movie image, in this particular analogy) of Bumblebee. This representation can be called a sense datum (though in variations of this theory, the representations might be known as an idea, appearance, or a percept). These representations, or sense data, not the actual objects themselves, are what we directly encounter and know within our mind during the act of perception.

  Going back for a moment to our movie analogy, you and I certainly know the difference between a movie image of a car and a car we encounter as we cross the street. But this ability to distinguish between the two may not be as inherent or as simple as it first seems. After all, when the Lumière Brothers premiered their film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” in 1895, reports indicate that the audience ran out of the theater screening in terror, perceiving the movie’s image as an actual train approaching them and potentially about to run them over. This may seem impossible to us today, but for you and I, films have been a part of our entire lives, and we have been trained to perceive the differences between a movie and the world we encounter in three dimensions. The two are clearly distinguishable for us, but for those Parisian moviegoers at the end of the nineteenth century, with no experience watching movies, the train on the screen seemed indistinguishable from a train they would encounter at a station.

  “Why Are You So Sweaty and Filthy?”

  If we accept that there are perceptual errors, the question becomes whether those can be reconciled with a direct realist view of the world and our knowledge of it, or whether the existence of perceptual errors proves that we experience the world indirectly via representational realism.

  Generally, the arguments from illusion and hallucination are seen as evidence that direct realism is not a satisfactory explanation, because it doesn’t seem to allow for a consideration of perceptual error. The belief that hallucinations are indistinguishable from actual sensory perceptions of external objects that the perceiver is encountering seems to imply that sensory perception does not require the existence of an external object. Hence what we experience is representations of objects that exist in the external world.

  Add to this the fact that recent research in neuroscience suggests that perception, imagination and dreaming activate similar areas of the brain, and we can see why there are those who feel direct realism does not adequately explain our interaction and experience with an external world. On the flip side, critics of indirect realism might retort that once you accept the presence of sense data, how do you prove the existence of an external world? In other words, you may not be that far removed from idealists or skeptics.

  Of course, Sam and Mikaela don’t really have time to ponder these kinds of questions. There’s a battle going on, and they’re in the fight for their lives. There’s a world to save, after all. Common sense would tell Sam and Mikaela that they are encountering real objects or events in a world that exists outside their minds. And it’s these events that bring about Sam’s own transformation into a man. When he hands Sam the All Spark, Captain Lennox tells him, “You’re a soldier, now,” and Sam has responsibilities greater than offering to drive the girl he likes home. The fact that he has experienced perceptual errors is taken for granted and seems without deeper connotations, at least until he has time to slow down a bit and ponder the changes to his world.
r />   By then he might just want to make out with Mikaela on a hilltop, surrounded by his new friends and siblings, the Transformers.

  “It’s a Mystical Bond between Man and Machine”

  It goes without saying that we live in a world of increased technology. Machines appear to surround us. We listen to music that is stored as binary code. We watch movies via machines that project light through celluloid or that translate digital encodings into pixels. We use computers rather than pen and paper. Our iPhones tap into satellites and towers in order to help us determine our GPS coordinates as well as to communicate in various modes with friends and colleagues.

  Many of us spend more time with machines than people. Maybe it’s not so surprising that we are engaged by a story that describes machines as something other than what they seem, as potential companions rather than tools. Perhaps the idea of Transformers taps into some longing we have for a greater connection with the world we perceive.

  That may be why, walking out of the movie theater and into the starry night, I look across the parking lot for my Wrangler, maybe a little disappointed that it just sits there, waiting for me, casually resting on its four tires, still for all appearances just an automobile. But do I know that for sure? I have only my perceptions and experiences, context and introspection, reason and memory upon which to base my knowledge. What’s to say that I’m not experiencing my own perceptual error, and that I won’t wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a revving engine, forced to give chase to my car only to discover new realizations about it, myself, and the world I inhabit?

  EPISODE THREE

  _________________

  Mind over Matter