What is “Real?”
In the previous review, I finished my thoughts on the movie, but I wanted to spend some time refuting the thesis of both the short story, Super Toys Last All Summer Long, by Brian Aldiss, and the movie. The statement is as follows. “Nobody knows what ‘real’ really means.”
There are numerous ways to approach this statement, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on refuting the question as it applies to humanity because, in the context of the story, “real” is being conflated with humanity and human value. In other words, “What makes a life valuable?”
So, the story is not talking about how to determine reality as a whole; it’s really attacking human exceptionalism, claiming that if a robot can replicate a human’s behavior, then the robot’s and the human’s value are interchangeable, and, if one wants to be uncharitable, they could claim that a human life isn’t worth preserving if a robot can perform the same purpose.
This is one of the reasons I believe the Flesh Fair, a pro-human rally, is presented so unfavorably in the film. By making the characters at the rally so repugnant, the film implies that they are wrong for being angry about their gradual replacement. This anti-human sentiment is also suggested when Joe victoriously declares that one day the robots will be all that’s left, and in part 8 of this series, I established that Gigolo Joe is acting as a prophet during this scene.
From Spielberg’s perspective, Joe is the voice of truth. This is not the limited perspective of a character because Joe has dropped his clownish behavior and started spilling an ominous monologue for seemingly no reason, a sign of the writer’s hand. Therefore, I would argue that the thesis statement of the story is really an attempt to diminish human value by calling into question the definition of the word “real.” I would structure the argument like this.
- “Real” is unknowable.
- Because “real” is unknowable, the value of one thing from another is irrelevant.
- Therefore, objective human value does not exist.
Premise A is easy to refute given the limitations the story has put on the claim; that is to say, we are not talking about the Matrix, a denial of the senses, or total reality. Such a claim would require a different set of arguments. Instead, we are starting with the physical and moving to the metaphysical. In other words, we have our senses, so we can rely on observation.
I feel especially comfortable starting with senses and observation because the movie is basically appealing to the Turing Test, saying that since David acts human, he is human. The movie’s whole premise is based on sensory observation, so it’s fair to use the same logic to refute the film’s claim. And if we can use our senses, then we can use our brains, so the first thing I’m going to use my brain to point out is that premise A requires a definition to state that the noun in question is undefinable.
The definition of “real” is defined by the short story and the film itself. Since the story revolves around whether or not a robot can become human—implying that David doesn’t deserve to be shut off because he is just as valuable as his mother—we can safely say that “real” is being used to describe value.
The story is, either intentionally or unintentionally, attempting a bait-and-switch, hoping the audience will conflate a question about David’s value with a broader ontological question. It needs to do this because both writers’ worldviews seem to be materialistic, and, therefore, it has no real refutation against the accusations of mimicry beyond saying motives are irrelevant.
It needs to undermine the existence of a human’s inner life without outright denying that inner life since everyone has an inner life and, for many people, it is, in some measure, reflective of the soul. Calling people soulless is generally unpersuasive, so making their case requires a pivot, a diversion. Therefore, “value” and “real” are collapsed into the same term.
A simple way of putting all this might be to say that the writers want the audience to be thinking “objective truth is unknowable” when they read the word “real,” but what the writers really mean is that human value is indefinable and, therefore, doesn’t exist. To put it even simpler, they want to poetically say, “Who knows? Who cares? Just say he’s real. You don’t want to see David cry, do you?”
But there are multiple problems with this approach. First, define “unknowable”—or in the quote’s case, “really means.” Do the writers mean that nobody can agree on the question, or do they mean that the term “real” is so nebulous it can’t exist at all? Perhaps they mean something else, but the refutation of the first two definitions further collapses premise A.
If the term “unknowable” means no one can agree, I would argue it doesn’t matter because whatever the opinions of a group asking the question might be, everyone is acknowledging that reality exists by simply having the conversation. “Real” must be knowable in some measure because it’s identifiable. We don’t need to agree on what reality is to know it exists.
Two men can both see the same frequency of light. One can call it green; the other can call it blue, but the light is there. It doesn’t matter who’s right; the light is the inciting incident of the argument itself. The light is real because it has caused something within the men’s world. The light produces an effect.
Anything that exists will produce an effect. So, “real” is knowable because if two men can have an argument about whether or not it exists, then the concept is identifiable. That’s a knowable characteristic. This knowable characteristic by itself refutes the second scenario as well. If something has a knowable characteristic, it can’t be so nebulous that it escapes a definition.
The next issue returns to the bait-and-switch. Pivoting away from the inner man, or the mind, has the unfortunate consequence of collapsing all emotions to behavior. David is supposedly human because he loves his mother, but Spielberg consistently shows that David has no idea what love really means.
The greatest problem with the film is that it consistently undermines its own hypothetical. First of all, there’s the imprinting. This removes free will from the equation. If someone says, “I love you,” while a gun is pressed to their head, then that declaration isn’t sincere. Why? Because choice is a fundamental component of love. Imprinting is coercion; therefore, it cannot be love.
Then there is David’s lack of empathy for his brother and father and his lack of emotion when the clone of his mother dies. If a robot is indistinguishable from “real,” then so is his cloned mother, yet David doesn’t mourn her loss. He crawls into bed with her and may very well have “died” too.
Humans recognize these distinctions. They recognize the value of free will, the value of empathy for others, the distinction between love and coercion. The movie does not. David’s obsession is called “love” because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge the abstract, which the writers cannot afford to do. If they did, then the accusations of mimicry are thrown back on the board, and they have no refutation.
But ideas like love, beauty, and so on are part of the human experience because humans sense them. They don’t always agree on the particulars, but they intuitively know that these ideas exist. Even if these concepts exist on a gradient, so does the spectrum of light. And just because a human cannot sense beauty with nerve endings does not mean that the human is not sensing something and reacting to it.
If a man touches a hot plate, he recoils. If he sees a beautiful sunset, he reflects. That’s a response to stimulus. That’s a sense. Premise A doesn’t work because the whole claim is relying on sense data, but it intentionally ignores senses that detect ideas. But these ideas affect the human experience, and anything that exists has an effect.
I’ll finish this argument next time.