Insensitive dead matter

What do zombies and robots have in common?

Sounds like a bad riddle, but I think it's an interesting question. Perhaps I'm just a bit dense to not have thought about the commonalities before, but I hadn't really thought of zombies and robots performing any kind of similar function. I've never really made the connection between the two entities before, but reading this passage about robots got me thinking about it:

"Thoughtful machinery violates the equally obvious and sacred dichotomy of the living and the dead, a difference embedded in our mentality. The skills for interacting with living things, with feelings, memories and intentions, are utterly different from the techniques for shaping insensitive dead matter... Ancient thinkers theorized that the animating principle that separated the living from the dead was a special kind of substance, a spirit. In the last century biology, mathematics, and related sciences have gathered powerful evidence that the animating principle is not a substance, but a very particular, very complex organization. Such organization was once found only in biological matter, but is now slowly appearing in our most complex machines"

(Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind 111)

That "animating principle" or spirit, is really what it all comes down to. It's the mind portion of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. And it's that dualism that lies at the heart of a lot of the objections to new computational (artificial intelligence) and biotechnologies.

The fears associated with these new technologies have a lot to do with a desire to keep human beings in a special category - one that can't be replicated by humans themselves, in other words, reproduction/production of new human beings should take place without technological intervention. That way that animating principle, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, can enter the body.

If humans are the ones to create new humans, then they would be responsible for providing that animating principle, spirit or soul, which makes us wonder whether it's appropriate for humans to take on a task that has always been seen to be the province of a divinity, or at the least, Nature. Part of the problem is that we don't know how to make a soul. We doubt whether we can do so. And even if we were to succeed in doing so, how would that make us any different than the countless other species on the earth? If humans are no longer special, then what's it all for?

At least that's how I read some of the arguments against thinking machines. I'm simplifying a bit, and perhaps conflating different arguments, but what it really comes down to is a blurring of the boundaries between human and anything else.



The fear of thinking machines that cross this boundary also strikes me as what's at the heart of fears about zombies (or Anne Rice type vampires, who are imagined to be dead in a traditional sense, reanimated by their inclusion in the vampire species).

Zombies also blur that boundary between human and not-human. After all, many zombie movies ask the question of whether zombies still belong to the human race. Take the questions Fido raises, about whether the enslaved zombies are still human, the echoes of former lives in the zombies of Land of the Dead or the end of Shaun of the Dead, or even the pathos of the Frank's infection and his recognition that in a few short seconds he will become a danger to his daughter in 28 Days Later.

Of course 28 Weeks Later opens tomorrow (the reviews emerging today are mixed at best), which is probably one of the reasons I made the connection between Moravec's discussion of robots and the status of zombies. But zombies also blur the line between human and not-human, just as thinking machines would.

Robots and zombies. A strange mix, but when you think about it, they both share a troubled relationship with humans.