Having watched the film A.I. recently and having been absolutely smitten by it I thought I’d write a little post about it, hoping that someone else here might have seen it. If you haven’t, I genuinely recommend it although proability suggests that you won’t like it as most people don’t. There are lots of philosophical ideas expressed in the film and I’ll just pick one to discuss here. If you haven’t seen the film you can join in anyway.
A scientist intends to build a mecha (i.e. robot) boy that can love and in the very first scene, a lady asks him a moral question along the lines of: If the boy can be programmed to love his mother then what does that mother owe the boy in return? Must she love him back even though his love for her is only the result of a program. The scientist responds by saying that indeed it is the oldest moral question but in the beginning God made Man to love him.
An obvious link is made in the film between scientists and God, between mechas and Man. The film therefore explores whether God has any responsibility to his creation. If we see ourselves as a creation, and we believe in a creator, then what does he owe us. In one way it’s looking at whether the existence of evil in the world (which can only arise if the creator neglects his creation) disproves the existence of a God. Why must God love his creation if in A.I. humans destroy mechas at a “Flesh Fair” (a so-called celebration of life)?
Even if you haven’t seen the film, what are youir views on this key aspect to its philosophical implications?
This is the reply from Flamin’ Red JJ to my post but unfortunately it was lost in the confusion of swapping the forum boards so here it is:
Firstly, as a movie, AI was indeed terrible.
Philosophical subtext was its one redeeming feature.
Anyway, the concept of ‘God’ is the human response to our ability to create- if we can create, then someone must have created us. This is clearly false reasoning.
What the film seemed to me to be driving at (and all these things are essentially subjective), is that scientists rarely consider the ethical implications of developing new theories and technology.
It also suggested that commerce will always be prepared to exploit emotional insecurity, without scruple.
The movie was not really asking questions about God or about the future of humanity and technology, but forcing us to reassess the present state of affairs.
i saw the movie and i agree that it was very good. well in my opinion you could take your question in 2 completely different directions. the first direction being, yes if god created us he doesnt have to love us, and it brings up many quesitons in my head, why did god bring me into this realm and expect me to obey him and love him when hes putting me through pain and bordom everyday. taking it that religion is true, ebcause many religions claim that god does love us. i find myself very lost sometimes due to this theory. if god put us here and expects us to love him for it its somewhat of a crock because i never asked to be born, and to my knowledge i dont recall getting a choice to be here. the other direction i couild take this is that we were made for fun and jsut to be a show for some higher realm. people say many times oh wouldnt it be funny if life was jsut one big movie. well it very well could be something like that to other beings. hmm now that i look at this im not sure if i took that to 2 differnt lengths btut either way im tired and i ned to sleepy so reply and critique and ill correct myself.
but neither of them justify this. They both claim that these arguments are examples of false reasoning. The inclusion of the word “clearly” does not make it true or justifiable. Why are these forms of false-reasoning? You can’t argue something by just affirming it in a confident manner. You need to do some justifying if you want people to accept your arguments. In fact Kjevah’s example seems like fairly simple logical reasoning to me. Man has never seen physicality create physicality and therefore (some) people feel that they have to look beyong scientific/natural causes to explain ‘how this all got here.’ Don’t be so hasty to deny the existence of God. I’m not saying I believe in God because I’m not yet sure but your self-confidence is worrying and in some ways narrow-minded. Some very intelligent people in the past have seen God as the answer, don’t just throw it out the window like it is a simple decision to make.
Onto A.I. … AMaskofJune thank you for your response. It was really interesting to read. Have you read any existentialist writing? What you say here fits in perfectly with some existentialist thought:
I completely agree with what you have written there. We do not chose to be born and we are not consulted so why should we feel grateful. On top of this, there is so much pain and evil in our existence that it seems to me that we have little to thank God for. However those people who believe in God tend to be eternally grateful to him and I find this a bit confusing. Maybe it is the result of some sort of ‘programing’ that has been installed in humans to love their creator…similar to that in David (in A.I.) towards his mother. AMaskofJune I recommend this site: mysteriesofai.com. If you remember the imprinting scen in A.I. then you will remember that it had some religious overtones to it, especially in the 7 words that David’s ‘mum’ said to him so that he would love her as his mother. What I am suggesting therefore is that the concept of God seems to bring with it some kind of worship of this creator and love of him, and yet it is clear that if God created, he does not seem to still interfere for our good because of the existence of evil in the world. Therefore, as A.I. suggests God does not owe his creation anything, once he has created. This therefore justifies the existence of evil. If I were to believe in God (and I’m not sure if I do or don’t) then he would be a God who created but does not now interfere. Therefore I can’t believe much of Religion because as you say, “many religions claim that god does love us.” I like your second idea because it fits in with A.I. too. David is like a toy for the ‘orgas’ - for rich ones who can afford him and who need to replace lost loved ones. N.B. the professor who made David did so to replace his dead son David and the mother believed their son to be dead when she ‘bought’ David. Like the teddy, David is a toy. There’s nothing to suggest that we are not, in a similar way, toys for God, entertainment for the other realm, as you put it. As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear: “Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods : / They kill us for their sport…”
AMaskofJune it’s nice to have such an open-minded person on the boards.
I was merely pointing out that it is a non sequitur to say that for human beings to be able to create then there must be a higher being that created us and ‘gave’ us this unique ability.
Why can’t we be the top of the intellectual ladder in the animal kingdom (dolphins aside!)?
I still feel that it is the fact of our consciousness that drives us to explain that fact through religion and science.
Man has created ‘God’ by way of explanation of the human condition, and religion, as Marx pointed out, has taken on a firmly therapeutic role for the masses.
After all, with the demise of popular religion in modern society, we have seen the rise of the psychiatrist.
thank you for the complements much!! its good to see eye to eye with someone. dont get me wrong its good to be critiqued becasue you get to see things froma different view but also good for someone to relate with you. thanks for the link, although i havent gotten to take a look yet because i too have finals, but i look forward to taking a look at it when i have all my work out of the way. no i havent read any existentialist writing but i will definately look into it now that you informed me of it. good day to everyone!
Actually, they’re both very right in saying their arguments are wrong.
Kjevah’s relies on causality, which Hume has clearly shown is just a useful tool, but not an a priori fact, therefore any argument relying on causality can only be accepted in a weak empirical form.
Flamin Red’s is wrong because in simple formal logic the argument doesn’t rule out that we can create and yet are not created. Err, my formal logic’s a bit rusty, but I think the tree would be some thing like this:
(C v -C)
WC
/ \
C -C
Where WC is that we can create, and C is that we are created.
And Dolphins are definatly are the top of the ladder, just piss around all day and eat, sounds like a great life to me
All this talk of God’s responsibilities also interests me, I’d like to comment that even before the idea of natural selection came about people like Hume (again, but just a coincidence) had postulated that there was no reason for the creator to be omnipotent or omni-prescience, he suggested that the world could have been created by not just one diety, but many, or one junior deity in training, explaining all the injustices in the world! In a way, belief in an imperfect creator would be more justified as the world is not perfect (and also we bring the question here why would a perfect being create the imperfect? It already knows what will ahppen, what it looks like, etc. etc.).
Matt, I was mainly complaining about an apparently ‘clear’ reason for a belief in God which they can then dismiss by saying that it is shoddy logic. Maybe they got the wrong reason for why people believe in a God. And whilst I would agree that Flamin Red’s argument was fallacious. I’m not so sure that Kjevah’s is if you throw in some more observations.
-Man has never seen a physical objected created from nothingness.
-Therefore physicality cannot create physicality.
-The universe exists
-Using a law of induction (and admittedly this is the ropey bit because the creation of the Universe could be the big exception), the Universe must have been created.
-Spirituality created the Universe
Define Spirituality as the way you see God. Hence God created the Universe. Is this piece of reasoning wrong again? I’m certainly not saying that it isn’t. Matt, you seem to know a bit about logic, what do you think?
Do you mean blind faith? I’ve got exams on at the moment so I’m only skim reading peoples post I’m afraid! Happened to find this site while trying to get some stuff off the net, thought I’d have a look, as so few people I know like discussing philosophy.
Dawkins, in his book the Selfish gene, starts making arguments about memes, basically ideas that operate much along the lines of natural selection. notes that the Religion meme (belief in god idea) is very good because it has an inbuilt resistance to criticism.
I used to hold exactly the same view as yours alex in the reasoning you spelled out below, but you’re quite right in noticing that the 4th point’s the shakey one. Since starting to study philosophy I’ve found that it’s been attacked in both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jayarasi for the former and Hume (which despite attempts by numerous philosophers to refute still persists as a major prolem for the philosophy of science) for the other. Though usually they didn’t realise they were attacking the idea of god.
Also, look at modern Physics, with a new interpretation of Einstein’s work, the inclusion of a variable which he invented and then dismissed as his biggest mistake, they’ve calculated that nothingness has some potential to spontaneously form a universe. Apparantly vacuum has some energy when there’s no mass near it or something, I’'m not a physicist so I’m not too hot on the exact consequences of this idea, but it might give us a non-sentient creator. However then we have to start asking who came up with the laws that our universe follow, so maybe it doesn’t help at all. Argh,m my brain’s starting to hurt thinking about this!
The only reason I posted here was that I hated A.I. soooo much, so I read the thread Just wanted to put my vote in against the film! Just throwing some philosophy in doesn’t make up for a weak story line and the really interesting ideas it touched on (such as David attacking his other clone, or the fact the the Doctor didn’t care that he had attacked it) were completely skipped. In my opinion the film threw too many philosophical ideas about the problems of robots and then didn’t really tackle any of them.
The movie was OK, but you can definitely see the bit where Kubrick leaves off and Spielberg takes over… and it’s all downhill from there
The philosophical subtext was interesting in general terms, like the extent of our responsibilities and whether a subjective entity has the same “rights” and “existence” purely on virtue of their subjective nature. There’s some good ideas in there, but the god stuff leaves me cold.
Does making something make me a god? Is every parent a god? Are we “playing god” if we make a life? These questions are inane and annoy me. Even christians seem to think all their god does is make life, and that all it takes is for us to make some approximation of life and we’ve basically done all that their god does.
Weird thought. Probably no more a convincing imitation of god (assuming, for argument’s sake, that there is one) than a robot is an imitation of life… Saying “I am god because I greated something” is corellative to “I am human life because I walk and talk”
Just wanted to put my vote in against the film! Just throwing some philosophy in doesn’t make up for a weak story line and the really interesting ideas it touched on (such as David attacking his other clone, or the fact the the Doctor didn’t care that he had attacked it) were completely skipped. In my opinion the film threw too many philosophical ideas about the problems of robots and then didn’t really tackle any of them.