The Most Human Human (6 page)

In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and its transcripts, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of their stateless, knee-jerk character, I recognize that the terse remark I want to blurt has far more to do with some kind of “reflex” to the very last sentence of the conversation than it does with either the actual issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become
quantitatively
clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.

The Turing test attempts to discern whether computers are, to put it most simply, “like us” or “unlike us”: humans have always been preoccupied with their place among the rest of creation. The development of the computer in the twentieth century may represent the first time that this place has changed.

The story of the Turing test, of the speculation and enthusiasm and unease over artificial intelligence in general, is, then, the story of our speculation and enthusiasm and unease over ourselves. What are our abilities? What are we good at? What makes us special? A look at the history of computing technology, then, is only half of the picture. The other half is the history of mankind’s thoughts about itself. This story takes us back through the history of the soul itself, and it begins at perhaps the unlikeliest of places, that moment when the woman catches the guy glancing at her breasts and admonishes him: “Hey—I’m up
here.
”

Of course we look each other in the eyes by default—the face is the most subtly expressive musculature in the body, for one, and knowing where the
other
person is looking is a big part of communication (if their gaze darts to the side inexplicably, we’ll perk up and look there too). We look each other in the eyes and face because we care about
what the other person is feeling and thinking and attending to, and so to ignore all this information in favor of a mere ogle is, of course, disrespectful.

In fact, humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species. This fact intrigues scientists, because it would seem actually to be a considerable hindrance: imagine, for example, the classic war movie scene where the soldier dresses in camouflage and smears his face with green and brown pigment—but can do nothing about his conspicuously white sclera, beaming bright against the jungle. There must be
some
reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs. In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clearly, and from a distance, which direction other humans are looking. Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed in a 2007 study that chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s
heads
, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s
eyes
. So the value of looking someone in the eye may in fact be something uniquely human.

But
—this happens not to be the woman’s argument in this particular case. Her argument is that
she’s
at eye level.

As an informal experiment, I will sometimes ask people something like “Where are you? Point to the exact place.” Most people point to their forehead, or temple, or in between their eyes. Part of this must be the dominance, in our society anyway, of the sense of vision—we tend to situate ourselves at our visual point of view—and part of it, of course, comes from our sense, as twenty-first-centuryites, that the
brain
is where all the action happens. The mind is “in” the brain. The soul, if anywhere, is there too; in fact, in the seventeenth century, Descartes went so far as to try to hunt down the
exact
“seat of the soul” in the body, reckoning it to be the pineal gland at the center of the brain. “The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises
its functions
¹
is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain,” he writes. “It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland.”
²

Not the heart at all—

Descartes’s project of trying to pinpoint the exact location of the soul and the self was one he shared with any number of thinkers and civilizations before him, but not much was thought of the brain for most of human history. The ancient Egyptian mummification process involved, for instance, preserving all of a person’s organs
except
the brain—thought
³
to be useless—which they scrambled with hooks into a custard and scooped out through the nose. All the other major organs—stomach, intestines, lungs, liver—were put into sealed jars, and the heart alone was left in the body, because it was considered, as Carl Zimmer puts it in
Soul Made Flesh
, “the center of the person’s being and intelligence.”

In fact,
most
cultures have placed the self in the thoracic region somewhere, in one of the organs of the chest. This historical notion of heart-based thought and feeling leaves its fossil record in the idioms and figurative language of English: “that shows a lot of heart,” we
say, or “it breaks my heart,” or “in my heart of hearts.” In a number of other languages—e.g., Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Zulu—this role is played by the liver: “that shows a lot of liver,” their idioms read. And the Akkadian terms
karšu
(heart),
kabattu
(liver), and
libbu
(stomach) all signified, in various different ancient texts, the center of a person’s (or a deity’s) thinking, deliberation, and consciousness.

I imagine an ancient Egyptian woman, say, who catches a man looking tenderly into her eyes, up at the far extreme of her body near her useless, good-for-nothing brains, and chastises him, hand at her chest. Hey. I’m down
here
.

The meaning and usage of the word “soul” in ancient Greece (
—written as “psyche”
⁴
) changes dramatically from century to century, and from philosopher to philosopher. It’s fairly difficult to sort it all out. Of course people don’t speak in twenty-first-century America the way they did in nineteenth-century America, but scholars of the next millennium will have a hard time becoming as sensitive to those differences as we are. Even differences of
four
hundred years are sometimes tricky to keep in mind: when Shakespeare writes of his beloved that “black wires grow on her head,” it’s easy to forget that electricity was still several centuries away. He’s not likening his lover’s hair to the shelves of RadioShack. And smaller and more nuanced distinctions are gnarlier by far. “Hah, that’s so ’80s,” we sometimes said to our friends’ jokes, as early as the ’90s … Can you imagine looking at a text from 460
B.C
. and realizing that the author is talking
ironically
like someone from 470
B.C.
?

Back to “soul”: the full story runs long, but a number of fascinating
points are raised at various moments in history. In Plato’s
Phaedo
(360
B.C.
), Socrates, facing his impending execution, argues that the soul is (in scholar Hendrik Lorenz’s words) “less subject to dissolution and destruction than the body, rather than, as the popular view has it, more so.”
More
so! This fascinated me to read. Socrates was arguing that the soul somehow
transcended
matter, whereas his countrymen, it would seem, tended to believe that the soul was made of a supremely gossamer, delicate, fine form of matter
⁵
—this was Heraclitus’s view
⁶
—and was therefore
more
vulnerable than the meatier, hardier tissues of the body. Though at first the notion of a fragile, material soul seems ludicrously out of line with everything we traditionally imagine about the soul, it makes more sense of, if offers less consolation for, things like head injury and Alzheimer’s. Likewise, part of the debate over abortion involves the question of when, exactly, a person
becomes
a person. The human body, Greeks of the fourth century
B.C
. believed, can both pre- and postdate the soul.

Along with questions of the composition and durability of the soul came questions of who and what had them. It’s not just the psychologists who have been invested in The Sentence: philosophers, too, seem oddly riveted on staking out just exactly what makes
Homo sapiens
different and unique. Though Homer only used the word “psyche” in the context of humans, many of the thinkers and writers that followed him began to apply it considerably more liberally. Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus referred to plants and animals with the same word; Empedocles believed he was a bush in a previous life; Thales of Miletus suspected that magnets, because they had the power to move other objects, might have souls.

Oddly, the word appears to have been used both more broadly and
more narrowly than it tends to be used in our culture today. It’s used to describe a general kind of “life force” that animates everything from humans to grasses, but it’s also construed specifically quite intellectually. In the
Phaedo
, the earlier of Plato’s two major works on the soul, Socrates ascribes beliefs, pleasures, desires, and fears to the
body
, while the soul is in charge of regulating these and of “grasping truth.”

In Plato’s later work,
The Republic
, he describes the soul as having three distinct parts—“appetite,” “spirit,” and “reason”—with those first two “lower” parts taking those duties (hunger, fear, and the like) from the body.

Like Plato, Aristotle didn’t believe that people had a soul—he believed we had three. His three were somewhat different from Plato’s, but they match up fairly well. For Aristotle, all plants and animals have a “nutritive” soul, which arises from biological nourishment and growth, and all animals additionally have an “appetitive” soul, which arises from movement and action. But humans alone had a third, “rational” soul.

I say “arises from” as opposed to “governs” or something along those lines; Aristotle was quite interesting in this regard. For him the soul was the
effect
of behavior, not the
cause
. Questions like this continue to haunt the Turing test, which ascribes intelligence purely on the basis of behavior.

After Plato and Aristotle came a school of Greek philosophy called Stoicism. Stoics placed the mind at the heart, and appear to have taken a dramatic step of severing the notion of the “soul” from the notion of life in general: for them, unlike for Plato and Aristotle, plants did
not
have souls. Thus, as Stoicism ascended to popularity in Greece, the soul became no longer responsible for life function in general, but specifically for its mental and psychological aspects.
⁷

Stoicism appears to have been among the tributary philosophies that fed into Christianity, and which also led to the seminal philosophical theories of mind of René Descartes. For the monotheistic Descartes, presumably the (Platonic) notion of multiple souls crowding around was a bit unsavory (although who could deny the Christian appeal of the three-in-one-ness?), and so he looked to draw that us-and-them line using just a single soul,
the
soul. He went remarkably further than Aristotle, saying, in effect, that all animals besides humans don’t have
any
kind of soul at
all
.