Star Trek: What are Little Girls Made Of?

I haven't seen this episode for years. It does seem a little campy now and the scenes where Kirk is using his mojo on the female android and getting ready to strike Rock with a giant phallic symbol are hysterical. Bottom line though, it was not only entertaining but did raise some interesting questions about what makes a person human. Our bodies are imperfect and designed to break down over mere decades, who wouldn't want their essence transferred to a theoretically immortal body so that they could go on and not be ravished by diseases and time? The questions that were raise are as poignant today as forty years ago when the episode originally aired. Can more than just data from our memory be transferred to a computer? Can we someday somehow transfer consciousness or is the consciousness by its definition something only organic life forms can possess? I believe as we learn more about the human mind and as machines progress, we will someday be able to bridge the gap. Two things that I think will be needed: the human minds ability to hold contradictory ideas together, not as black or white, but somehow to understand the contradictory nature of existence. Also, there will have to be different programs working on different levels that somehow mimic our id, superego and ego working together unconsciously. We are not there yet, but as our readings pointed out, man's consciousness arose from much more humble beginnings. Who is to say the machines won't evolve (with our help) to consciousness.

Colossus the Forbin Project

Great film. It reminded me of the 1959 movie, On the Beach, with its doomsday warning of man's inability to control his technology. As I stated in class, it also had the familiarity to it of all those classic Star Trek episodes that had an all powerful machine/being that Kirk or Picard would lecture at the end of the show about what a piece of work man was. However, in this film, there was no speech at the end, just a bunch of small, insignificant and powerless beings finally coming to realize that they have been bypassed on the evolutionary ladder. Given the film was made in 1970, I think it was meant more as a warning against man's hubris, a sort of retelling of the myth of Icarus, but given the advances in technology and our constant awareness that we are destroying the world we live in, I can't help but feel that perhaps machines will be the only thing left in a few hundred years. If man does manage to wipe himself out, then perhaps we are just one chain in the evolution of consciousness. A thousand years from now, conscious machines may think of us as we now view the Neanderthal or Lucy. The fact that we are doing this to ourselves makes the thinking machines seem less scary (as perhaps Colossus was seen back in 1970) and more a sign of hope that some part of humanity could live on once the organic beings become only images on a database and fossils.

My favorite image in the film (and there were many great moments) was the bridge being withdrawn by Dr. Forbin. What was left was only emptiness, with no way left to ever bridge the gap between man and machine. What a powerful image to capture before any dialogue even begins.

Paley's Natural Theology

I found Paley's Natural Theology piece fascinating as it was published all the way back in 1826 yet the ideas it explores can still be applied to current debates on creationism and technology (with machines "conceivably" producing other machines). We were told Paley was going to be a straw man, but I don't think we fully explored how his argument was shown to be faulty. I brought up the argument that his image of a complex watch being proof of a designer (as it is too complex to form by accident) doesn't prove God exists, as then we would have to argue how could a complex being (the most complex ever) such as God have come into existence (who designed God?); however I was told this is not the crux of Paley's argument. We instead focused on the reductio ad absurdum aspect, the watch reproducing itself and the question of can their be a design without a designer. First, watches don't make watches of course. And even if a machine was able to reproduce itself, the original designer (at least in this area of the universe) would be man. The fact that man has created something complex, with a design, doesn't prove the existence of God. We didn't have time in class to discuss the current theories on the first spark(s) that produced life from lifelessness (I hope we do soon) but if you grant that life can form spontaneously under the right conditions (temperature, gasses, etc.) and agree that over vast spans of time, evolution can produce mutations, changes and complexity, then the fact that a being has evolved with consciousness, that can create complex tools to better control his environment, does not prove (or disprove) the existence of God. Had the first watch just appeared and then started producing other watches, I think would be a strong indication of a devine hand. However, all life on this planet came from very rudimentary beginnings, so how does something we view as complex today argue for complexity in the beginning?