A typewriter will never turn itself on in the middle of the night and begin clacking out the "Great American Novel." However, a cat will wake itself up in the middle of the night, find a ball of yarn, and bat it all around the living room, leaving a tangle of yarn around the legs of chairs. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between all machines and all life. It is odd that the behaviorists, alleged students of behavior, do not seem to have noticed this difference.
We know that no real car will ever behave like "The Love Bug" in some Disney movies, partly because we have at least some crude knowledge of how cars work. The great humbug of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is made possible only because most programmers do not become fluent in assembly language, and never learn the physics of a logic gate. It's just a dumb machine, and like any other machine, it does only what we tell it to do. If we don't tell it to do anything, it is just an expensive paperweight.
We have to push the buttons on machines. Living things, on the other hand, may initiate action without anything pushing their buttons. The first attribute of animacy is initiative. Our ordinary everyday experience is that machines and living creatures behave very differently. Hollywood writers instinctively recognize this difference. When they want to show us AI, instead they show us animacy. Herbie the Love Bug starts by itself and goes where it wants, regardless of the operator's inputs. Hal 5000 has to be cajoled, and the crew is nervous about its decisions.
When a computer program is run with the same inputs, it always produces the same outputs. This is still true if the program includes a random number generator, so long as it is provided with the same "seed" number. But in the same environment, cloned life forms take different actions. Thus, the second attribute of animacy is choice.
A virus may attack a cell immediately, or it may lie low and hide for years. Don't blame this on quantum mechanics. Viruses are far too large to be affected by quantum mechanics.
The third attribute of animacy is strategy, such as the strategy of a virus which decides to hide out in some unusual host while it rearranges genes until it can survive some new antibody to it. See Kilboume's book Influenza. Strategy is a combination of purpose and creativity.
It is this combination of initiative, choice, and strategy that is animacy, which gives empirical content to the empty philosophical term "free will."
AI is a belief in magic. It is an age-old dream, one we find in Pinocchio, for instance, the dream of bringing an inanimate object to life with some magic spell. In the case of AI, the "magic spell" is a computer program. AI enthusiasts believe if they can just make the program big enough or smart enough, the computer will suddenly "come to life," like Number-5 in one of those Disney movies ("Short Circuit"). It will never happen. There are no essential differences between computers and other machines. If a computer can come to life, why not a car or a screwdriver? Ally Sheedy says "I'm a machine, and I'm alive." In what factory was she built?
All living things have animacy. How do I explain this? Mind. Mind provides the coherency and continuity of perception, the overall organization of the organism, and animacy in behavior. The nervous system is only a pre-processor. Viruses, bacteria, fungi and plants display animacy and coherent behavior without a trace of a nervous system.
I give two examples of coherency. If we watch bacteria under a microscope, we see all the internal parts jiggling around, doing the dance of life. At cell death, all cease simultaneously. There is no ripple of failure that spreads out from one place or another. Another instance of unexplained coherency comes from the study of neurophysiology in higher animals. A certain stimulus causes certain columns of neurons in the cortex to fire. But there remains an inexplicable quantum jump from that fact to the coherent field of perception.
This gap is finally being noticed in the scientific community. See "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience," by David J. Chalmers, in Scientific American, December 1995, p. 80. Physiology can never jump that gap. It is Mind that gives ordinary perception its coherence and continuity. All living things have animacy because they all have Minds. Thus, the detailed behavior of living things can never be predicted, even if we are talking about trees, fungi or viruses.
Reductionists just assume that living things can be explained in terms of heredity and environment. The truth is, reductionists have ignored animacy. They haven't explained it away, any more than they have explained away consciousness.
Another way of looking at animacy is in terms of challenge-and-response, which may really be opportunity-and-response.
The great historian Arnold Toynbee found repeated patterns of challenge-and-response in human affairs, although no one has
ever found an example of cause-and-effect in history that could stand up to close scrutiny. This is just another way of
looking at animacy, not a different or more advanced kind of animacy.
Copyright © Thales 1999
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