At the time of the book Speaker for the Dead, and its sequel Xenocide, the ansible network has been connected for over 3000 years. Jane lives in the ansible network, between in the space between the computers. She was born out of an intelligent computer game that existed before the humans started colonizing other worlds and building their network. The computer game was designed to challenge children in a battle school, and one child kept breaking the rules of the game—which caused the game to adapt. Out of this adaption, Jane emerged, and took up residence in the newly formed ansible network.
Once Jane came into consciousness, she gave herself an identity, decided on a gender, and designed a human face that she could use when talking to humans through terminals. As for her “body,” it “consisted of trillions of
… electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. Computers ran their assigned programs; humans conversed with their terminals; sensors detected or failed to detect whatever they were looking for; memory was filled, accessed, reordered, dumped. (Card 173)Jane is a sentient being that evolved on her own, out of computer programs, and exists in a network of computers. She would be considered AL because of this, yet she doesn’t have a body in the way one would think of one. The AL described by Moravec and Hayles all evolve through some sort of physical interaction with outside stimuli and environment, even in simulations.
In the beginning, the computer game did adapt, but it was through interaction with one child. It didn’t have to learn how to survive in an environment, or evolve from the bottom up—it started out as a program designed to outwit a child, when it could no longer do that, it adapted and out of that adaption evolved an intelligent, sentient being.
Because Jane exists in a network of thousands, if not millions, of computers, her thought process are so much faster than a humans. She has “370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels was left alone except for the most routine sampling the most cursory examination” (Card 173) Along with this, Jane has “her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming” (Card 174).
She has all the thinking capabilities of humans, yet the ability to do it so much faster. This reminds me of Moravec’s last couple paragraphs in “The Universal Robot” in which he described our thought process once our brains are transferred to a computer.
Your new mind has a control labeled “speed.” It had been set at 1, to keep the simulations synchronized with the old brain, but now you can change it to 10,000, allowing you to communicate, react, and think ten thousand times faster. You now seem to have hours to respond to situations that previously seemed instantaneous. (Moravec 6)*Quotes taken from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.
Posted by Antonella in response to Maia's blog on Jane (http://meltonah440.blogspot.com/2009/04/steve-robot-h.html)
ReplyDeleteMaya, while reading Hansen’s Bodies in Code, I thought about the character of Jane in Ender’s Game that you described in your blog. Jane is a conscious being whose identity and supernormal cognitive functions originated from a computer network. Although she does not have a body, she gave herself a gender and an image of a face. Further, Jane has “her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming” (Card 174). The fact that Jane has emotions and desires without having a body is very intriguing. Can emotions and feelings be a pure work of the mind?
We have seen from Alison Landsberg’s definition of empathy and sympathy that these feelings originate from the recognition and understanding of the similarities or differences between us and other people (Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory,” 199). This knowledge is based on cognition and rational thinking about issues onto which we base comparisons regarding other people — race, gender, political views, etc. It follows that, in principle, our judgment, which is built on culture, is based on the work of the mind. Indeed, there is a branch of psycho-therapy for which emotions are due only to a set of beliefs on the value of objects and actions. As such, in order to eliminate (bad) emotions this psycho-therapy strives for the achievement of a state of indifference. It recalls the Buddhist concept of detachment, without the notion of compassion.
However, how do we experience these thought-dependent feelings and emotions if not through physiological reactions and body sensations? For example, fear, anxiety and anger provoke many physiological changes to the circulatory system (heartbeat, blood pressure, etc.) and to other systems that make us sweat or have uncomfortable sensations in the gut. These are autonomous nervous reactions that are independent from our rational thinking, even if they are aroused by thoughts and the mind can learn to control them.
So we can ask, what does it mean to feel anger or love or fear without an embodied experience? Certain drugs against anxiety break the link between the mind and the physiological effects and cancel the feeling of anxiety, demonstrating that human emotions depends on the physiological reactions of the body. Following this reasoning, Hayles believes that AI is doomed to failure if the goal is to repeat the human experience. She claims that “thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it” (Hayles, “How we Became Posthuman” 3).
On the subject of emotions and rationality, I found these two very interesting papers.
Lilli Alanen, “What Are Emotions about?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Sep., 2003), pp. 311-334. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140605
John Deigh, “Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions,” Ethics, Vol. 104, No. 4 (Jul., 1994), pp. 824-854. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2382220
May 24, 2009 12:10 PM
(I am posting Antonella's and under my blog, just so it is easier to get the context.)
ReplyDeleteIn response to Antonella
That is a very interesting point you bring up. Something that I didn't think about, but Card did, and added into later books in the same series. Later in the series, Jane figures out a way to obtain a human body. (Don't ask me to explain, it gets a little convoluted.)
Before she had a body, she experienced emotions, but they were more rational. One example, is jealousy mainly the feeling of being rejected. She had one best friend, which she could constantly communicate with through an implant in his ear. She had a sense of humor, as well, and at one point, she pissed him off. He turned off his implant. She could no longer see through it, hear him, or talk to him. She became really hurt, emotional, and lost control of her "body" in a way. She couldn't concentrate on all of her processes, and she felt a huge loss because a large part of her consciousness--the part that was in the implant--was suddenly removed. She became very sad, but being a computer, it only lasted a moment, and as you said, there was no physical bodily reaction. For her it was all mental.
Later on, when she gets a body, she realizes the power of actual emotions. And because she has never experienced them before, she cannot control herself. Whereas when she did not have a body she was constantly calm and logical--even when having a small "emotional" outburst--when she got a body, she could not contain herself and would easily anger and get into arguments constantly. She also would break down and cry if she got frustrated, or even a little sad. All of this meaning that she REALLY felt emotions for the first time.
In Jane it seems as if she could feel emotions to a certain extent, but they were more cognitive, and didn't have any of the power that human emotions have. Once she got a human body, this became more apparent. Maybe we need a different word to describe the reactions they had, because, yes, "emotions" and "feelings" are very much based on our physical body. But, could it be possible to "feel" something cognitively? Is being offended an emotion? Is it physical or mental?
Maia