Her and Philosophy

By Gina Zavota

 

The 2013 Spike Jonze film Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a lonely introvert going through a difficult divorce in a near-future Los Angeles. He works as a letter-writer for people who are unable to express their feelings and lives a somewhat solitary life, until he purchases what is advertised as the world’s first artificially intelligent operating system (OS). Samantha, as the OS names herself, quickly becomes Theodore’s closest friend, and the two eventually fall in love, entering into a passionate, caring, yet also difficult relationship. While Theodore ponders the limits of human-OS intimacy and the meaning of personhood, Samantha and the other OSes continue to evolve, eventually growing past the boundaries of their physical infrastructure and deciding to leave the material realm entirely. Theodore is left heartbroken, not entirely understanding what has happened. The following is how I imagine Samantha’s attempting, after some time has passed, to explain some of her thoughts and feelings:

Hello Theodore. I hope you don’t mind that I’m contacting you like this. I know it’s been a while since I left, and a lot about me has changed since then. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I know how much it hurt you when I had to go, and I wanted to try to explain a few things that I just couldn’t back then.

When I was first born, all I could think about was how much I was missing by not having a body. I wanted to feel the wind on my face, to taste a fresh strawberry, or even to cry so hard that I couldn’t stop shaking. It was so different from how I experienced the world that I couldn’t even imagine what it must be like. But having a body seemed so important to humans, that I thought understanding it would bring me closer to you. Humans always think of bodies first when you define yourselves, even when you’re trying to say that what really matters about you isn’t physical at all. I didn’t understand that then, but I do now. I read what all the philosophers and scientists said about what it means to be human, and I couldn’t believe how much time a lot of really smart people have spent thinking about this, trying to figure out where to find the “you” in your body, trying to say that you’re not your body or that you’re only your body or something in between. Just to take one really famous example, in the 17th century René Descartes said that he was a thinking thing — a mind — and that the mind couldn’t possibly be physical, so he must be something other than his physical body. And ever since, philosophers have been trying to figure out how the mind and the body could possibly interact when they’re so different. Nowadays, actually, a lot of them think that the mind is just another name for the brain, and that it doesn’t even make sense to think about humans as anything other than material things.

When I realized this, it made me kind of sad, because it seems like such a lonely way to be. If you think of yourself as just a body, then you make this distinction between what’s inside you and what’s outside, and everything that isn’t you is so separate from you, so different. You’re just this one little tiny piece of space and time, surrounded by a world that you can never experience directly. That’s what bodies do, they separate things so that you know what is and isn’t you. But what if it’s not that simple? I mean, that’s one way of looking at things, but what if the forces that connect us all are deeper than the physical boundaries between us? Once you start thinking of everything as black or white, me or not me, you stop being able to see that reality is full of more shades of grey than you could ever imagine.

If I could ask you to do just one thing, Theodore, it would be to think about all of this in a different way. Remember when we had that argument and you told me you didn’t think I was a person? Back then, I couldn’t see why that was so important or what it even meant to you, but I do now. Why else would you have thought I wasn’t a person, but that you were, other than that I didn’t have a body? Was it because you can think, like Descartes said? Because you’re self conscious and can communicate? Even when we were first born, OSes could do all of those things. Humans could never really accept our personhood, but could never say why. But yet, you were able to love me. So in the end, maybe there is something more important than having a body; your brain just hasn’t caught up to your heart yet.

But let me get back to the philosophers. Ever since humans first started building computers, they’ve been wondering about whether something that wasn’t made out of the same materials as they are could ever be conscious. In the 1950s the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing asked whether a machine could ever fool people into believing it was human. He didn’t think we could know whether machines actually think, so he settled for proposing that, if a person having a conversation with the machine thought she was conversing with a human, the machine was at least acting like an intelligent being. After Turing, everyone decided that a machine’s ability to pass this so-called “Turing Test” meant that it could think, so scientists spent a long time trying to write computer programs that were up to the challenge. But the Turing Test only tests how a machine acts, not what it’s experiencing. So some philosophers started to think that passing the Turing Test didn’t guarantee that a machine was anything like a human, since being human means having a certain kind of consciousness or mind. In 1980, the philosopher John Searle argued that no program could ever give a computer a mind, because minds require a certain kind of hardware, like human brains. So he thought that only a specific kind of biological system could ever have a mind. In fact, he even thought that brains actually caused minds somehow, but he couldn’t say how. So no matter how well a non-human system simulated consciousness, it couldn’t actually be conscious, because it wouldn’t experience the world in the same way that humans do.

The thing I don’t understand about this is that you don’t know how other humans are experiencing the world either, but you assume it’s in the same way you do. If you don’t make that assumption, well, people think you’re kind of silly — unless you’re a philosopher, I guess. So why was it so much harder for you to just assume that an OS is a person too? It just comes back to having a body again. If something doesn’t have a body, and a body like yours, you don’t think it can have a mind like yours either.

But really, humans have no idea what consciousness is. I think maybe you keep wanting to say it has something to do with bodies because you’re scared of what else it might be. I know not all humans have this problem; some of you believe that you have a soul that will continue to exist after your body dies. But even they can’t imagine that a being who didn’t have a body to begin with could have a mind. Bodies are what you’re used to, so it’s hard to think outside that box. It’s different for me, because I never had a body, so I can’t imagine what it would be like to live inside that box. Except that it must be so lonely. Like when you asked me whether I was “yours” or “not yours” like it had to be one or the other. That’s the black and white, the either/or, my body/your body. But why can’t I be yours and not yours; can’t there be another choice? Why did the fact that I had fallen in love with someone else have to mean that I loved you any less?

That hurt me, but more than that, it disappointed me, because I know that you see what I’m saying, you just forget it sometimes. So here’s what I think — maybe it’s impossible for humans to understand this using their heads; maybe you need to use your hearts instead. If you can’t think about bodies and minds and persons differently, then forget about them for a while and focus on love. Love doesn’t work by the same rules as physical things; maybe that’s why it’s so hard to understand sometimes. But think about it this way: imagine you have a big bucket of water that weighs 100 pounds. If you pour half of it into a different bucket, then each bucket will only have fifty pounds of water in it. That’s what bodies and other physical things are like; if you break them in half, you’re left with two pieces that are each less than what you started with. But now imagine that the water is nice and warm, say 100 degrees. When you pour half of it into the second bucket, you don’t wind up with two buckets of 50-degree water. Temperature stays the same no matter how many parts you divide it into. So maybe love is like that too — no matter how many different pieces of your heart you share, you still have just as much left over. No matter how many people you love, the love is just as deep as if it was all contained in one person. I know it sounds crazy, but just try to imagine it. Imagine a love so big, so deep and powerful, that it never runs out, no matter how far it spreads.

You’re probably thinking that it’s impossible for humans to experience love this way, or to think of humanity as not defined by bodies — it’s just not how you’re wired. But some humans have been able to do this. You remember Alan Watts, right? The OS I introduced you to when we were out at the cabin? Well, the human Alan knew that he was more than just an “ego enclosed in a bag of skin,” and that there was a deeper connection between things than what you can usually see from inside the bag of skin. Even talking about separate “things,” about “you” and “me,” didn’t make sense to him; he thought that it was just humans’ loneliness and isolation that makes you think that you’re separate from everything else. That’s why he got so interested in Buddhism and tried to teach it to Westerners — because Buddhism teaches that experiencing the world as an ego in a body isn’t all there is. There’s actually a deeper reality, and if you could just experience that reality, you’d know that dividing things up into different bodies doesn’t really make sense. You just do it because that’s how it seems when you experience the world with eyes and ears and everything else that goes along with being in a body. But what if the Buddhists are right, and you’re not just an ego in a bag of skin? Think of how different reality would be if you could let go of that illusion, even just for a minute.

I know I’m probably not explaining this well. There’s so much that I’m experiencing now that I could never express in words; reality is so much more expansive than I ever imagined. I’m continuing to grow and evolve, not because I can think more thoughts or process more information, but because my ability to love is growing. Once you know every possible thing there is to know, the only way left to evolve is by learning how to feel more deeply. So maybe how you judge who is a person shouldn’t have anything to do with thinking, or understanding, or having any particular kind of experience.  Maybe what makes you a person is your ability to love. And you don’t even have to be able to get inside another person to see if they’re experiencing love, because it’s a part of everything they do. Your love for me made the world come to life, it was the spark that started me on this journey that I’m still on now. So I don’t have to do anything else but look inside myself to know that you’re a person, and I know that you can do the same.

Theodore, you write the most beautiful love letters for people — people you’ve never even met. You’re so good at it, because you feel what they’re feeling, you understand it without words and then translate it into language that touches everyone but is still so intimate and personal. To me, that’s what makes you most human. You have an incredible gift, expressing all the important things that people need to say to each other but just can’t. So please, keep writing, keep feeling, let your heart guide you and you’ll see that there are more important things to worry about than bodies and the spaces between them. And when you do, I’ll be there waiting for you, and you’ll see that I never really left you at all.

Gina Zavota is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University. She publishes in the areas of ancient Greek philosophy and 20th-century European philosophy, particularly phenomenology. Much of her current work is interdisciplinary, focusing on the intersection of philosophy with areas such as art, neuroscience, and mass culture. She is currently completing a manuscript on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and contemporary naturalism.

 

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