Humans 2.2: The Consciousness Code

Humans 2.2 begins with talk of a "consciousness code" - a good description of what Niska has digitally sent out to the world, a code like a virus, that operates in an inexact, unpredictable way, triggering consciousness in just a relatively small number of androids - as far as we know - and maybe not at the same time.  This also is a good description of the unpredictable power of the overall series.

Episode 2.2 can be seen as various riffs on this consciousness code.  Athena is trying to transplant her AI desktop creation into an android body.  She doesn't say this, but she's probably read Merleau-Ponty and his notion of a "metaphysics of flesh" - that you can't have true human sentience in just a nonliving machine, what's needed is a brain in an physical, living, moving body.  Merleau-Ponty was talking about how human intelligence evolved and exists, but the same presumably would apply to artificial brains or AI - they require bodies.   So Athena's on the right track, but her attempt tonight fails.

Mattie's working on this, too, in a different way.  She has a copy of Niska's code, and she wants to create a human sentient android out of a stock model, by uploading the code in its/his brain.  She looks like she's well on the way.

As in season 1, we also are getting a good display of other androids, almost sentient, or sentient in different ways from our main characters.  The shrink introduced last week is back again, and is as well versed in accents as in therapy.  This android psychologist - a psychologist who is an android, not a human psychologist attempting to understand an android -  is actually a good joking commentary on Rogerian therapy, which, as Joseph Weizenbaum demonstrated decades ago, can be easily mimicked by even a primitive AI program.  It's also a riff, come to think of it, on that old joke - "I went to see a child psychologist, and that kid was useless!"

And the android who was a detective - DI Voss - is back again this year.   She seems as sentient as Niska, Mia, Sam, and the rest - but there's something a little different about her consciousness code too, and it will be fun and provocative to see how it plays out.

And I'll be back here with more musings on all of this next week.

See also Humans 2.1: Westworld meets Nashville

And see also Humans: In Ascending Order ... Humans 1.7: "I Think You're Dead, George"

Almost Human 1.11: The Metaphysics of Flesh

Tonight in Almost Human 1.11 we get another good future crime story - involving both the digital and the tangible - as well as an important piece of the ongoing Dorian biography with implications for the overall Almost Human narrative.

The crime story is centered around a smart home, which we're just beginning to see emerge in the 21st century.  Our homes today can and are constructed to regulate temperature, what's on television, and other benign and helpful things, as well as call police when intruders - i.e., people who don't have the requisite code or other characteristics - break in.   How big a step would it be to program homes to kill an intruder whom the home deems a danger to its denizens? In a stand-your-ground world taken to its logical, deadly, sick extreme, a smart home kills a teenage boy who climbs over a wall in Almost Human 1.11.  This in turn sets in motion a revenge plot in which Kennex and Dorian must overcome masterful hacking and killer androids - or a combination of cyber and physical - to stop further killing.

The smart house, like the smart car, and smart phone, represent the continuing evolution of what the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the "metaphysics of flesh".  Homes and cars and phones of course are not flesh, but they can be animated and driven by information in the same way as living beings.  Important and instructive to see this on a television show.

Also expansive to see another hacker on the side of the good in addition to Rudy - in this case, Nico, who manages to out-hack Emily, the master hacker seeking revenge.  But Rudy plays the more significant role in the ongoing story, discovering that Dorian has been embedded with human memories.    Rudy removes that module, but the reason for the embedding remains to be uncovered - including who did it - and will likely have a decisive role in the series.

There are just a few episodes left of Almost Human this season, with still no word that it will be renewed.  I hope it is.   What certainly hasn't helped in building an audience for this good series is that, for whatever reason, it episodes have been presented out of order.   The labyrinths of television programming can rival the metaphysics of androids and smart homes of the future.

See also: Almost Human debuts: A Review ... Almost Human 1.2: Sexbots ... Almost Human 1.3: Change of Face ... Almost Human 1.4: Almost Breaking Bad ... Almost Human 1.5: Clones and Holograms ...Almost Human 1.6: The Blackmarket Heart and Double Dorian ... Almost Human 1.7: Meets Criminal Minds ... Almost Human 1.8: Guided Bullets ... Almost Human 1.9: Literally Bad Robot ... Almost Human 1.10: Killer Genes

#SFWApro


Like science fiction about bio-programming? Try The Silk Code

Caprica 1.8: "The Metaphysics of Flesh"

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of the "metaphysics of flesh," by which he meant that we cannot understand intelligence as an abstract, but only as a process that animates and directs real bodies in the real world.   In my Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age (1988), I argue that this means that artificial intelligence consisting of a program however powerful in a stationary computer can never really be like human intelligence - that would require a program in a machine that moved through the world, like a human being, or a robot.  Or, in BSG/Caprican terms, a Cylon.

Daniel Graystone almost says as much to Zoe in Caprica 1.8 tonight, telling her, "I took you out of a virtual playground and brought you into the real world" - took her out of V-world and put her into a robotic body that moves through the world, if not exactly like a human, certainly at least in our real world, not a virtual realm of electronics and pixels.

Since I agree with Merleau-Ponty, I thought Daniel's point was well taken.  Not that I admire his methods - trying to use everything from fire to ordering Cylonic Zoe to kill her beloved dog to get her to come out - but I do think Zoe owes some kind of debt to Daniel.  He didn't set the bomb that killed her flesh-and-blood existence.   Rather, it was his work, both in holobands and robots, that has allowed Zoe to continue to have two ongoing lives after death.

Caprica's first season (or the first part of the first season) will end next week.   I may be a little late in posting my review - I'll be a guest author at the science fiction convention, I-Con, where Ronald D. Moore will be a guest of honor - but I wanted to say now that I surely hope Caprica comes back for a second and more seasons.   Like Battlestar Galactica, Caprica has delved into some of the most profound philosophic issues, in or out of fiction, only Caprica's have been somewhat different from BSG's.    Its mix of fathers and daughters and avatars and Cylon has been uniquely thought-provoking and enjoyable.



See also:  Battlestar Galactica Caprica: Exquisite, Flawed Copies ... 1.2:  Dawn of a Different Machine ... 1.3:  Daughters, Missing and Present ... 1.5: Adama's Daughter ... 1.6: The Chip and its Roots
... 1.7: The Cylon and the Dog

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The Plot to Save Socrates



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