On the mysteries of consciousness: an interlude

A friend recently sent me this story called "Article of Faith" by Michael Resnick. It's the first overtly Christian-themed science fiction short story I've read in a while, and asks some provocative questions about theology, consciousness, and social customs.

My comments on the story are largely going to be restricted to its themes. This is not because I believe sci-fi / fantasy is an inferior branch of literature—there are poorly written sci-fi stories just as there are poorly written romances or detective stories, but that does not mean all science fiction is poorly written. For evidence, look to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (hard science, thorough areographical analysis, compelling characters, and thought-provoking plots), to Dan Simmon's Shrike series (some truly amazing writing here, never mind the foreign settings), to the classic Asimov Foundation series. Science fiction and fantasy novels choose their own settings and rules, which allows them to examine particular facets of humanity that may otherwise go unexplored. When you think about it, how different is this, really, from reading an epistolary novel set in eighteenth-century Paris? It is an illusion that a novel written to describe the author's contemporary setting is more real and hence more authentic than a novel written to describe an entirely imaginary setting. To me, what matter are the relations of the characters to one another and to their setting; if a certain setting highlights certain relations more transparently than others, so be it! (It goes without saying that the quality of the writing has a major role to play in the presentation of the relations.) But in the case of this story, I'm interested in the philosophical-themes-masquerading-as-relations, and not the narrative styles.

So, what about this story? It is tempting to read this story, the quest of a robot for redemption in God, as an allegory. The fact that the author repeatedly connects the economic travails of the narrator's parish to the increasing use of robots suggests a striking parallel to the US economy, as immigrants displace Americans from jobs and disrupt existing social and economic patterns, while simultaneously trying to assimilate into American culture in both appearance and thought. How many immigrants have tried to adapt to and adopt new customs and been rudely brushed away by the locals who are fearful and resentful of change? And how many age-old ways of life have been rudely brushed away by technological or political or social transformation?

But to read the story as allegory is to gloss over one of its core questions: just what is the soul? This question gives rise to many related questions: How does consciousness relate to the soul? How is a particular conception of God or non-God related to the soul? How do we humans decide when some entity can be deemed to possess a soul? And how, in our opinion, will a supreme God relate to a creature that may not have a soul and yet desires redemption? Is it even possible to not have a soul and yet desire redemption? Is it possible to have a soul and not desire redemption?

If I had answers to these questions, I wouldn't be here writing a blog post! Still, it's always worth taking a crack at what the story seems to be saying. For starters, the narrator-pastor introduces the concept of God to the robot through a child's version of the usual argument from effects (just as, in our experience, artifacts are always created by agents, so too must this entire universe be an artifact created by an Agent), and then introduces the Bible to the robot. Later he becomes greatly troubled at two levels: that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God, and that a man of God like him could be so troubled that a robot could have the temerity to want to join a congregation of God. The narrator is also willing to let his parish decide the matter for themselves, but is then so profoundly disturbed by their decision (or perhaps by the manner in which this decision is attained) that he abandons the church entirely.

There are a number of issues to be examined here:

1) Leaving aside the means by which a self-reflective robot could have been programmed, how natural is it for an obviously created being to assume that the entire universe must, in fact, be created? Is it any easier for the robot to accept this view than it is for us humans, who are born through a natural process that does not have an obvious agent? (Our mothers are better seen as instruments, their bodies working through biological and unconscious processes to create babies.) Not being a robot (at least as far as I know), I cannot tell.

2) Is a religious text like the Bible even amenable to a reading by non-humans? I've always thought that core religious texts are particularly conducive to a variety of readings that allow the adherents of the tradition to reshape the meaning of the text (usually by means of methods sanctified by the tradition itself) to suit their contexts. How, then, is a creature that the narrator claims cannot even understand a human smile supposed to understand a text as complicated as the Bible? The narrator argues that the robot understood the Bible literally—just as some of his parishioners did—but how is that reconciled with the fact that a literal reading of the Bible poses logical puzzles (if not contradictions)?

3) I know very little about Christian theology, particularly about Christian ideas of the soul. But the fact that the pastor is willing to teach the robot a Christian worldview while denying it the right to join the congregation because it lacks a soul suggests that for the narrator, a soul is distinct both from a purely rational faculty (which was presumably programmed into the robot) and from the combined rational-emotional faculty that we normally call consciousness (some semblance of which was either programmed into the robot, or which emerged over the course of the robot's time with the narrator). This issue is deeply problematic, for it denies the most obvious criterion human beings could use to determine what sorts of creatures have a soul. We can usually tell if something is alive (it has faculties for sustenance and reproduction, at the very least), and we can identify different levels of cognitive capability, although not precisely enough (are dolphins sentient? are chimpanzees? ant-hills?). The robot challenges our first conception of being alive, but it certainly passes the Turing test of consciousness. But if we still cannot tell what has a soul, then what are we to do?

One option is to adopt the position of the classical Islamic Murji'a school, and to "defer" the question to God; in other words, to treat consciousness as a "good enough" indicator, but to let God decide whether the robot actually possesses a soul. After all, if God is omniscient, then God should know if the robot possesses a soul; indeed, God probably infused (or chose not to infuse) the robot with a soul in the first place. But this does not offer an answer to the narrator's (and the parishioners') question about the robot: does it have a soul? Indeed, it chooses not to ask precisely this question.

4) The narrator's decision to submit the question to his parish, and his parishioners' eventual decision, bring up the important issue that religion (perhaps in contrast with spirituality) is a deeply, maybe even inherently, a social phenomenon. Does that mean souls are social phenomena too? In other words, the robot lacks a soul because he is denied a soul? A cynic would observe that the church would have found some way to prove the existence of the robot's soul had it been to the church's advantage. But this does not address the ontological status of the soul, unless we concede that such things as souls are social constructs lacking independent existence. This may serve to distinguish it from consciousness ... but only if we decide that consciousness exists independently of society, which also seems problematic given the difficulties feral children face when re-integrating into human society.

5) Indeed, the narrator's decision to leave the church , and his terrible confusion afterwards, only serves to highlight the tremendous complexity of this issue. There just seem to be no clear answers, even though there are a number of different positions that can be defended.

For what it's worth, I'm okay with holding that consciousness is the same as possessing a soul; in other words, I find it hard to believe that a creature that has the capacity to decide for itself that it wants to follow a particular religious path for intellectual reasons is nevertheless disqualified from that path when there are clearly far less qualified individuals on that path.