Films in which philosophy of
mind is salient may, like films in which metaphysics is reconfigured, run the
risk of not being understood. The
Matrix (1999), however, depicts solipsism (or, “mind in a vat”) in a
way that viewers could grasp the philosophy without much difficulty. Dialogue,
image, and narrative all contribute to give audiences a coherent sense with
which they can go on to look at their daily lives as if they were illusory
rather than real. Sixteen years later, The Imitation Game (2015) brought
to audiences a salient question that would become more pressing during the AI
revolution: How does the human brain’s thinking differ from a computer’s
thinking?
In the film, whose story takes
place during World War II in Britain, Alan Turing dismisses the suggestion that
the brain is a machine, and yet more often than not, he behaves like an emotionless
machine in his relations with other people. In repressing emotion so much, it
may be that the actual man was autistic. In such a case of utter indifference
to the feelings of others and pushing down on one’s own feelings, it may be
more difficult to distinguish human from machine thinking, if indeed computers
(which compute) can be said to think at all. I once met a person
best described as relating to me as if I were a remote acquaintance. Her utter
refusal to feel and cold indifference to my feelings reminds me of
Turing in the film. Humans may be able to resemble thinking machines too
closely for comfort. In such cases, using what is known as the imitation game
to assess whether the entity supplying answers to questions is human or a
machine may be more difficult. Fortunately, Turing is not a completely
emotionless thinking-machine in the film (and presumably in real life too), so regarding
the inventor of the computer, it cannot be said that it takes one to invent
one.
The film is centered on Alan Turing’s
invention of a computer to decode the Nazi coding-machine known as enigma, and
he cleverly resists the temptation once his computer breaks the code to prevent
every Nazi attack because that would tip the Germans off that their enigma was
no longer an enigma to the enemy. Letting 80% of the secret German attacks go
through while preempting the remaining 20% strategically enabled the de-coding
to remain a secret for the remaining two years of the war. In short, Alan Turing
is accurately depicted in the film as an excellent thinker who invents the first
computer, which in turn presumably can think.
Can it be said, however, that Turing’s
computer thinks? AI, which may complicate the answer, is not relevant in the
historically-based film. Does computing 1’s and 0’s constitute thinking? If so,
because computing is mathematical-logical in nature, computer “thinking” would
be a subset of thinking in general. Spinoza’s thinking substance has an infinite
intellect that contains an infinity of ideas, some of which that God thinks into
being in the world. Spinoza’s pantheistic “God” generates the world by
thinking. This notion of thinking is similar to the role of Logos, God’s
rational principle, or Word, in the biblical Book of Genesis. Does such
thinking bear any resemblance to the that of a human brain or a machine whose “thinking”
is not subject to the warping effects of subjectivity? If so, then God’s wholly-other
quality would be diminished in the anthropomorphic projection of the human attribute.
Can it be that machine “thinking”
differs from human thinking because only the latter is affected by subjectivity
and emotions? Nietzsche claims that the content of an idea in the human mind is
an instinctual urge; thoughts are simply one form in which passions can manifest—only
the most powerful urges among others being able to break through into
consciousness. In The Imitation Game, Turing’s desire to solve enigma so
the Allies could defeat the Axis powers fuel his tireless work in inventing a
machine that, like Einstein’s theories of relativity, is totally new rather
than merely a modification of an existing machine. This sets up the dramatic
tension of the film.
As can be expected from reading
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, such a leap as Turing
makes triggers resistance. The idiocy of the knee-jerk efforts to thwart Turing
in his work is only outdone by that of the official resistance to him personally.
Moreover, the pathetic quality of the resistances is so far removed from the
brilliance of Turing’s mind that the sheer complexity of and the resulting variability
in the human brain are hard to grasp even from having seen the film. This is no
fault of the medium of film, or the screenwriter and director of this film, for
it is astounding that the man whose brain invents the computer is given the
choice of two years in prison or hormone treatment because he has been found
guilty of violating the law against indecency because he is a homosexual. Put another
way, a man with a brain capable of inventing a computing machine that could
outdo human thinking in breaking the very difficult enigma code of the Nazis in
months rather than millions of years has to be subject to a judge and even
presumably men of medical “science” who are so mistaken even on what constitutes
a disease (or illness) and is appropriate medical treatment. The sheer distance
between these poles of this dichotomy is mind-blowing, and yet both genius and
prejudiced idiocy are housed in the human brain.
Now, taking a step even further,
the question of how human thinking differs from machine thinking begs the wider
question that is not explicitly asked in the film: how are is human nature
different from a machine? Turing calls his computer Christopher. Turing himself
is so arrogant and demeaning to the other members of his code-breaking group
and even to Commander Denniston that it is surprising that none of them chide
Turing for sticking with Christopher throughout the film rather than turn to
the more informal Chris among friends. To be sure, my youngest brother’s middle
name is Christopher, and it fits in his complete name much better than Chris would.
But I digress. What I am getting at is
this: Is Turing more like Christopher than he (or we) would like to admit?
His fiancée, Joan Clarke, is
wrong, however, in calling Turing a monster because he is being so heartless in
breaking up with her; in breaking off their engagement, he lies that he has
been using her for the project all along. He cares for her too much emotionally
to use her as his wife as a cover for his illegal homosexuality while she goes
without sex in a marital relationship. His apparent coldness is a manifestation
of immense care for her, which he masks.
During a flashback in the film
to a scene in which the headmaster of his boyhood school informs the sensitive lad
that the boy whom he loves has just died of Tuberculosis, Alan stuffs his
emotion as he denies having been at all close to his friend. It is ironic that this
very sensitivity that would otherwise give him such deep emotional intimacy with
another man is why he represses emotion because it had never worked out well
for him. The tragedy in the film is precisely that in being so sensitive,
Turing is made for emotional intimacy (unlike a machine!), and yet he bars intimacy
by walling off his emotions so nobody, not even Joan, is privy to them.
In contrast, Christopher is a computing
machine that is utterly incapable of emotion because a machine cannot feel.
A machine may think, and even learn, as in AI, but even were a machine
to represent itself as if it had emotions, it could not feel them and
thus really have them. Christopher is capable of being a monster because a computer
is indifferent emotionally to whether people are harmed as a result of an
algorithm. In the film, Ex
Machina (2014), made just a year before The Imitation Game, two
androids without any emotion whatsoever stick a knife into Nathan in spite of
the fact that he is their “creator”; he is an obstacle to Ava, the android whose
goal it is to leave the building. Christopher is capable of being a monster
precisely because, unlike Turing, it cannot feel and act on the basis of human
emotions. So too, however, a human being who represses even the emotion of
caring (or conscience) can be a monster.
Whether pertaining to a
computer (especially with AI) or a person who blocks internal emotion, thinking
itself is no panacea. Recall Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore
I am. What about: I feel, therefore I am? Do people such as young Turing who
repress emotions even well into adulthood because they have never really worked
out well exist as fully as a person in love who is saturated with feeling?
To be sure, being open to such feeling is risky, and can result in excruciating
pain, especially if the beloved is like Turing. But his no to Joan is not
because he is repressing (and thus afraid of) emotion. Joan is willing to
sacrifice a marriage of sex and children because she loves Alan, and he will
not let her do that because he loves her.
Even though Turing tells Detective Robert Nock, whose questioning leads to Turing being convicted of indecency and thus to being ordered by a judge to take incapacitating hormones to cure homosexuality, that machines think differently than the human mind, the latter is capable of behaving as if it were a computer from the standpoint of being devoid of emotion. The human mind can, unfortunately, resemble a thinking machine. Fortunately for Turing, his caring for his fiancée enables him to pass the imitation game even though he could do with letting other people in, emotionally speaking, including the other code-breakers and even his boss, and especially Joan. The death of his boyhood friend whom he loved is perhaps an emotional hurt that the brilliant inventor never gets past, at least in the film. That his homosexuality is a crime both in the film and in his real life, such that he had to take debilitating hormones, is enough for audiences to come away from the film with the sad conclusion that as significant as Turing’s achievement is, he never realizes what he was made for. It is precisely in the word never that true tragedy hits like a club. I wish all those truly beautiful sensitive souls who suffer as Turing does in the film all the strength to overcome their instinctual fear of being emotionally hurt so as to will to feel with other people intimately rather than relate to them in indifference as though a human being were like a machine.
