Wall-E

In the film, Wall-E (2008), a robot “falls in love” with another, whose anthropomorphic pronoun is she/her rather than it as is fitting for a machine. As a robot does not have genitalia, neither the masculine or feminine single pronoun applies, and because a robot is an entity, the plural pronouns also do not apply. Word-games aside, the more substantive and interesting matter of whether a robot, and even AI (i.e., machine learning), can (or could potentially) understand the phenomenological experience of falling in love, and, whether yes or no, be able beyond mere prediction to match couples who would fall in love were they to meet. A college course on these questions, especially with relevant films including Wall-E and The Matrix being assigned, would be incredibly popular and capable of tremendous mind-stretching. 

The full essay is at "AI on Falling in Love."

Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

Avatar: The Way of Water

Sequel to Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) contains many parallels with the original film—perhaps too many. The most outlandish, yet philosophically robust, concerns the return of Steven Lang even though his character, the antagonist Col. Miles Quaritch, is killed by Neytiri at the end of the first film. Lang delivers some outstanding lines, so it is no wonder that David Cameron wanted to extend Lang’s character’s life. In so doing, Cameron invented the devise of a recombinant, a Na’vi artificially grown with the human Quaritch’s memories and personality implanted in the brain. This device is fundamentally different than a Na’vi avatar body in which a human brain is temporarily infused remotely by a human. In the case of Jake’s avatar body, which has both Na’vi and Jake’s DNA, there is no question that Jake’s avatar is not Jake himself. In the second film, the lines of identity blur between the human Miles Quaritch of the first film and the Na’vi Quaritch of the second. Cameron himself seems to be not of one mind on the question of whether the Na’vi Quaritch is the same “person” as the deceased human Quaritch. I contend that they are not, and, by implication, that a person’s self-identity, based on existing (or experience of oneself) does not rest solely with one’s memories and personality. In short, there is more to being a person. Before applying philosophy of personhood to the Quaritch characters in the films, I want to provide a context by briefly laying out the extent of parallels between the two films.

In the first film, a small, floating rock represents what pays for everything the humans are doing on Pandora. By the second film, the solid substance, unobtanium, is curiously not even mentioned; a liquid, amrita, extracted from the brains of (whale-like) tulkuns, is “what’s paying for everything on Pandora now.” The fluid acts as an anti-aging agent on humans. In the first film, a small rock represents unobtanium; in the second, a vial of amrita represents what comes from a much, much larger animal. The implication is that even a small sample is lucrative, and therein lies the strong motive for the humans’ colonial exploitation of Pandora at the expense of the Navi. Another parallel involves Lo’ak, the youngest son of Jake and Neytiri, who is taught the sea-culture ways by Reya, son of the local chief, in the sequel. “You bonded with an outcast!,” the chief exclaims to his daughter. Similarly, the chief in the first film was not at all pleased when Neytiri tells him that she has bonded with Jake’s avatar. Also, the reference to Jake, Neytiri, and their children as “children” in the sea way of life in the second film mirrors Neytiri telling Jake in the first film, “You’re like an infant.” The astute viewer of the sequel may notice that Neytiri manages a smirk when she and her family are being referred to as children, for she is then as Jake had been when Neytiri began teaching him the ways of the forest Na’vi. Still another parallel exists between the Tree of Souls that is on solid ground (until the giant bulldozers come by) in the first film and the Spirit Tree that is under water in the second film. The implication is that there is more than one way to “connect” with Eywa, so the loss of the Tree of Souls is not as catastrophic as it seems in the first film.

Parallelism as a tool for relating the two films is epitomized, and I think stretched too far, in Col. Miles Quaritch’s “return” as a recombinant in the second film. Quaritch’s becoming conscious in the second film parallels Jake when he first inhabits his avatar body in the first film even though a recombinant and an avatar are very different even though both have a Na’vi body. Becoming conscious from not having been conscious before is not like having one’s consciousness transferred from one’s own brain to that of one’s avatar. Unlike Jake only vicariously occupying his avatar body in the first film, the Na’vi Quaritch has no such mind-body duality; his mind and body are fused together and thus Na’vi rather than human. Therefore, Cameron overstates the parallelism between the Na’vi Quaritch in the second film and Jake’s occupied avatar body in the first film. Similarly, the parallelism between Miles Quaritch of the homo sapiens species and Quaritch of the Na’vi species is overdone—in this case, as identity, both in terms of a person’s identity and the identity of the two characters as identical (i.e., the same “person”).

Yet even as preposterous as the device to continue Steven Lang as an actor in the second film is, the relationship between his two characters is the most philosophically rich aspect of the second film. The political economic issues in the human colonization of Pandora pale in comparison because ontology and existentialism are more fundamental than political and economic thought philosophically. Indeed, my own studies went from political economy to theology and philosophy precisely to go deeper. From such a basis, I contend that Cameron overstates the existential self-identities of the two characters, erroneously fusing them into one identity, and thereby loses sight of what it is to be a particular person rather than someone else.

First, I need to unpack my term, existential identity. The word identity applies both to a person’s awareness of one’s self (i.e., one’s identity) and to two things being identical. Regarding the relationship between the human and Na’vi Quaritches, which spans two films, I could perhaps replace the adjective existential with ontological. Ontology (i.e., about what is real) applies here to whether the two characters are actually one entity, whereas existential places the emphasis on the two existences of (i.e., as experienced by) the two characters—the human and Na’vi Quaritches—without first asking whether they have the same essence. I contend that the experience (i.e., conscious existence) of the Na’vi Quaritch includes awareness of being a different entity than the human Quaritch. Put another way, the Na’vi Quaritch’s conscious experience does not consist only of (the human’s) memories (and personality). Unlike Jake’s avatar in the first film, the existence of the Na’vi Quaritch begins when he becomes conscious.  So I will argue that the Na’vi Quaritch is not a seamless continuation of the human Quaritch. In other words, we shouldn’t take them to be the same “person,” and thus identical, for the respective experiences of the two characters are distinct even though they have a personality and some memories in common. By implication, having the same memories and personality are not sufficient to be someone.

Ontologically, the two characters are two entities; each has his own body that is distinct and separate from the other. They aren’t even in the same film! Even in terms of DNA, they differ because they are, as the Na’vi Quaritch points out to Jake and Neytiri in referring to Spider, the human son of the human Quaritch, of different species. From this ontological basis, the Na’vi Quaritch experiences himself, and thus his identity, as distinct from the human Quaritch, and yet, the Na’vi Quaritch uses the first person, singular pronoun, “I” in referring to the human Quaritch in being betrayed by Jake. Very bizarre indeed. It demonstrates that Cameron has overreached in trying to extend Steven Lang’s character in the first film into the second film.

Just as there is (arguably) more to understanding than the manipulation of symbols (i.e., words) according to rules because a person’s understanding is a part of one’s experience, similarly experiencing oneself as a self—one’s selfhood—is not merely to have a certain set of memories and even a certain set of personality traits. To be sure, memories and personality are powerful ingredients in a person’s identity.

Cameron is on safe ground in having the Na’vi Quaritch repeat lines said by the human Quaritch, such as “Do not test my resolve” and “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” These lines resonate, and so they could have been etched in the human Quaritch’s memory, upon which the Na’vi Quaritch could easily draw from. They resonate so because they reflect a distinct personality, which the two characters both have. Even an impeccably identical vocal stress in the Na’vi Quaritch’s repetition of sayings of the human Quaritch is plausible. “You make it real clear,” “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” and “Lite em up” are the most notable instances. It is precisely such lines that likely motivated Cameron to “essentially” reprise Steven Lang’s role. It could be argued, admittedly, that people usually don’t repeat sentences word for word, so Cameron could be overreaching and thus overstating the identity between the two characters to give audiences more of what worked the first time around.

Even so, Cameron does not characterize the Na’vi Quaritch in general terms as a parrot. In fact, certain differences, such as in the Na’vi Quaritch using the words, scalp in referring to killing Na’vis, Mr. Sully rather than “Jake” in referring to Jake Sully, and labcoats rather than “scientist pukes” in referring to the scientists, can be taken as indications that the Na’vi Quaritch’s personality is distinct from that of implanted one. It would make sense that the experiences of the Na’vi Quaritch, which could not have gone retroactively back into the first Quaritch, have an impact on the personality of the Na’vi Quaritch alone. For one thing, experience with General Ardmore, which the human Quaritch presumably does not have in the first film, may boost the Na’vi Quaritch’s inclination show greater respect and less disdain for his enemies, including Jake and the scientists. The General’s professionalism in torturing Spider, for example, may rub off on the Na’vi Quaritch.

Therefore, both in terms of memories and personality, the Na’vi Quaritch is not identical with the human Quaritch. This suggests that the second Quaritch is at least in part his own “man.” He could still be a continuation of the human Quaritch, but, ontologically, barriers to a seamless continuity in terms of being the same person exist. As I have already argued, the beginning of the Na’vi Quaritch’s consciousness does not extend back to the human Quaritch’s existence because consciousness is not merely of memories and personality, and the body of the Na’vi Quaritch is distinct and separate from that of the first Quaritch. In fact, at one point in the second film, the Na’vi Quaritch crushes the scull of the first Quaritch! It would be absurd were the second Quaritch to say that he is destroying part of his own body. Rather, the second clearly views the scull as that of another “person.”

Nevertheless, the Na’vi Quaritch is of two minds on whether he is the same “person” as the previous Quaritch. General Ardmore also seems to be confused, though she at least seems to come to her senses. In meeting the Na’vi Quaritch, she tells him, “A lot’s changed since your last tour here.” The problem is that the human Quaritch had the tour.  The line is jarring, even out of place. Fortunately, she later reminds the Na’vi Quaritch that Miles (Spider) Socorro, a son of the human Quaritch, is “not your son.” By her tone of voice, I suspect that she realizes that the Na’vi Quaritch has gotten carried away in identifying himself as the human Quaritch and she is trying to draw him back to reality. Were the General to hold both that the Na’vi Quaritch had the prior tour of duty on Pandora and is not the father of Spider, then we would be in a pickle, or a pretzel, for logically we would be faced with a contraction. Unfortunately, this is precisely what confronts us when we turn to the Na’vi Quaritch’s own statements regarding himself in relation to the human Quaritch.

The Na’vi Quaritch oscillates somewhat on the question of paternity, telling Spider, “I’m not your father, technically,” and tone implies that a technicality doesn’t really matter. The General has already sternly “reminded” the Na’vi Quaritch that Spider is not his son. So the “but for a technicality” suggests not only that the Na’vi Quaritch is self-identifying as the human Quaritch, but also that the identification is an over-reach. Somewhat later, the Na’vi Quaritch disavows paternity, telling Jake and Neytiri concerning Spider, “He’s not mine; we’re not even the same species.” This is obviously a bluff, so Neytiri would realize the lack of value in using Spider as a hostage, but at least the Na’vi Quaritch is aware that he and the human Quaritch are, by implication, also not of the same species and thus cannot be the same “person.”  

That the Na’vi Quaritch comes to care about Spider, as shown in his decision to release Jake’s daughter so Neytiri won’t kill Spider, or that the Na’vi Quaritch even takes on a parental role in warning Spider that he might get a whipping if he misbehaves, does not mean that the Na’vi Quaritch takes himself to be Spider’s father, and thus the same “person” as the human Quaritch. That the Na’vi Quaritch empathizes with the human Quaritch, whose memories and personality have been implanted, and whom after all has been killed by Neytiri, is understandable, and thus so too is his assumption of the role of an adoptive parental figure. This is especially so, as Spider could not be expected for be fully at home in Neytiri’s family. Indeed, watching Neytiri kill a human, Spider hides from her lest her prejudice against the Sky People punctuate itself in vengeance against all humans after the murder of one of her sons by a human. Always one to point out that the humans and Na’vi are different and distinct, Neytiri would naturally be skeptical of the actual identity of the Na’vi and human Quaritches, and yet her decision to use Spider as a hostage to get the Na’vi Quaritch to release one of her daughters hinges the Na’vi Quaritch’s self-perception of identity with the human Quaritch. It is not clear whether the Na’vi Quaritch gives up his leverage by letting go of his hostage (i.e., the daughter) because he views himself as Spider’s father, for an adoptive parent would do likewise, but given how much the Na’vi Quaritch wants to kill Jake, I believe that the assumption of fatherhood, and thus of being a continuation of the human Quaritch, exists. This continuation even includes believing that what was done to the human Quaritch was done to the Na’vi Quaritch.

At the same time that the Na’vi Quaritch tells Jake and Neytiri that Spider is not his son, he tells Jake, “I took you under my wing; you betrayed me.” Na’vi Quaritch’s “I” extends back to include the human Quaritch, and yet the Na’vi Quaritch earlier insisted, “I’m not that man, but I do have his memories.” I’m not that man and you betrayed me. Now we are at the crux of the matter! A rational being, whether Na’vi or human, cannot hold that what happened to another being (rational or not) happened to oneself as if “that man” and “I” were not mutually exclusive. Self-identity cannot embrace the identity of oneself and another being. In other words, recognizing the human Quaritch as that man is to recognize that he is at an existential and ontological distance. By the law of non-contradiction, something cannot be both another entity and not another entity. The two entities are thus not identical; they have distinct and separate identities. This makes sense in the case of the human and Na’vi Quaritches, as their respective experiences are different; they aren’t even of the same species. The Na’vi Quaritch did not have a previous tour on Pandora before he first became conscious; General Ardmore is wrong in saying so, but she seems have realized this by the time she tells the Na’vi Quaritch that Spider is not his son because the human Quaritch was the boy’s father.  She comes to realize that the Na’vi Quaritch has been playing the dead character. Were she present later in the film when the antagonist and protagonist finally clash in person, she might tell the Na’vi Quaritch, No, Jake did not betray you. He betrayed the guy whose scull you crushed in one of your hands, so move on, get over it; your life is yours. You are not the person whom even you yourself have referred to as “that man.”

Bladerunner

In 1982, when Bladerunner was released, 2019 could only have been a blink of an eye in people’s thoughts. Even the year 2001, the year in which the movie 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) takes place, must have seemed far off. Of course, the actual year was not so futuristic as to have a computer take over a space station; controversy over AI eclipsing the grasp of human control would not hit the societal mainstream for twenty years.  So, Ridley Scott can hardly be blamed for positing flying cars, and, even more astonishing, imposing the notion of a replicant, a being of genetic biomechanics that fuses computer and human characteristics, on 2019. Even acknowledging the tremendous impacts on society of inventions since the dawn of the twentieth century, the pace of technological change is slower than we imagine. In 2019, on the cusp of a global pandemic, flying (and self-driving) cars were just in the prototype/testing phase, and AI existed rudimentarily, and certainly not corporeally in human form. Scott missed the mark, probably by decades, though he got the trajectory right. Indeed, the film’s central issue—that of the threat of run-away, or “rebellious,” AI to humans—was reflected in the press especially during the first half of 2023. I contend, however, that the philosophical merit of the film lies not in political theory, but, rather, in what it means to be human. The nature of human understanding, self-awareness, an ethical sense, and matters of theological reflection are all brought to the forefront in the question of whether the replicants can and should be taken as human beings. In other words, it is the fusion of AI, or computers more generally, and biology that lies at the core of the film.

In the film, Deckard is hired to kill replicants who have rebelled by traveling to Earth. His character arc can be grasped in terms of a gradual recognition that they essentially human, or at least enough like us that they can and should be regarded as subjects rather than objects. The film furnishes us with several criteria in which the replicants can be counted as human.

Self-awareness is the foremost criterion: taking oneself to be an entity that has subjectivity. At one point in the film, Pris, a female replicant, says, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. The screenwriter doubtlessly had Descartes in mind. I am aware that I am thinking, therefore I exist. Even if an evil deceiver has us believing incorrectly that the world of appearances exists, we know that our thinking does not depend on any external world. In the film, the replicants can indeed think; they have been programmed to do so by Tyrell, who is a genius. In fact, the leader of the rebel replicants on Earth, Batty, refers to Tyrell as the replicant’s creator (god) even though it could be argued that the genetic bioengineers who grow the biological organs of the replicants also warrant such divine status. In actuality, there is nothing divine about programming AI or growing biological organs presumably out of stem-cells. It is not as if Tyrell and his engineers create everything, whether ex nihilo or not (one of the Creation accounts in Genesis is not ex nihilo). In other words, the give rise to existence itself is qualitatively different than creating something in particular in the realm of already-existence.

So the replicants have the human attribute of being self-conscious of themselves as entities that can think. This is not to say that they are minds in vats filled with chemicals. Pris insists that she is also physical, by which she means biological or corporeal in nature. She has a body; a replicant has biomass and even human genes. One of the biometric engineers tells a replicant, “You have my genes in you.” Can we say then that Descartes’ mind/body duality pertains to replicants? The replicant’s mind is programmed whereas the bodies are grown organically. The film does not provide us with a definite account of how the replicant brain is “hard-wired”—whether it is a computer physically emmeshed in a biological body or that computer code has somehow been written into the organic neuro-networks. The latter alternative lies beyond our comprehension, at least as of 2023. Indeed, it may even seem paradoxical. In a Gospel narrative, the risen Jesus walks through a door yet he is hungry and eats a fish. It is clear that his corporeal body has been transformed yet is still corporeal. In Pris insisting to the bioengineer who grows eyes using his own genes for replicants that she is physical rather than merely a thinking thing, the implication is that the replicants are entirely biological (i.e., every organ is organic rather than machine). Yet in her death throws after being shot (not tased!), Pris’s body shakes violently as if it were being electrocuted. The implication here is that her brain was hit and is electronic circuits rather than made of flesh. If so, it is remarkable, again from the standpoint of the actual world in 2023, that a hard-wire computer can have self-awareness, and thus be taken as a subject (i.e., having subjectivity).

Furthermore, the replicants have emotions, which are in the subjectivity; that is, the replicants know that they themselves feel. The replicants, especially Batty being of the sixth generation, are intelligent. So too is Tyrell, who had programmed Batty; both are superb at the game of chess. The replicants know that they (i.e., their respective subjectivities) will one day come to an end. In being mortal, they are like us. Similarly, they fear death. Two replicants, one of whom is Batty, make it clear that they fear dying. Batty even tells Deckard, the bladerunner, that it is precisely that fear that makes someone a slave—a slave to one’s fear. So it is clear that AI extends in the story-world of the film beyond intelligence to include emotions. Additionally, Batty clearly mourns Pris, and even exacts vengeance on Deckard for having killed Pris and another replicant in Batty’s rebel group.

Even more astonishingly, the AI manifesting in Batty includes a moral sense. When Tyrell tells Batty, “You’re the prodigal son,” Batty retorts, “I’ve done questionable things.” Ironically, it is the human Tyrell who seems to be missing the moral sense, for he replies, “Also extraordinary things!” It is indeed extraordinary that a replicant would then bring in theology in saying quite sadly, “Nothing that the god of biomechanics would let you into heaven for.” Batty even conceptualizes heaven. At one point while fighting Deckard, Batty says, “Go to hell; go to heaven.” Batty’s sarcastic quip, “Aren’t you the good man” to Deckard for not fighting fair, can be assumed to have theological and not merely moral overtones. Batty even calls him a bastard spirit. Finally, clearly aware that he is soon going to die, Batty saves Deckard rather than kills him. Kindness to one’s enemy has explicit religious overtones in Christianity even if most Christians prefer to focus instead on a metaphysical belief-claim that is only indirectly linked to helping one’s enemies. Indeed, the history of Christianity presents examples of Christians having “true belief” yet belying the claim by persecuting rather than helping people they didn’t like. Here in Bladerunner, it is a replicant that ironically provides us with an illustrative example of Christian charity. Deckard can only look up perplexed at Batty’s change of heart. When Batty dies, he releases a white dove, which flies away, evocative perhaps of Batty’s soul leaving his body. At the very least, Batty has in his mind the idea of God. In his proof that God exists, Descartes posits that existence because the idea, itself having full perfection, could not come from a being of less perfection. So God must exist for there to be the idea of God in a human mind. Yet a finite mind can also have the idea of infinity without there even needing to be infinity.

At the very least, it is clear that Batty thinks a lot about morality and even religion. In contrast, Deckard does not. Even though Batty has done “questionable things,” it is telling that he is quite aware of this. Historically, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith all posited a moral sentiment in human nature; we are fundamentally sociable creatures who gain pleasure from shared experience that “fellow feeling,” or sympathy, and imagination can provide. When Batty saves Deckard from falling, the two share an intimate moment emotionally as Batty shares the marvels of what he has seen.  He is saying, in effect, that he had not been merely an instrument, or object, that humans sent out to protect the colonies in space; rather, his existence has chiefly been that of a subjectivity, and is thus worthy of being taken as an end in itself, rather than merely as a means to a human’s plans. Kant’s ethical claim that beings partaking in rational nature—being able to use reasoning—should be valued in themselves is taken up and embraced implicitly by the most advanced replicant. As he was being used as an instrument—an object—to protect the intergalactic colonies, Batty was marveling at the sights. He was not merely a machine. Perhaps by observing the humanity of the dying replicant, Deckard then comes to the realization that he loves Rachael, one of the female replicants, and that she can love and trust him. The two recognize each other as subjects—each as having a subjectivity rather than being taken as an object.

In short, the film essentially asks what it means to be human. Self-awareness, reasoning, emotions, a moral sense, and even contemplation of ideas transcending the limits of human conception and perception are qualities that pertain to at least the most advanced generation of replicants. It is ironic that it is a replicant, Batty, who brings up and critiques Deckard from moral and religious standpoints. Clearly, a replicant’s understanding goes beyond the machine-type of “manipulation of symbols according to rules.” Moreover, the cognition and understanding mesh with emotions and self-awareness, as well as the awareness of other subjects. Indeed, the aforementioned qualities of the replicants are sufficient to support the claim that they can love and be loved in return—the Bohemian ideal expressed in Moulin Rouge. 

In Bladerunner, both Deckard and Batty come around to being more human, and thus more humane. Both can be taken as subjects rather than objects; both have subjectivities. Perhaps it can even be said that Deckard’s humanity depends on that of the replicants, or at least to the recognition that they are sufficiently human to be taken as such rather than as walking computers. Certainly, it is the humaneness of Batty that Deckard literally comes to depend on to live another day. It certainly would not make sense to say that Deckard owes anything to the replicant were it merely a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules even assuming the existence of machine learning. Yet that Batty has a subjectivity and thus experience that goes beyond his essence—an existentialist assumption—means that Deckard can feel that he owes Batty a debt of gratitude. Certainly Deckard feels an ethical obligation toward Rachael because she not only loves him, but trusts him as well. She is thus capable of being hurt emotionally, should he betray her by reverting back to viewing the replicants as objects. Finally we have in Bladerunner what it means to be human, ironically in its fullest sense.  

Realive

In 2016, Robert McIntyre, a graduate of MIT, became the first person to freeze and then revive a mammalian brain—that of a white rabbit. “When thawed, the rabbit’s brain was found to have all of its synapse, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact.”[1] The film, Realive, made that same year, is a fictional story about a man with terminal cancer who commits suicide to be frozen and revived when his illness could be cured. In the context of McIntyre’s scientific work, the film’s sci-fi demeanor belies the very real possibility that cryogenics could realistically alter fundamental assumptions about life and death even just later in the same century. What the film says about the life and death is timeless, however, in terms of philosophical value.

Diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer, Marc Jarvis opts for cryogenics. His body is to be frozen and revived when technology has advanced to the point of being able to reanimate him and cure the cancer. “I’d be able to live longer,” he blandly tells his friends, who are skeptical. For this to happen, he responds, “I guess I’d have to trust humanity.” He is referring to the advent of the necessary medical technology, rather than to the question of whether global climate change might extinguish the species in the meantime. This “sin of omission” by the screenwriter is particularly strange, given physicist Steven Hawkins’ prediction at the time that the species would have at most a century left on a habitable Earth.

In the story, living longer isn’t Marc’s actual goal, so he may well be indifferent to the plight of the species as he informs his friends of his decision to go with cryogenics. He does not commit suicide with the hope of being revived when he could be cured so he could live out the rest of his life.  As he tells Elizabeth, his nurse after he is revived 60 years later, in 2084, “Suicide was my way of fighting the arbitrariness of cancer.” Suicide, he tells her, was “the only way of avoiding the agony and the uncertainty of when death would finally arrive.” In retrospect, he says that being able to end his life at his choosing gave him the power to die peacefully. He had not really thought he could be reanimated; suicide, he tells Elizabeth, “gave me back control over my life.” He had accepted death; things were fine as they were. He accepted his experience of life as that which it had been, even though he was still young (roughly 30). The fear was gone, he tells Elizabeth more than 100 arduous days after having being revived. His fear of death is still gone, he informs her as he then asks her to help him commit suicide again. He has already died once. He is once again prepared to end his life. His final wish: “To be nothing again, to disappear, to finally rest in peace.” Why? To return to an after-life existence in heaven? Or out of a preference for not existing over the pain of living?

Just after being revived, he is enthusiastic. “I was going to die,” he tells the medical team in front of his bed. “I was going to disappear, forever, and I’m alive again. I’m alive!” But he quickly realizes that his “new life” comes with some rather serious drawbacks, medically speaking. At least for some weeks, his body seems permanently “on the verge of collapse.” He records the following for future posterity: “Life, what do we expect from it? Certainly not this fragility, this half-speed existence. We definitely don’t expect a medical history full of afflictions and minor defects, a propensity for phlegmbosis, numbness in the extremities, involuntary movements, loss of equilibrium, scaling of the skin, irritation of connective tissue, respiratory insufficiency, cardiac insufficiency, incontinence, impotence. You don’t expect so many limitations so soon.” His physician tells him that he could expect a life like people with chronic diseases or the elderly, and he would have to maintain at least periodic connection to a machine that keeps him alive. In erroneously assuming that these conditions would be permanent, both Marc and his physician dismiss the likelihood that medical science would continue to advance. 

To be sure, Marc’s medical team knew Marc would lose all of his memories, after which no medical science could bring them back. You expect at least to keep your memories, Marc narrates for posterity. “What if your memories were erased as well? What will become of me once my memories have faded?” Fortunately, a device exists in 2084 that can allow people to recover memories without actually remembering anything, but he dismisses it outright too. He could still draw on those stored memories mentally—hence indistinguishable from him really having the memories—and perhaps advancements in medical science could literally grow more “gray matter” such that Marc would someday begin to accumulate new memories. In short, the static nature in the assumptions made not only by Marc, but, more astonishingly, by his medical term in 2084 is astonishing, given their experiences with medical advancements.

At any rate, Naomi, Marc’s girlfriend before he died, had herself frozen in hopes of being together with her true love again someday. Elizabeth wants to assure Marc, “Someday you two will be able to be together again like you were before; it’s only a matter of time.” Here in Elizabeth we find the openness of a dynamic assumption; medical science should be regarded as a moving target!  Yet he isn’t buying it. He knows Naomi’s bodily condition is not good; the process of freezing had not gone well. “I don’t even want to imagine Naomi if she’s trapped in someone else’s body, someone else’s life,” he tells Elizabeth. “That’s your fear talking,” Elizabeth correctly tells him. In short, Marc has lost hope—faith in medical science and even in life itself. Accordingly, he wants to commit suicide again, and he wants Elizabeth to bracket her own hope and assist him.

The nineteenth-century European philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, aptly describes Marc’s rationale for killing himself “for good” (i.e., without any hope of being reanimated again). “A man who kills himself does not take his life, it has already been taken from him. That is why he kills himself; he destroys only a semblance of himself; what he casts away is a mere shell whose kernel, whether by his fault or not, has long since been eaten away. But a healthy, normal life . . . is and should be man’s highest good, his supreme being.”[2] Marc expects a healthy, normal life; it is his god. Yet paradoxically death is not his enemy, for suicide is to him simply a preference for not existing over life without his god.

Life and death are of course the true characters in the fictional drama. Expectedly, religion is in the mix, though surprisingly only explicitly in a few instances in the film. The position taken in the film, through Marc as a witness—albeit fictional—is that life “is nothing more than a state of matter . . . there’s nothing transcendent or divine about it.” As such, life is merely biological. In fact, Marc opines that it is life that’s “scary, not death.” Life is “always on the verge of extinction.” A human life can quickly, and unexpectedly end without the person having any control over it. As for the soul, Marc figures it is maybe “the part that is lost when you freeze the meat and thaw it out again.” In short, the film adopts a materialist perspective. There is no after-life, other than revitalized, or unfrozen, life itself. In other words, being reanimated—not resurrected!—is the only after-life, or, more accurately, life after life. In between them: nothing. Not existing. How hard this is to apply to ourselves!

“Welcome back to life, Marc,” the physician says as Marc regains consciousness upon being revived. “Do you remember anything about the other side?” Is there an afterlife?, the physician wants to know. The first report of a possible “eye-witness” of heaven in human history is underwhelming: “Fear, dying, waking up,” Marc answers without a hint of excitement. Later, he makes it explicit: “Before I died, I thought there was nothing after death. Now I’m sure.” He is the only person alive immune from what Feuerbach describes as the fantasies of profligate human imagination. Marc records his (or the screenwriter’s) own thoughts as follows: “Why do we yearn so desperately for life after death? What is it that we want? Perhaps reward for our grief, or punishment for our sins. No, what we really expect to find is what we already know; what we once had and lost. If there was something, we would turn it into more of the same—the same chaos and the same beauty, the same reward for the same effort, the same tale by the same idiot. If there was something, it would probably be purgatory.” In other words, we construct, or hope for, an after-life looking all too familiar—human, all too human. The “most sensitive, most painful of man’s feelings of finiteness is the feeling or awareness that he will one day end, that he will die,” Feuerbach suggests.[3] All a person knows and experiences is premised on the ongoing—perceptually-seeming “ever” present—basis of existing, the end of which must surely be felt to be torrentially horrendous. A human’s “defense against death is the belief in immortality.”[4] People who think they know for a fact there is an afterlife might want to pause at word in italics. None of us know, which is why the screenwriter of the film has Marc’s physician ask.

The physician—a man of science!—is disappointed in Marc’s answer as it is well within the realm of biology. He wants for there to be a religious dimension so much that he over-reaches cognitively. In presenting Marc to the public (i.e., investors), for example, he refers to Marc as “the first person resurrected.” However, resurrection is a distinctively religious term that refers to a spiritual-physical body; Jesus’ resurrected body, for instance, goes through the door of the Upper Room and yet he is hungry so he asks for a fish! Clearly, more is going on here than reanimation or revitalization. Cryogenics does not even constitute the sort of miracle as Jesus performed in bringing Lazarus back to life, and yet Marc's physician refers to his successive cryogenic attempts, including Marc, as Lazarus!

In short, Marc’s (albeit fictional) body is not supernatural, and yet the physician uses terms suggestive of a religious miracle. In fact, he refers to Marc as the first resurrected man more than once in the film. It is as if man of science were driven instinctually to make what is human, divine. According to Feuerbach, “Man makes a god or divine being of what his life depends on only because to him his life is a divine being, a divine possession or thing.”[5] God is beneficent (because good), and thus of use to humans—hence petitions are made as a matter of course in many liturgies, but the underlying presupposition or basis of this belief in the divine attribute is that human life is itself of great worth (i.e., divine).

Therefore, Marc while still young and yet seemingly deprived of God’s beneficence has a knee-jerk reaction for his life to go on, albeit after some time of not existing. Alternatively, he could pin his hopes on heaven, yet he dismisses it even before he knows it to be a fantasy of the human imagination tinged with fear. Yet even in ostensibly wanting to live more, or again, it is to be on his terms.

According to Feuerbach, we are the gods—or, more accurately—our human ideals are our true gods—the potential of the species, which Feuerbach erroneously claimed is infinite. The danger in idolizing our ideals lies in settling for nothing less. Hence Marc acts rashly, I submit, in committing suicide again. His god is human, all too human. If Feuerbach was right, even the ostensibly religious deity is really just human life in its infinite potential. Yet the terrain of our experience is finite—our perception, feeling, and cognition only go so far. Even cryogenics in itself could merely extend a human life, rather than making human beings immortal.

 

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[1] Candace Sutton, “Human Bodies Frozen in Desert Facility Waiting for Science to Wake them Up,” News.com.au.

[2] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 52.

[3] Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 33.

[4] Ibid., 34, italics added.

[5] Ibid., 52.

Passengers

Augustine wrote that Christians are ideally in the world but not of it. The fallen world is not the Christian’s true home. For the 5000 (plus crew) prospective colonists hibernating aboard a mammoth spaceship in the film, Passengers (2016), the planet Earth was presumably not their true home—or maybe that home was becoming climatically rather untenable and the 5000 were lucky souls heading for a new, unspoiled home. In any event, the film’s central paradigm can be characterized as “travel to” and “end-point.” That is to say, means and end characterize this picture at a basic level. The film is particularly interesting at this level in that so much value is found to reside in the means even as the end is still held out as being of great value.

For Aurora Lane, intentionally woken by Jim Preston with 89 more years to go on the trip, Earth had not been home in the sense that home is where love has been found. For her, home was mobile—moving through space at half light-speed—for she found love with Jim in spite of the fact that he had deprived her of living to see the end-point, the colony-planet. In refusing Jim’s new-found way of putting her back to sleep so she could wake again just four months before the end of the voyage, Aurora must have realized that she had found her home with Jim traveling through space. With plentiful food and drink, and no need even of money, Aurora and Jim faced a downside only in the possibility of encroaching loneliness. Headless waiters and a bottomless bartender—all robots—could not be said to give rise to any viable sense of community.

It is strange, therefore, that 89 years later, at the end of the voyage, the awakened crew and passengers do not encounter any offspring having been made out of Jim and Aurora’s love. The couple having realized that they would not live to see the new world, would they not have naturally wanted to have children who would have a chance of seeing the prospective paradise? It seems to me that the screenwriter did not think out the consequences of the couple’s decision far enough in this respect. The awakened passengers and crew should have come upon both trees and the grown children whose entire life had been in space.

In spite of having only each other, perhaps Aurora and Jim relish the peace that can be so compromised in a community (imaging having an apartment complex all to yourself!) and the freedom from the insecurity of want—two assets that could only be found during the journey. The spectacular views of space are also worthy (although it is difficult even to imagine a ship of such material that could withstand such a close pass to a sun). Yet, even so, how difficult it is for us—the audience—to understand why Aurora and Jim could possibly come to prefer a life spent entirely en route, on transportation. We are so used to being goal-oriented, teleological beings that we miss the sheer possibility that the journey itself might constitute a full life worth living.

Abstractly stated, we are so used to relegating means to an end as long at the end is viable that we have great trouble enjoying the means apart from the end. As long as the end stands a chance of being realizable, we cannot ignore it and thus fully rest content along the way.

The ability to reason about means and ends is a virtue.[1] Interestingly, virtuous actions “may be pursued ‘instrumentally’ but must be done ‘for their own sake.’ . . . They must be ends in themselves. . . . Actions truly expressive of the virtues are actions in which the means are prized at least as much as the extrinsic ends to which they are directed. . . . The telos, the best life for human beings to live, is an inclusive end constituted in large part by virtuous activity.”[2] In other words, virtues are both means and ends. A person should value acting virtuously for itself, rather than merely as a means to an end. While not a virtue-ethics guy, Kant uses this characterization in Critique of Practical Reason to claim that human beings should be valued as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means to other ends (e.g., manipulated). Can a boss ever push his use of his subordinates for his own ends sufficiently out of his mind to value those people as ends in themselves—as having inherent value?

The space voyage in the film is shown at first as only a means to a distinctly different end, the colony. Yet by the story’s end, the spaceship comes to be an end in itself too. Due to the length of the trip and the appreciably shorter human lifespan, Jim and Aurora find value in the means not as a means, but only as an end in itself.  Yet as human beings, could they ever come to disconnecting the spaceship from awareness of its end? Could Jim and Aurora ever feel a sense of ease on board without the sense that they have lost or given up the spaceship as a means? For the remainder of their lives, the colony is ahead of them. Is it even possible that two human beings could become oblivious to this fact?

Here on Earth, the Christmas season is so oriented to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that it is scarcely imaginable that the festive atmosphere during the first three weeks of December could be chosen over Christmas itself. I suspect that more adults like Aurora and Jim, being without family, would prefer the season over the holiday itself—even opting out of it. Yet can a person come to enjoy a Christmas show or attend a Christmas party without having in mind the “not yetness” and the “betterness” of Christmas itself? What if the experience with friends at the Christmas Party two weeks before the actual holiday is better than the saccharine day itself? Can the experience ever hope to get its due regard and esteem for its own sake even as it is regarded as a means?

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1. Joseph J. Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996): 24.

2. Ibid., p. 25.

The Age of Adaline: Death as No Longer Inevitable

In The Age of Adaline (2015), the age-old “fountain of youth” leitmotif springs forth yet again. In this incarnation, Adaline is forced to come to grips with the fact that everyone around her, including her daughter, is aging even as Adaline herself does not. A strong electromagnetic has altered her genes such that her cells do not divide at slower rates as they age. As she becomes aware of the repercussions, we in turn can marvel at what may be just decades away scientifically concerning the expected human life-span. In short, when the film came out, scientists were already openly discussing whether death itself may no longer be inevitable for human beings.

In an article in Biomaterials published in August 2015, scientists from the Ott lab at Harvard University provide the world with the science behind their successful effort to grow a rat’s limb from cells and attach it to a living rat.[1] Harald Ott describes the significance of the scientific feat for human beings. “Limbs contain muscles, bone, cartilage, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments and nerves – each of which has to be rebuilt and requires a specific supporting structure called the matrix. We have shown that we can maintain the matrix of all of these tissues in their natural relationships to each other, that we can culture the entire construct over prolonged periods of time, and that we can repopulate the vascular system and musculature. . . . Additional next steps will be replicating our success in muscle regeneration with human cells and expanding that to other tissue types, such as bone, cartilage and connective tissue.”[2] In other words, a person’s diseased or simply aged organs may one day be replaceable with organs grown with the individual’s own cells.

The Ott lab’s mission statement lays out the rationale. “End organ failure is the leading health care challenge in the Western World. Nearly 6 million Americans suffer from heart failure with about 550,000 new cases diagnosed annually; 25 million Americans suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with an estimated 12 million new yearly diagnoses; 530,000 Americans suffer from end stage renal disease. Organ transplantation is the only potentially curative therapy available. However, its outcomes are limited by donor organ shortage and the side effects of harsh immunosuppressive treatments. Organ engineering is a theoretical alternative to transplantation. Whole organs could be derived from patient’s cells and transplanted similar to donor organs.”[3] If the brain is such an organ and could be grown from a person’s cells, then would such a transplant essentially end one person, or at least consciousness, and begin another? Ethically speaking, who would have access to his or her own personal “replacement organs”? Only the rich, while death is still inevitable for the poor and middle class?

To be sure, a bunch of organs does not a body make; considerably more is involved. So we must look to the research on cellular aging itself before we can anticipate death as not necessarily inevitable. Just to clarify, this is not the same as immortality. In the film, for example, were Adaline to get hit by a truck, she would not continue at the same age; she would be dead.

In 1913, researchers discovered a cause of aging in mammals that may be reversible.[4] “The aging process we discovered is like a married couple—when they are young, they communicate well, but over time, living in close quarters for many years, communication breaks down,” said Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics David Sinclair, senior author on the study. “And just like with a couple, restoring communication solved the problem.”[5] In scientific terms—now that I’ve warmed you up—“The essence of this finding is a series of molecular events that enable communication inside cells between the nucleus and mitochondria. As communication breaks down, aging accelerates. By administering a molecule naturally produced by the human body, scientists restored the communication network in older mice. Subsequent tissue samples showed key biological hallmarks that were comparable to those of much younger animals.”[6] That is, not only can the aging process be slowed down; it can actually be reversed!

The implications of the research both in growing organs and reversing the aging process at a cellular level are nothing short of breathtaking, not to mention paradigm-altering. At the time of the film’s release, some scientists were openly suggesting that death might no longer be inevitable as early as 2050. That is to say, children, young adults, and even people having reached middle-age watching The Age of Adaline in early 2015 might not experience aging themselves, even as they would naturally have memories of grandparents or parents having aged and died.[7] In the film, Adaline must come to grips with her daughter being an old woman; the implication is that Adaline would eventually have to confront the loss of her daughter, and, indeed, anyone else held dear. I believe this is why Adaline keeps herself from getting into a romantic relationship; even more than wanting to avoid the fear of trusting another person with her secret (for fear of being picked apart by government scientists) and being in the awkward situation of being young while one husband after another reaches retirement age, the deaths of one dog after another—a photo of each one being solemnly kept in an album—have taught her that death as not inevitable has a very sad downside.

Even if death is rendered not inevitable (even as taxes remain so) for every person alive, say in 2100, people would experience other living beings aging and dying. Moreover, longevity itself would doubtless have its own downsides. For those to whom life is a terrible struggle, a lifespan of even just two hundred years—the time between 1776 and Jimmy Carter as the U.S. President in the late 1970s—could be felt to be a curse. The whole notion of a life sentence would have to be re-thought, otherwise it would be intolerably cruel. So too would age discrimination need to be reconsidered. Would it even make sense?

Furthermore, would everyone in the world be at the same age? If so, would humanity consist of children and adult-children—Munchkins, as it were, only with a youthful look? Such a sight would doubtless be extremely distressing to any aliens visiting from elsewhere in the galaxy. Perhaps people could decide to stay at any given age—presumably after having reached adulthood.

Moreover, the right to reproduce in an already overpopulated world might become contentious at least as pertaining to those persons who have “opted into” death as not inevitable, though even they could of course die from an accident or natural disaster. Ethicists would likely find work. The Age of Adaline only skims the surface of the implications from what may lie in store for humanity—that is, if our species can survive the climate-change that was already underway at the time of the film’s release. My point here is that we really have no idea what some of the implications would be; the medical advances touched on above, as well as the work on diseases such cancer, may outstrip the capacity, or at least the usual habits, of the human mind to adapt. At the very least, some paradigms with deep ruts may need to be buried and new seeds sowed.

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[1] Bernhard Jank et al, “Engineered Composite Tissue as a Bioartificial Limb Graft, Biomaterials (August 2015), 61:246-56. The abstract reads as follows: “The loss of an extremity is a disastrous injury with tremendous impact on a patient's life. Current mechanical prostheses are technically highly sophisticated, but only partially replace physiologic function and aesthetic appearance. As a biologic alternative, approximately 70 patients have undergone allogeneic hand transplantation to date worldwide. While outcomes are favorable, risks and side effects of transplantation and long-term immunosuppression pose a significant ethical dilemma. An autologous, bio-artificial graft based on native extracellular matrix and patient derived cells could be produced on demand and would not require immunosuppression after transplantation. To create such a graft, we decellularized rat and primate forearms by detergent perfusion and yielded acellular scaffolds with preserved composite architecture. We then repopulated muscle and vasculature with cells of appropriate phenotypes, and matured the composite tissue in a perfusion bioreactor under electrical stimulation in vitro. After confirmation of composite tissue formation, we transplanted the resulting bio-composite grafts to confirm perfusion in vivo.”

[2] Nitya Rajan, “Scientists Grow an Entire Limb in the Lab Using a Dead Rat,” The Huffington Post, June 4, 2015.

[3] “Our Mission,” The Ott Lab for Organ Engineering and Regeneration, Harvard University (accessed June 5, 2015).

[4] Ana Gomes et al, “Declining NAD+ Induces a Pseudohypoxic State Disrupting Nuclear-Mitochondrial Communication during Aging,” Cell (19 December 2013) Vol. 155, No. 7, pp. 1624-638. The abstract reads as follows: “Ever since eukaryotes subsumed the bacterial ancestor of mitochondria, the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes have had to closely coordinate their activities, as each encode different subunits of the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system. Mitochondrial dysfunction is a hallmark of aging, but its causes are debated. We show that, during aging, there is a specific loss of mitochondrial, but not nuclear, encoded OXPHOS subunits. We trace the cause to an alternate PGC-1α/β-independent pathway of nuclear-mitochondrial communication that is induced by a decline in nuclear NAD+ and the accumulation of HIF-1α under normoxic conditions, with parallels to Warburg reprogramming. Deleting SIRT1 accelerates this process, whereas raising NAD+ levels in old mice restores mitochondrial function to that of a young mouse in a SIRT1-dependent manner. Thus, a pseudohypoxic state that disrupts PGC-1α/β-independent nuclear-mitochondrial communication contributes to the decline in mitochondrial function with age, a process that is apparently reversible.”

[5] David Cameron, “A New—and Reversible—Cause of Aging,” Harvard Medical School, December 19, 2013.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The matter of brain transplants puts this assumption at risk, for a brain grown out of some cells would not have the memories. Stretching the envelop even more, what if science eventually enables the memories and even consciousness of the “old” brain to be part of the brain being grown? It seems more likely that the experiential continuity of the person would continue.