A Trip Down the Uncanny Valley
Why does it freak us out to see simulations of humans that fall just short of the real deal? When it’s stylized, just a collection of parts that attempt no more than to signify personhood, we’re fine. But when its real enough that we’re briefly fooled, that we feel the tug to fawn or lust, we’re repulsed.
We group the world in to things we judge to be conscious and things whose welfare we aren’t concerned with (NO! You took the batteries out of my gameboy in the prime of it’s life!). No one would wince if I stabbed an apple with a dagger. How about a drawn smiley face? A G.I. Joe? A tickle-me Elmo? The kind of stuffed baby doll a toddler would play with? How about one of these? A human fetus? An animal fetus? It might be a fun exercise to sound out our “gut” reactions, but after only a moments deliberation we can tell whether something is really worth feeling compassion for, right?
And yet, people disagree. In the United States most people are carnivores, only drawing th line at animals they might keep as pets; I don’t know anyone who eats dog regularly, but it’s commonplace elsewhere. I’ve stopped eating mammals from time to time, but I’ve never seriously considered abstaining from fish (for moral reasons, anyway) - I’ve spent a lot of time around them, and I have difficulty believing they’re conscious in any important way. At the end of the day, it seems like most people operate on the somewhat less than rigorous don’t-eat-anything-with-a-face rule.
Are individual ants conscious? I don’t feel too bad when I crush one. Is a colony of ants conscious? Harder to say. If they are, then what about colonies of people? Is there something-that-it-is-to-be-like the city of New York as a whole? Is there something-that-it-is-to-be-like the right half of my body (as distinct from the left, or whole)? How do you delineate something that experiences (an experience-er), when there aren’t any apparent lines in the sand where causal interactions stop? I find those examples far fetched (even though I fetched them), but if you’re not a mind-body dualist (and you shouldn’t be), it can feel like a slippery slope to something like panpsychism.
There is a great episode of RadioLab where researchers ask subjects two versions of the Trolley Problem while undergoing an MRI scan. The first formulation is a classic intuition pump for selling the virtues of moral consequentialism:
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
Almost all the subjects say yes. Then you ask…
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
Very few people would push the fat man. Philosophically this can be justified (amongst other ways) by denying that consequences are all that matter in moral choices (perhaps acts are good or bad in themselves). But the researchers interviewed in the RadioLab episode aren’t philosophers - they’re just interested in what parts of the brain are being used while the subjects deliberate. When asked about the fat man, completely different regions light up then when given the first query. They speculate that in the lever example we’re able to be very Spock-like thanks to the involvement of machinery; the math is simple, maximize the number of lives. It’s not so easy with the mental image of pushing a fat man - perhaps it’s appealing to some much more basic part of our natures, not to hurt things that we empathize with, overriding our calculating selves.
Perhaps what is so disturbing about the uncanny valley is that its a perceptual illusion that suggests moral consequences. If I show you a penrose triangle you’ll probably find it an amusing curiosity, but hardly a challenge to your ability to function in the world. Now, a doll that you can’t tell from a person, however briefly - that calls in to question the epistemic grounds for your ethical decisions. If you can mistake something unconscious for something conscious, the much scarier reverse case could be true. A pop-sci article has been making the rounds that claims men’s brains respond to scantily clad women and tools the same way (supported by MRI scans, of which we should be skeptical). If our brains don’t recognize women, let alone ant colonies or trees, as things we have to treat morally right off the bat, our cherished moral intuitions are called in to question.
The documentary video links that follow explore the lives of people who come across as all too comfortable with this ambiguity. I recommend starting with the incredibly wittily titled Guys and Dolls, which is about the owners of high end mannequins designed for sexual gratification. If you can make it through that, try this feature from the BBC titled (matter-o-factly): My Fake Baby (Part One, Part Two). It’s about… Fake Babies. The documentaries aren’t just about the objects, but the people who relate to them, and the human drama alone makes them worth watching.
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