Could A Robot Feel Love?
A debate on the mind-body problem
Written by Yifan Wang
Are humans different from robots? Most people will give a positive answer without hesitation. Unlike robots that are merely machines, people have minds. But what exactly does ‘have minds’ mean? Dualists believe that the mind is a soul, an immaterial entity that coexists and intimately connected with the material body. Physicalists insist that the mind is a subclass of the physical entity and people are just functional bodies. Both views believe in the existence of bodies. The question is whether there really are intangible entities, ‘minds’ or souls, that exist independently of the bodies? Which facts or features of humans cannot be explained well by physicalists, but need to posit the existence of souls to give a better explanation? What makes us feel that we are not only a merely physical body like a robot? If we can find a convincing human feature that the robot does not have, it would be the reason to believe we have souls. One possible answer is love. People extensively describe, observe and experience love in daily lives, but it seems that robots do not have such emotions.
What is love?
Before examining whether it is necessary to posit the existence of souls to explain love, one needs first to figure out what love is. Love is a feeling or emotion of one’s first-person perspective, and love has two aspects. One is the behavioural aspect: people will behaviorally respond when they aware of the feeling of love. For example, people in love want to pursue or be close to the one they loved, speaking love words and hugging or kissing that person. The other aspect of love is the sensation, what it feels like on the inside. You have a certain feeling of falling in love, a special inner experience. Your heart is pounding, and your blood is racing.
The behaviour aspect of love
Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film, A.I. (2001), describes the story of a humanoid robot kid, David. David was ‘adopted’ by Monica, whose son suffered from a rare disease and was in a state of suspended animation. The activation instruction of David is to love Monica like a human child to relieve her pain. David wanted to accompany Monica anytime and anywhere, and he even acted jealously towards Monica’s husband. It is not difficult to imagine a robot, a pure machine, can behave in a loving way. Dualists might argue that David loves Monica only because the engineer programmed this instruction, and his love is not spontaneous. It requires an external impulse to explain David’s love, and for humans, this impulse is the soul. However, why could not the instructions only be built-in, just like David might have his built-in instructions? Instead of assuming the existence of the soul, why don’t we explain it by evolution and biology? Physiological processes, such as genetics, evolutionary advantages, and reproductions, lead babies to be born with some built-in instructions. This is innate psychology that allows people to start learning and adapting to behave purposefully. Therefore, even if we need some sort of instructions, all of this might still simply be the result of some complex physical processes, and there is no need to appeal to an immaterial entity to explain.
The sensation aspect of love
Although physicalists can explain behavioural aspects of human emotions well, so far, there is no good interpretation of sensation or the inner experience. Certain characteristic experiences go along with having any given emotion. There is what it feels like to you when you are depressed or worried or joyful or in love. In other words, our experience has qualitative properties. For example, when you see something red, there is a certain feeling of the red inside of you, and such feeling is quite different when you see something blue. Though a machine has learned all of the physical facts about colours and could distinguish red from blue by different light frequencies, it seems to fail to know what exactly red or blue feels like. Intuitively, no qualitative property goes on inside the robot. Although David tried to eat Monica’s cooking to make her happy, he was expressionless during the meal, as if he did not know the taste of a particular food. David’s love is paranoid, he cannot realize how his actions might embarrass Monica. Philosophers use the term qualia to describe the qualitative or subjective aspect of the experience, including bodily sensations (such as pain and hunger), emotions (like love, envy, or fear), and perceptual experiences like hallucinations. Qualia seems to be a convincing feature to support the existence of the soul. Dualists argue that besides the body, one must have immaterial soul operating the qualia, or consciousness. But how? How could two distinct entities interact with each other, and how to explain the causal relations between the mind (soul) and body? Some dualists further posit an infinite and perfect God who has the supreme power to connect the souls with the bodies. In contrast, physicalists believe that qualia and consciousness can be well explained with the development of neurology. Although the current physiological knowledge cannot explain the mental states, it seems reasonable to believe that we can discover the answer through the standard methods of cognitive science and neuroscience.
Qualia
Nevertheless, are physicalists overconfident? Even if there are sufficient reasons to speculate that the physical system of the brain gives rise to qualia, we still cannot understand how and why it does so. For instance, by giving the identification of heat with the motion of molecules, scientists could easily explain that the motion of molecules plays a causal role to heat. However, even if we knew love is to be identified with some neural or functional state, there would still something left unexplained. Suppose, for example, that we precisely identified that the firing of ‘nerve fibre x’ causes the feeling of love. There are still some remaining problems: Why does our experience of love feel the way that it does? Why does the firing of ‘nerve fibre x’ rise to one particular feeling rather than another? Our lives are full of different qualitative properties of experiences so that it is difficult to find a paradigm theory to explain. In addition, qualia are a feeling of one’s first-person perspective. It is almost impossible to determine whether my feelings for love are the same as yours. Suppose Mia and Tom share the same bag of chocolates. To Mia, chocolate tastes sweet, while it tastes bitter to Tom. But Mia has learned and used the word ‘bitter’ to describe the tasting of sweet since she was a child. Under this circumstance, although Mia and Tom both describe that chocolate is bitter, their respective qualia about chocolate are inverted.
The problems faced by physicalists suggest that our instincts about robots might be wrong. It is possible that robots also have specific experiences of seeing, angering, and loving, which just different from human feelings. For example, when the robot kid David was eating, he could feel a particular burning sensation; or his feeling of love might be a strong sense of possession. In this way, humans and robots could both have qualia. Since physicalists have not yet given a reasonable explanation for qualia, maybe we should accept the dualist argument about immaterial souls, then the robots may also have souls. This conclusion completely subverted our cognition, but before physicalists fully explain the qualia, this may well be a possibility.
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