Provided by Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive
Can a Robot Hear Music? Can a Robot Dance? Can a Robot Tell What it
Knows or Intends to Do? Can it Feel Pride or Shame in Company?
-- Questions of the Nature of Human Vitality
Colwyn Trevarthen,
Department of Psychology
The University of Edinburg
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Third Revised
Edition, 1969
Robot: Czeck, from robotiti, to work, drudge.
Related to German arbeit.
a) A living being that acts automatically (without
volition).
b) A machine devised to function in place of a
living agent; one which acts automatically or with
a minimum of external impulse.
Robots ... persons all of whose activities were
imposed upon them and who were not allowed
‘even the luxury of original sin’. -- G. B. Shaw.
Robotize: To mechanicalize.
"The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the
whole concept of materialism only applies to very
abstract entities, the products of logical
discernment. The concrete enduring entities are
organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences
the very characters of the various subordinate
organisms which enter into it. In the case of an
animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the
total organism and thus modify the plans of
successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate
smallest organism, such as electrons, are reached.
There are thus two sides to the machinery involved
in the development of nature. On the one side there
is a given environment with organisms adapting
themselves to it ... The other side of the evolutionary
machinery, the neglected side, is expressed by the
word creativeness. The organisms can create their
own environment. For this purpose the single
organism is almost helpless. The adequate forces
require societies of cooperating organisms. But with
such cooperation and in proportion to the effort put
forward, the environment has a plasticity which
alters the whole ethical aspect of evolution."
(A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World,
1925)
Introduction and Summary
I give the OED definition of a robot to emphasise that
it is the lack of volition that distinguishes and robotic
‘worker’, which by this criterion is a mere tool. I
reproduce a favourite quotation from Whitehead for the
clever and illuminating way it distinguished between
abstractions, ‘products of logical discernment’, and
organisms that have a special coherence and
‘organisation’, out of which properties ‘emerge’ that are
both adaptable and creative. I do not accept that
simulation of the appearances or the motions and
effects of life, however intricate and ingenious, is a
making of life. Organisms are complex dynamic
systems (CDSs) of a strange kind, always active within
envelopes that limit and constrain what emerges, and
that separate and aggregate sub-CDSs in intricate
hierarchies, in such a way that what ‘emerges’ is fated
to adaptive ends. It is the ‘finality’ that is the secret of
the creativity of a living being, not its ‘plasticity’.
Every living thing has a system or programme of
development, the course of which is both genetically
and epigenetically determined from each zygotic
beginning. There is never less than one bounded,
complex and organised, actively self-sustaining cell,
with an intricate ‘import-export, customs control’ of a
multi-layered molecular cell wall, a cytoplasm full of
energy-storing and metabolism and gene expression
controlling organellae, and a nucleus with genetic
material, also bounded by an ‘editorial’ wall. And what
happens when this cell changes, divides, differentiates
and re-integrates by a determined auto-poesis depends
on the whole structure of that initial organism-cell. The
genes it inherits are just part of the play, with
constrained roles and responses, obedient to the
messages from the cell surface and its systems of
cytoplasmic organellae.
Plants grow their life in species-specific form,
making substance by draining nutriment and moisture
from the earth and capturing energy from the sun, with
chloroplasts that react to light by assuming the green