The movie Her is touching some nerves. It was among the top movies showcased at the recent Oscars. Joaquin Phoenix is apparently superb in the movie that most reviewers showered their praise on it. I’m not sure if they were really happy with the movie or with what the movie’s premise is based on….that the computer AI would become sentient. Alive. Something conscious.
We’ve been wondering about this for a while. The movie 2001 A Space Odyssey (produced in 1968) was perhaps one of the first movies to touch on this concept, though earlier science fiction writing went there first. Really, though, the movie is asking questions about the soul.
I’ve recently been using Christian Wiman’s book My Bright Abyss for part of my spiritual quiet time. He is a good writer and a poet, and about halfway through, he gets to this question of the soul. As he writes there, “The word or idea of “soul” has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning.” Or I might add, “unless it is discussed in terms of a mechanical thing having a soul.”
We probably don’t like the idea of soul. It sneaks too close to the idea of eternity, the idea that “I” may exist far beyond my physical body. For many, that question is one that sounds a lot like religion, and well, in our world today, as Wiman suggests, there is an embarrassment to talk about it.
However, the science is fairly certain on this: we have a soul, a conscious that exists beyond your flesh. Lee Strobel’s book The Case for a Creator got to this point with his conversation with Dr. J. P. Moreland. Moreland repeatedly made the case that the soul, the conscious state of my understanding that “I” am an “I,” is something that makes us unique. You can’t operate on my brain or my body and somewhere find “me” and yet I am aware, conscious of existing, able to think about myself and beyond myself. Moreland described the idea of a computer having a soul as absurd or, at the very least, naïve.
He said, “Look, we have to remember that computers have artificial intelligence, not intelligence. And there’s a huge difference. There’s no ‘what it’s like to be a computer.’ A computer has no “insides,” no awareness, no first-person point of view, no insights into problems. A computer doesn’t think, “you know hat? I now see what this multiplication problem is really like.” A computer can engage in behavior if it’s wired properly, but you’ve got to remember that consciousness is not the same as behavior. Consciousness is being alive; it’s what causes behavior in really conscious beings.”
Which brings me back to Wiman. Are we really conscious? Wiman wrote in this chapter about the anxiety or stress about our modern world with all its instant connection which seems to bring on more frustration or pressure to deal with all the signal noise, rather than somehow making us better in control of our time (as is so often promised). In this musings, Wiman hits upon the fact that all of our issues in modernity (or is it post-modernity), come back to the problem of the soul and our awareness of life now. Of being present.
So, Wiman writes the following about how we must recapture the soul in order to find ourselves, and then thus to be conscious or alive in the now:
The word or idea of “soul” has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and thru, and ours—until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the fist of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitably, it breaks.
There is a distinction to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to—and if attended to, discloses—our souls. And yet it is a distinction without a difference, perhaps, as crucial to eventually overcome as it is to initially understand. To be truly alive is to feel one’s ultimate existence within one’s daily existence. All those trivial, frittering anxieties acquire, even if only briefly, a lightness, a rightness, a meaning. So long as anxiety is merely something to be alleviated, it is not life, or we are not alive enough to experience it as such.
We don’t need to know more of “self” but more that we are a soul, eternal, more than just our self. As we get into our soul, the deep question then begins to emerge of “what now?” And this is where Christ comes into play. Only in Christ alone does the fullest comprehension emerge of being fully here, fully conscious.
To be aware of the “trivial, frittering anxieties” without the deeper sense of purpose is to become lost in the swirls of a raging rapid of impulses, grabbing for our attention. God and God alone allows a center within which the soul rests, aware of the life around and willing to engage that life. To touch the unlovely, the lonely, the hurting even as more electronic impulses seek to pull us to distraction. The twitterverse wants you like a computer, reacting only to the next impulse, ignoring the important. God wants you alive, present in the world, able to stop for the sunset, able to see the soul in that other who stands by the roadside with a little cardboard sign.
Be alive.