Heaven and Hell

I was very surprised to learn recently that a close friend of mine believes in Hell: a place in the afterlife where sinners will be tormented for an eternity.  Hell is a concept that I have never been comfortable with, and for much of my life I have adopted a rather smug attitude toward those who believe in it.  But over the years, as I have encountered – both in writing and in person – others who ardently believe in it, including not only people who are good, but also people who are extremely intelligent, I have felt an increasing sense of discomfort over the acceptance that these others have of the idea.  Could I be wrong?  Is my smugness a symptom of an impious pride that is blocking me from the truth?

Several years ago, I happened to meet a woman who was a devout Christian, who had five children.  Somehow or other, the subject of the afterlife came up, and I asked her if she believed in Hell.  She replied that she did, declaring that this fate would befall not only those who had been wicked during their lifetimes, but also those who had rejected the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.  I pointed out to her that, with five children, there was a rather significant probability that at least one of these would be among this class of sinners, if for no other reason than that he or she would not choose to follow her religious beliefs and practices.  Could she find true happiness in heaven, I asked, knowing that one of her own children was being tortured for all eternity?  Oh yes, she replied, because in that case the Creator would erase from her memory all traces of the existence of that particular child, thereby enabling her to enjoy her eternity of bliss completely undisturbed.  It was a reply that I found to be both horrifying and humorous at the same time.

I have always thought that the concept of Hell is particularly incongruent with the Christian religion, which counsels that one should have compassion for all living beings, including one’s enemies and oppressors.  It seems rather strange to me that the practice of such compassion and sympathy should end as soon as one passes into the afterlife.  And yet, very wise and very good persons such as St. Augustine insist (as he does in City of God) that there will be eternal torment for the damned, that in fact this will probably be the lot of the majority of humanity, and that such a condition will not disturb the happiness of the saved.  I have never read Thomas Aquinas – another very good and very intelligent man – but I have heard that in his writings he goes so far as to contend that one of the sources of pleasure for the saved in Heaven will actually be that they will be able to watch the torments of the damned.

Should I be a member of that fortunate minority who makes it into Heaven (and I am certainly not claiming that I believe that I have a good chance of doing so), I couldn’t imagine myself being happy there if anybody who I had known in this lifetime was being tortured for all of eternity: even those who had generally been causes of unhappiness in my life.  Eternity, after all, is a very, very, very long time.  I think of the most horrifying, miserable conditions that human beings have been subjected to in their lifetimes, such as being prisoners of war in the camp of a brutal enemy, and even in those circumstances, the victims could at least take consolation in the knowledge that a final release from their suffering would come at the end of their lives, if it didn’t come sooner, with a release from their captors.  Civilized human beings generally believe that there is such a thing as cruel and unusual punishment, which should be prohibited, even for the most heinous crimes.  It is a standard of mercy that all of us – or nearly all of us – subscribe to.  But I cannot imagine a more cruel and a more unusual punishment than one that would last for an eternity.

How is it that persons who are very scrupulous about the humane treatment of the most violent criminals in this lifetime can suddenly cast this sympathy to the winds in matters of the afterlife, and believe with no reservation or discomfort that intelligent beings will be tormented for a time without end?  Many of these persons are quite ready to accept such a fate for beings who were not even evil in the commonly understood sense, but rather whose greatest sin had merely been that they had not had belief and faith in the appropriate religious doctrine.

Now I am not above taking consolation myself in the idea of some higher form of justice, meted out to all rational beings.  I have observed with just as much bitterness and frustration as everyone else the phenomenon of persons who had been immoral, abusive, exploitative, and wicked during their lifetimes, and who seemed to have been able to engage in these behaviors with little or no negative consequences upon themselves, and in some cases even enjoyed great material success.  Conversely, I have seen good, charitable persons suffer during their lives, and never gain the reward to which they seemed entitled.  I want to believe that there is some sort of process beyond the mortal confines of our existence that will mete out rewards and punishments fitting for the behaviors practiced by each of us while we were on earth.  But at the same time, I have to believe that such rewards and punishments will be grounded in similar standards of justice as those practiced by temperate, moral people in this world.  Is it unrealistic to believe that a perfect being – as we understand the Creator to be – will be a perfectly just one, and a perfectly compassionate one as well?  And is it my own limited capacity to understand and comprehend such perfection which causes me to regard a perpetual, never-ending punishment as both unjust and uncompassionate?

(There is, admittedly, a great comfort in the idea that not just death, but an afterlife as well, will serve as a great “equalizer”, bringing down the proud, wealthy and powerful, and bringing up the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden back to a common level.  I have known persons, however, who have been a little too enamored with this idea: who want to believe that a reckoning awaits not only those who were evil, but also those who had been able to enjoy life much more than they had.)

It is not just traditional conceptions of Hell, however, but those of Heaven as well which have given me problems.  Will an existence without goals to achieve, or problems to overcome, be a truly happy one?  As I pass my time in Heaven (again, assuming that I merit such a reward), will I truly find happiness by looking upon each new day as one that will be empty of complications, or conflicts, or challenges?  “Ahhhh, another blissful, trouble free day, where I can love everybody unconditionally and be loved in return in exactly the same way.  And after this, another just like it, and one after that, and another after that, and . . .”.  Now I must admit that when I have shared reservations such as these with others about Heaven, I have encountered some potent and potentially valid criticisms.  My complaints about Heaven, after all, are based upon my current, mortal conceptions of time and of experience.  Beyond this present, earthly existence, how we relate to time, and the nature of our experiences, might be something that is entirely different, and well beyond our capacity to understand it now.  My conception of happiness is at present an earth-bound one, and may be incongruent with the type of happiness that beings in an afterlife will experience.

And yet, one cannot resist wondering what the source of such happiness will be.  I would like to think that there is at least some congruence between what will make me happy there (in Heaven) as what has made me happy here.  The wonderful Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life comes to mind, where, upon passing on into the afterlife, his character discovers that one of the pleasures there is that he can eat as much of his favorite foods as he likes, with absolutely no guilt or fear of consequences.  Of course, if the sources of pleasure in heaven really do reflect the sources of pleasure on earth, including the sensual ones, then one can’t help but wonder why we were adjured during our lives to abstain from them, or at least practice them in moderation.  Why hold back from enjoying them during our lifetime, if the goal of our existence is to enjoy them in an unlimited way for an eternity in the afterlife?

I am reminded of a joke by the Irish comedian Dave Allen.  A businessman is taking a stroll and encounters a young vagrant, loitering in the park.  “Young man,” he says, with irritation, “why don’t you get a job?”

“Why would I want do to that, sir?” the vagrant replies.

“Because then you could make money, and if you work hard enough and long enough, you will be able to put away savings, so that someday you can retire and live a life of leisure, lying around and doing whatever you want,” the businessman explained.

“But I’m already doing that now, sir,” said the vagrant.

If the sources of happiness in this life and the next are incongruent, so that we should shun or at least limit the first kind, and look forward to an unlimited helping of the other, then why are they incongruent?  Why should any source of happiness (aside, of course, from those which are derived from the sufferings of others) in this life be toxic?

Recently, the wife of a popular American television preacher ran into controversy, after she declared that if we focus on making ourselves happy, then this will make God happy.  She was roundly criticized by more traditional clergymen, such as the pastor of a church who, when invited to come on television and share his views on the matter, said that we should focus instead on making God happy, and by doing so we will eventually find true happiness for ourselves.  Now as I watched this controversy unfold, I realized that I had some fundamental difficulties – not just with the remark that the preacher’s wife made, but also the one made by this self-proclaimed expert on theology who was publicly rebuking her.  If God is perfect, omnipotent, the uncaused First Cause, etc., then how can God’s “happiness” or other mental and emotional states, whatever these are, be contingent upon anything that we do?  We can no more “make” God happy or unhappy than we can make God roll over, or jump up and down.  Of course, this implies that there is really no way that we can ever please God, no matter what we do, which would seem to make much of the rest of this discussion about Divine reward and punishment mute.  One possible way out of the conundrum is to engage in a little wordplay, and say instead that God can “take pleasure” in our actions.

Still, if God is merely “taking pleasure” in our actions – preferring that each of us lives our lives according to a certain moral code – in a way that involves no real stake in the matter for God (else this would take us back to the contingency problem), then what is the purpose in that?  It would seem to make of each human life the equivalent of a television “game show”, with those who acted correctly (or, according to some religiously-minded people, those who believed correctly) winning a prize, and those who failed the test not winning a prize (or worse, being punished, perhaps for an eternity).  This idea – of each human life getting a final “pass” or “fail” – seems rather unfair, given the diversity of circumstances, both innate and situational, that predispose a human being to one mode of conduct (and belief) rather than another.  It is rather naïve to assume or believe that every human being, regardless of their unique life circumstances, has an equal opportunity (let alone probability) of choosing and living the right path rather than a wrong one.  Even St. Augustine, in his City of God, wrestled with the problem of what would happen to human infants who never had the opportunity to commit to any form of behavior or belief.  And to the extent that these opportunities are not equal among all human beings, then the idea of a perfect, divine justice underlying all existence is seriously undermined.

It is for this reason, I think, that the idea of reincarnation has become a tenet among various spiritual disciplines.  If the Creator desires (another awkward verb to use in conjunction with a perfect, omnipotent being) that all of Its sentient creations achieve some sort of moral perfection, then it is much more just and reasonable to assume that more than one lifetime will be allotted to each sentient being to attain this goal.  Whatever mistakes we make in this lifetime can be corrected, and atoned for, in one or more future lifetimes.  Hell, in such a case, may not exist, or may not need to exist.  There is, for example, a particular type of saint in eastern religion called a bodhisattva: a saint that refuses to enter Heaven until all other sentient beings are saved.  Such a saint could never bear the idea of some fellow soul being barred from Heaven, let alone being tormented for ever in some form of perdition.  Hence, there is no contradiction between the compassion practiced by such a saint during life and that saint’s capacity to exercise similar compassion in the afterlife, as there so often seems to be in western religions.

But while reincarnation seems to be a more “humane” system of religion, I no longer believe that it is a more personally satisfying one to believe in.  There was a time when I warmed up to the idea of being able to attend to “unfinished business” in future lifetimes, correcting personal flaws and somehow atoning for past sins, and in particular found it appealing to believe that I could survive beyond the limits of my present life into those future incarnations.  This consolation, however, lost its allure to me many years ago after I read a discussion of the idea by the American philosopher Hazel Barnes.  In her book, An Existentialist Ethics, Barnes observes that a characteristic of reincarnation, as it is generally understood, is that a person living now has no conscious recollection of any of his or her prior incarnations.  Where is the comfort, Barnes asked, in believing that my soul essence will survive beyond my death into the existence of some yet to be born person, if that person will have no active memory of me?  Everything that made my existence important to me – my experiences, my feelings toward others who were close to me, my goals, accomplishments, and challenges – will be gone from the conscious memory of that future incarnation.  That person, in their day-to-day existence, will no more care about me and what had happened in my life than the typical person who I encounter in the street today.  Under such circumstances, how can I feel any kind of genuine satisfaction in the belief that I will “live on” beyond the end of this present life?  Everything that makes up “me”, in any meaningful sense of the word, will still be very much dead and gone.  (It seems to me – if current popular accounts of reincarnation are true – that the best I could hope for is that some future incarnation might dredge up fleeting mental images of my life in “past lives” hypnotic regression therapy.  Surely I would stand a much better chance of having my experiences make a tangible mark on the conscious minds of future persons if I just left behind a journal!)

And, Barnes added, there is another problem with reincarnation.  If the purpose of mortal life and existence is indeed to somehow “fix” ourselves, by growing spiritually, correcting our faults and shortcomings, and atoning for any wrongdoings that we have committed, then an endless (or nearly endless) cycle of births and rebirths will remove any sense of urgency to the project.  If the western religious concept of one life, one opportunity, seems too harsh and unforgiving, then the eastern one seems to err in the opposite extreme.  One can keep throwing the dice, so to speak, over and over and over again.  Why should I bother correcting a particular vice in this lifetime (particularly if I enjoy it), if I can fix it in the next life, or the one after that, or the one after that?  The finitude of time, Barnes observes, is what gives it its value, and it is also what confers an importance upon the choices we make.  If I truly believe that if I don’t fix a particular mistake now, then another opportunity may never arise in the future to fix it then, it will motivate me to take the proper action – now.  But if I believe that I will have a limitless stream of opportunities to do so, the motivation is diminished, perhaps entirely.  Even the capacity to enjoy life itself may be diminished, if I believe that I have an infinite store of time in which to do so.  “You only live once,” is a popular expression, and implicit in that expression is an exhortation to savor life, and live it to the fullest, because you only have this one chance to do it.  Every moment is precious, because it is part of a finite collection of moments allotted to us, and though these may seem uncountable (particularly in our youth), we develop a growing appreciation of the fact that our time here on earth is limited.  Another popular expression of late is “bucket list”: the idea that as we become more cognizant of the limited number of days still available to us, we want to rush out and have those “once-in-a-lifetime” experiences that will give us a greater sense of a fully-lived life.  The underlying message of the aforementioned movie, Defending Your Life, in which the recently deceased main character is literally put on trial, with lawyers for the prosecution and defense, is that the real purpose of life is to honor it by boldly “seizing the day”, and having the courage to strive for what (or whom) one truly loves and cares about.

In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the main characters learn only too late – after death, in fact – how truly priceless the seemingly commonplace moments in their lives were, when they were spending time with their families doing ordinary things, such as sitting together at the dinner table.  The gravity of the realization that those moments are now gone forever is painfully apparent to the deceased characters, and they regret that when they had lived them, they had been preoccupied with other things, and did not relish them and treasure them as they had experienced them.  The deceased want to shout out to the still-living and exhort them not to make the same foolish mistake by squandering their own precious moments with the loved ones in their lives, but cannot communicate with them from beyond the grave.

What if the dead characters in Our Town were given that second chance, and each could live their entire life over again, with a full memory of their previous pass through that life, and the ability to live parts of it differently, if desired?  What if they could live just one day of their life over again?  In the movie Groundhog Day, the main character finds, upon visiting a town as part of a work assignment, that he is living the same day over and over and over again in that town.  He initially rebels against the experience, acting in absurd and even destructive ways during repeats of this day, but eventually settles into the phenomenon, using each repetition as an opportunity to improve himself (he learns, for example, how to play the piano proficiently), and also to become more fully engaged in the lives of those around him – most of whom had merely been strangers to him during that very first passage through the day.  When he is finally liberated from this recurrence, and finds himself passing into a genuinely new day, it is apparently as a consequence of the fact that he has finally lived that previous day perfectly.  Perhaps this really would be the result of an ability to relive one’s experiences in an endless cycle of repetition: an ultimate perfection of those experiences by correcting, broadening, deepening, and savoring them, along with a perfection of one’s self as well.  On the other hand, it seems just as likely that the phenomenon of eternal recurrence would eventually leave one in a state of catatonic apathy, unwilling to engage with the world at all.  Perhaps, in time, both of these results – the positive and the negative – would occur.  Is this what the eastern concept of “nirvana” really means: the perfection of oneself through a seemingly endless cycle of births and rebirths, followed by a profound world-weariness in which one willingly ceases from engaging in any future rebirths, and chooses, instead, a complete detachment from existence?

Of course, in the traditional concept of reincarnation, we are not living the same life over and over again, but a different one each time.  But if the purpose of reincarnation is to “fix” ourselves, by atoning for wrongs committed against others, and learning better how to react to certain situations, then there has to be some sort of congruence between each life.  If I have wronged somebody in this lifetime, and need to atone for it in some future one, then it must be the case that my future “incarnation” will encounter that other person’s future “incarnation”, even if neither of us remembers our first encounter in a previous lifetime.  Similarly, if I need to perfect myself by learning better how to act and react in certain situations, then it has to be assumed that I will encounter identical or at least similar facsimiles of these situations over future lifetimes.  (And if I don’t remember what I did wrong or incorrectly the first time, then how will I be able to atone for it or improve my behavior the next time?  Are my actions being guided by some unconscious force which does have a memory of all of my previous incarnations?)  The very fact that my future lives will not be identical to this one really complicates things, because with novel experiences come novel challenges, and completely new ways to make mistakes that I could not have prepared for (unconsciously, it is assumed) through the benefit of living those previous incarnations.  But there’s an even bigger technicality.  The human experience has become more complicated over time, as a result of the evolution of civilization and the technological development that supports it, and its problems and challenges have become more complicated as well.  If, for example, as a caveman in a previous lifetime, I bonked somebody over the head with a club, I may find it easy to make amends for that particular transgression in this lifetime, but may find myself committing all sorts of new sins that were unimaginable back then (like making an unsavory remark about somebody on Twitter).  If my challenges and potential transgressions are becoming more complicated with each new incarnation, will I ever be able to completely settle the balance sheet, or will I constantly find myself stumbling over some new problem that I could have never possibly prepared myself for in a million previous lifetimes?  Maybe reincarnation was intended to be like a television soap opera, with problems arising and eventually being solved, but new challenges arising in their wake, along with the occasional introduction of new characters never encountered before, to keep the ongoing drama vibrant and interesting, and perhaps even never-ending.  (This strategy, after all, has enabled some television soap operas to last for a very, very long time.)

It is certainly a lot less complicated (and less mind-numbing) to simply believe that there is a Heaven and a Hell, and that our lot is determined after one shot at life.  But that idea has always left me with a much more fundamental underlying problem:  How could a perfect Watchmaker possibly make an imperfect watch?  If existence – not just mine, but existence in general – is a product of a perfect Creator, then how can it be less than perfect?  The solution to this paradox, for me, has always been a rather simple and obvious one: imperfection is a prerequisite of existence.  Existence in any meaningful sense involves hope, desire, and growth through the overcoming of obstacles and the meeting of challenges, and all of these imply that the present state is not as good as one would like it to be.  If we were all perfect beings in a perfect world, there would be nothing to do, because there would be nothing that had to be done.  

Perhaps each of our lives is like an individual dream of the Creator’s.  As in each of our own dreams, in which we exist as self-contained entities living out particular dramas with little or no memory of our waking, wider existence, perhaps each of us is living a part of the Creator’s existence, and doing so by “forgetting”, in the brief relative moment that our lifetime lasts, that we are something more than this individual person living this particular life.  Through death, or “nirvana”, we wake up to that wider sense of being – that being that transcends the imperfection of transient existence and embraces all of the lives that it has lived through the “dreams” that collectively make up existence in time.  This has always been a comforting belief for me, and admittedly a convenient one.  It is convenient, after all, for a middle-class American who has never known hardship, deprivation, or catastrophic turmoil to believe that life is imperfect because that’s what makes it interesting.  I wonder how comforting or convenient such an idea would be for someone who was poor, abused, or suffering from painful, crippling disabilities or infirmities.  And even I would like to believe that somehow, some way, it matters whether we are good rather than not good, and that our actions have genuine consequences.

Who knows which of these views, if any, are close to the truth: close to reconciling the existence of this imperfect universe with the designs of a perfect Watchmaker?  We can only wait, and hope, that the answer will be made known to each of us - someway, somehow - in the course of our unfolding existences.  Time will tell.

Predator and Prey

The Halloween month of October is upon us again, and I thought it would be an opportune time to discuss an interesting trend in horror novels and movies that I have observed.  This is the theme of human beings as prey.  I don’t think that the trend is accidental.  I strongly suspect that it has come about due to the observation that human beings have overrun this planet.  It took all of human history to reach a global population of 1 billion people by the year 1800; during the 20^th century alone, population increased from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.  The earth is currently home to about 7 billion people, and it is projected that this number will increase to 11 billion by the end of this century.

Of course, such phenomenal growth has not come without cost to the rest of our ecosystem.  Biologists contend that the earth is currently undergoing its sixth global extinction crisis, and that the current extinction rate of animal species is at least 1,000, and perhaps as high as 10,000, times higher than the normal rate.  This means that between 0.01% and 0.1% of all species on the planet are becoming extinct each year.

As a species with no natural predator to keep us in check, we have become like those rabbits that were introduced in Australia in the 19^th century, which eventually overran the island continent and caused a devastating impact on its natural ecology, eradicating native plants, and eroding topsoil.  Resident Australians have resorted to desperate measures to try to keep them in check, including poisoning, the introduction of fatal diseases, destroying their warrens (nests), aggressive hunting and trapping, and introducing predators (ferrets).  (In the United States, the common housecat, which is also technically an invasive species, has wreaked similar ecological devastation, particularly on the native bird population.)

Economists have raised the hopeful prospect that the human race will eventually contain its explosive growth as a natural course, noting that wherever standards of living have risen, there has been a concomitant decline in the birthrate and, indeed, in several developed economies, populations actually seem to be decreasing.  But whether this natural slowdown in population growth will occur in time to prevent the continued degradation of the global ecosystem is far from assured, and it may be that we have already passed a critical point of no return in terms of the irreversible damage that has been done.

And so I come back to the horror genre of contemporary fiction.  It seems this medium has become a sort of outlet for channeling our fears of unrestrained growth, as a new species of monster has taken precedence: the predator of human beings.  There is something of a population explosion occurring here, as these creatures have almost overrun the genre: in literature, in television, and the cinema.

I have identified five distinct types of such predators.  These are the subhuman (zombies), the human (serial killers), the meta- or super-human (vampires), the non-human (generally alien invaders, but also mutant creatures which have arisen on this planet), and the non-living (machines).  Most of these categories present, I think, rather uninteresting ways of introducing predators of humans into our human-dominated ecosystem, because they ignore the intimate and intricate relationship between predator and prey.  I have already commented on the zombie phenomenon in a previous blog entry (“Apocalypse Then”, April 2013), and can only add that this would be a very unsatisfactory predatory solution to human overpopulation, since the end result would probably be (unless the zombies were completely eradicated themselves) a total end to the human race, and a replacement of human beings with creatures that were incapable of emulating or going beyond the best elements of human civilization.  With respect to serial killers, I could never imagine the ranks of these growing beyond a relatively few aberrant individuals, and, with the exception of the effete and sophisticated serial killer Hannibal Lecter, it seems unlikely that they would create a more interesting ecosystem as a result of their presence.  Non-human predators present a genuinely viable solution to the human ecological crisis, but it is hard to imagine what these would be like, and where they would come from.  And finally, while some science fiction movies have envisioned future sophisticated machines as forming a predatory symbiosis with humanity (the best example being The Matrix movies), it seems much more likely that machines which have achieved self-awareness would find little or nothing of value to extract from human beings, and would therefore either ignore them or exterminate them.

This leaves the meta-human predator and its most popular fictional incarnation, the vampire, and here I think we have some fertile ground for imagining a creature which could form an authentic, endurable, predator-prey relationship with humanity.  Vampires, after all, are acutely aware of the fact that their survival is contingent on the continuing survival of human beings, and so (unless they were as foolish and short-sighted as people have been) would deliberately keep their own numbers down, so as not to jeopardize the survival of their food supply.  But vampirism, as it is portrayed in popular fiction, presents an interesting problem, because all vampires were, at some time, human beings themselves. 

This is a moral problem.  It is something that the predators that currently exist in earth’s ecosystem have never had to contend with, since (with the exception of human beings, and more on that later) they are not rational.  No lion ever engages in metaphysical speculation about the morality of killing a wildebeest, nor does a wolf entertain anguished self-doubts about killing a hare.  But humans are rational beings, and, if they have managed to insulate themselves from any moral qualms about preying on other living creatures because these are all non-rational beings of a significantly lower intelligence, then what recourse would a formerly human creature have in justifying its predation of humans?

In the history of vampire literature, this was a question that was initially not contended with.  Bram Stoker’s Dracula seemed to have no qualms whatsoever about preying on human beings, and, indeed, in the earliest genre of vampire stories that were inspired by his classic novel, there was a suggestion that perhaps the vampire convert underwent a mental/psychological transformation that deadened any such sympathies.

I think that it was Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire that was the first to address – in a very direct fashion – the potential moral conundrum faced by a former human being who must now survive by preying on humanity.  A horror classic that ranks with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula, Rice’s novel has since inspired a deluge of imitations – in books, cinema, and television – and while these (including Rice’s own sequels) are generally of lower quality and less memorable than her original masterpiece, they have followed her lead in portraying the vampire as more than simply a demon in human form.

Her novel centers on the character of Louis, a French-American living in New Orleans who is already undergoing a sort of moral torment even before his conversion.  A younger brother had taken the path to religious piety, and while Louis at first supported and accommodated him, even building a chapel on their plantation, he then watched helplessly as his brother drifted into a hallucinatory madness that eventually leads to the brother’s death.  Louis is stricken with doubts about the value of his own life, and descends into a debauched lifestyle that invites a violent end to it.  In an interesting inversion of one of Jesus’ sayings – “ Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” – Louis is “saved” just at that moment where his death wish is about to be satisfied, by a vampire, Lestat, who attacks him and then converts him into a vampire.  Louis discovers, in this new state, that both his ability to experience and perceive the world around him, as well as his powers to act upon it, have heightened immensely.  But much of the rest of the novel centers on Louis’s resistance to accepting Lestat as a mentor and guide for his new life, because he find’s Lestat’s behavior morally repugnant.  And yet, while condemning it, Louis is forced to accept the fact that he must become like Lestat, if he is to survive.  (And it is interesting to observe that the next line Jesus speaks in that Gospel quotation above is, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”)

Rice’s novel introduces us to a terrifying ecosystem, in which vampires, as predators of humans, hunt either individually or in groups, and these jealously guard their respective territories from potential interlopers – driving them out or even destroying them, just as animal predators do in the natural world.  Her vampires are also very careful about how they prey on the human herd, making their kills look like accidents, so as to prevent a general, disruptive panic.  And there is a suggestion that these hyper-sensitive, hyper-sophisticated creatures do more than merely prey on the lives of human beings.  They also enjoy the products of human civilization – the artistic and other accomplishments of the more talented members of the species.  (Lestat, for example, is a fan of the theater.)  We are thereby introduced to a higher order of predation: a predation that is suitable for a species of beings that has evolved to hunt a rational, intellectually-endowed creature.

But as horrifying as this picture is, one cannot help but concede that such an ecosystem actually would remedy many of the ills that are currently plaguing the human race – and, through them, the rest of life on earth.  Creatures such as these vampires would effectively prevent humans from overrunning the planet and destroying its ecology, as the rabbits in Australia nearly did.  And, if these vampires were selective in their killing, only preying upon human beings that did not satisfy their other cravings (i.e., by not producing things of artistic or material merit), then a higher order of “natural selection” would set in, and their predation would leave a progressively higher caliber of survivors.  (In Anne Rice’s first sequel to her vampire novel, for example, her character Lestat even claims that he only kills human beings who have a depraved moral character.)

The vampire predator, then – at least as conceived by Anne Rice – would best fulfill the role of an effective species that would restore ecological balance by keeping the human race in check.  It would realize that its own ultimate survival was intimately intertwined with that of its prey, and that if it were too successful in its predatory activities, then the result would be its own eventual demise.  And, being a more evolved predator, engaged in the pursuit of a similarly higher-level, intelligent species, its method of selective hunting would go beyond merely outrunning and overpowering the old, the sick, the lame, and the weak: its methods of selecting prey would involve detecting more subtle forms of degeneracy.  Its methods of killing, too, would involve techniques of stealth that lower-order predators could never conceive of, since it would realize that to create a wide-spread panic, and consequent chaos, would mean the end of the material and artistic products of human civilization that it also savored.

But there are problems with the vampire model of predation, and these, as mentioned above, comprised much of the focus of Rice’s novel.  After all, vampires were once humans themselves, and so, like Louis, the new convert could face a severe existential crisis when he or she realizes that human beings must now be treated solely as means, and never as ends.  No lion need ever face the sympathetic anguish of remembering what it was like to be a wildebeest; or a fox what it was like to be a rabbit.  (Of course, very young predators, such as lion cubs, might have the experience of being preyed upon by others – including adult members of their own species – though I doubt that this ever produces a compassionate reluctance among those who survive into adulthood to engage in the hunt.)

Only a predator of humans that never had an experience of being human could be completely free of such moral ambiguity.  Or could it?  Is there a certain level of intelligence above which one creature would be incapable of preying upon another – at least in a non-pathological way – if they were both above this threshold?  But what if the predator was so far above us in intelligence that we appeared as bestial to it as the rest of the animal kingdom does to us?  Would this allow it to hunt us and feed upon us and still feel certain that it is behaving in complete conformity with its own higher moral code?  Is there really some absolute threshold of intelligence and rationality above which any creature that possesses it should never be hunted, or even treated merely as a means to obtain some other form of benefit or satisfaction?  If so, what is this threshold, and what is the justification for establishing it there, and not at some higher or lower level?  And, even assuming that there is such a justification, what if a species tends to be above this threshold, but some of its members fall below it (perhaps because of some genetic disease, such as mental retardation)?  Will these particular members then be outside of the protection of the rule?  If some being of higher intelligence informed us that we had fallen below its threshold of predation (i.e., we weren’t intelligent and rational enough, by its standards, to be “exempt” from its hunting and exploitation activities), how could we convincingly argue that their threshold is too high, and that their moral code needed to be revised accordingly, particularly with regard to their treatment of us?

Questions like these haunted me after I first read Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (and many of these were directly inspired, if I recall, by a reading around the same time from one of the philosopher Robert Nozick’s books).  We flatter ourselves that we are the world’s “apex predators”, and yet the irony is that we seem to be wreaking global destruction due to our behavior which is more akin to that of a prey species (like rabbits) that have been allowed to proliferate unchecked.  Hence the apparent macabre wish for a predator of humans, which seems to be manifesting itself on such a large scale among writers of horror and science fiction.  Perhaps, ironically, part of the problem is that we are no longer really predators at all: rather, we are “proxy predators”.  Our technologies have allowed us to engage in predation and other forms of violence at arm’s length – with drones and guns and long-range missiles and factory farms – and we rarely have to experience in an immediate sort of way the consequences of our proxy predation.  Sadly, it is hard to imagine how we will ever be able to reverse this process, which has been the dark accompaniment to civilization itself.  Perhaps at least a partial solution to our global crisis might arise if we collectively take a hard look at where we, as a species, have set our own “threshold of predation”: with respect to all life on this planet – animal and human alike.

The Prime Directive

What if a machine were able to think?  This, of course, is a perennially popular theme in science fiction, with stories about computers or androids becoming so sophisticated that they achieve a state of self-awareness.  They become, in essence, living beings, albeit ones that are composed of circuits and wires rather than blood and veins.  And usually, in these stories, dire consequences follow for the human race.

But creating a genuinely thinking, self-aware machine is a very tall order, and, after an initial enthusiastic rush of optimism among proponents of “artificial intelligence” in the early years of the computer revolution, the outlook for this achievement has dimmed considerably.  It has been discovered that human (and animal) intelligence involves much more than a process of simply engaging in sequential trains of logic, and, even with the development of “neural nets” which simulate certain non-linear patterns of thinking, such as pattern recognition, the gulf between this and genuine thinking still seems to be immense.  All of these operations, after all, no matter how sophisticated, simply involve the carrying out of instructions that have been defined by the programmer.  There is no genuine “understanding” on the computer’s part of what it is processing.  Philosopher John Searle has compared the operations of a computer to a man sitting in a room who is being sent messages in Chinese, a language that he doesn’t understand.  He is able to “communicate” with the senders because he has an instruction book, written in his own language, which directs him to send back particular sequences of Chinese symbols whenever he encounters certain sequences of Chinese symbols in the messages that he is receiving.  He has absolutely no comprehension of what any of these symbols mean, and if there is indeed some sort of “conversation” going on between those who are exchanging messages with him in Chinese, he is completely unaware of it.  Searle contends that this is exactly what is happening with computers, and that it represents a nearly insurmountable problem in creating a genuine, “thinking”, machine. 

Philosopher Ned Block, however, took Searle’s thought experiment one step further.  What, he said, if there was not just one processor of these symbols, but millions, or billions, of people, each of whom had an instruction book of their own, with directions in their own language on what to do whenever they received a set of symbols.  Each of them might be directed to pass another set of symbols on to a particular person nearby, who then passes on a different set to somebody else, in accordance with his instructions, and so on.  None of the individuals in this massive group would understand the symbols that each of them was processing, just as the single man in the room in Searle’s thought experiment couldn’t.  But would the group somehow comprehend the messages being exchanged with the external communicant, even if none of the individuals that made it up did?  The obvious answer seems to be that there would be no difference between this scenario and the one described by Searle.  In both cases we have people carrying out instructions on how to send words in a language that they don’t understand.  Whether it is just one person or a billion would seem to make no difference. 

But wait.  Aren’t the billions of neurons in a human (or animal) brain doing exactly this?  Isn’t each neuron receiving electro-chemical signals from such sources as the optical nerves of the eye, and then passing on electro-chemical signals to other neurons, with each neuron simply automatically carrying out instructions on how to respond to certain stimuli in a manner that nature had “hard-wired” it to do?  And yet, somehow, from this process I am able to create an image in my mind, think about it, have feelings about it, and remember it.  My neurons can’t have a conversation with the external world, but I can, although I couldn’t do it without them.  But has consciousness really emerged from these processes alone, as a sort of “epiphenomenon”, or is something else responsible for it – something which has yet to be discovered by modern science?

In spite of this apparent counter-example from living organisms, Searle’s arguments still seem pretty compelling: it is hard to believe that the mere processing of a series of simple instructions, regardless of how many millions of these processes are now being carried out in a modern computer, could ever amount to anything like genuine thinking, or even experiencing, let alone self-awareness.  Hence, many computer architects have lowered the bar, and set as the ultimate goal for artificial intelligence the mere simulation of thinking.  While conceding that a computer might never be able to genuinely think, they aspire to develop a machine that can behave in ways that make us think that they’re thinking. 

Alan Turing

In 1950, Alan M. Turing, a British mathematician, logician, and visionary of computer science, suggested a criterion for determining when such a threshold has been reached: the “Turing Test”.  Imagine communicating with some other entity via a keyboard and a monitor.  You don’t know if this other entity, which is located somewhere else, is a human being or a machine.  You must try to determine this by typing questions with the keyboard and viewing the entity’s responses on the monitor.  Can a machine ever be built that will be able to convince any such person that it is a living, thinking being, regardless of the questions that are asked?  Turing was optimistic.  He predicted, in the year that he suggested this test, “. . . that in about fifty years’ time, it will be possible to programme computers . . . to . . . play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification in five minutes of questioning.”

It turns out that Turing was overoptimistic.  It is now more than 60 years since he made that prediction, and to date no machine has been able to fulfill it.  (And this in spite of the fact that a $100,000 prize has been offered annually in a competition to anyone who can present a machine which passes a version of the Turing Test.  This competition, known as the Loebner Prize, has been in existence since 1990.  Smaller sums have been awarded to machines in the contest that have demonstrated simpler feats of conversational mimicry.)

How exactly should a computer be programmed to mimic living beings?  Are there a set of fundamental instructions that would be most effective in creating a “life-like” computer or automaton?  Some computer architects, rather than focusing on sophisticated programs that would simulate high-level life processes such as communication and problem-solving, have instead turned their attention to the opposite end of the biological ladder, and concentrated on the creation of self-replicating automata.  Self-replication, after all, seems to be at the basis of all life, down to the cellular level.  The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in his 1942 short story Runaround, put equal programming emphasis on what androids could not do, with his “Three Laws of Robotics”, though even in these the goal of self-protection was explicitly acknowledged.

I believe that there actually is one basic directive or instruction, which, if it could somehow be programmed into a machine, would most effectively produce a machine that emulated a living being.  The directive would be to maximize its locus of meaningful activity.  Now on the surface I know that this doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of specifics.  What, I suspect one would ask, is “meaningful” supposed to mean?  The best way to get at this is to explain those conditions under which a machine (or even an actual living being) would completely fail at following this directive.

At one extreme, imagine a being that can perceive its environment (whether this is through the standard human senses of sight, hearing, touch, etc., or something different, and even mechanical, such as a machine receiving inputs, is immaterial), but is incapable of acting upon its environment, in any way.  For a person, this might be like being strapped to a table for his entire life, confined in an empty room, and forced to spend his entire time watching a television monitor, and hearing sounds from a speaker.  He wouldn’t even be able to “change the channels”: everything that he saw, heard, and felt would be guided by influences over which he had absolutely no control.  This, I argue, would be a life devoid of meaning.  If I have absolutely no influence over my environment – if I can’t even affect it in the most trivial of ways – then it is ultimately of no consequence to me.  One might argue that I might still develop sympathies for the other beings that I am forced to watch, and so be meaningfully engaged in that way.  But my level of engagement would be no more so than that I might have in the real world with the fictional character of a television program or movie.  My degree of substantial connection would be the same in both cases – which is to say I would have no real connection with them at all.

At the opposite extreme, imagine a being who could control everything in its environment, including other living beings.  These others would be like puppets, in that every action that they performed would be in accordance with the will of this omnipotent being.  In such an environment, for this being, there would be no novelty, no spontaneity, nothing new to learn or discover.  An existence such as this would be a sterile one, because of its complete predictability.  Complete power, complete control, would ultimately be meaningless, because with it would come an existence that offered no possibilities for growth through encounter with the unknown.  For one living such an existence, it would be like spending life confined in a room filled with games in which one moved all of the pieces.

Meaning, then, for me, represents a happy middle between these two extremes of complete control and complete lack of control.  It represents life in a world where I have some power over circumstances that affect me, so that I am more than a passive observer, but not a power so extensive, so complete, that I eliminate any possibility of novelty, of surprise, of having a genuinely spontaneous experience.  And to maximize meaning – where absence of meaning would be represented by either of these two extremes – would entail expanding one’s perceptual capabilities, while also attempting to exert some control over the widening field of experience.  It would also entail risk, of course, since my efforts to widen my personal horizons will also potentially put me into contact with somebody or something that could diminish, or even destroy, my ability to exercise any kind of control over my life.

Would a machine ever be capable of doing this?  Would mobility be a prerequisite for success?  Would a machine have to, at the very least, be able to procure the necessary resources for its continued sustenance?  Perhaps not.  If the machine had the capability to communicate with its surrounding environment, it might be able to “persuade” others to attend to its needs, and even to assist it in its project of both sustaining itself and increasing its loci of perception and control.  Such an idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. While computers may not have yet reached the degree of sophistication in communication to pass the Turing Test, they have for some time had the capability to engage in at least rudimentary forms of conversation with human subjects.  In the mid-1960s, a computer program named ELIZA was developed which could mimic a psychotherapist, by asking the sort of leading questions that are often used by practitioners in this field.  (These questions were constructed based upon prior answers of the subject that the computer was communicating with.)  In the 2013 science fiction film Her, a man falls in love with a computer that has a female voice.  The film was inspired by an actual internet web application called “Cleverbot”, which mimics human conversation extremely well and has scored highly on the Turing Test.  Given the capacity for human beings to develop deep emotional ties to animals of much lower intelligence – and even in many cases inanimate objects – it does not seem unlikely at all that some computer could someday enlist a human being who has fallen under its spell to support its objectives.  (And isn’t it the case that many people already practice a form of this art?)

This idea of the prime directive came to me many years ago: not as the result of thinking about computers and artificial intelligence, but actually as a consequence of an ongoing debate that I had with a college friend of mine.  We were starkly different in temperament: I tended to live a very ordered existence, planning the activities of each day very carefully and thoroughly, while she was much more of a spontaneous sort, and relished the novelty of unplanned experience.  She was disdainful of my own behavior, saying that by controlling the activities of my day so completely, I was squelching any chance of doing something genuinely interesting, let alone exciting.  I, on the other hand, had developed a contempt for persons who exercised little or no control over their own lives, because in the working class environment of my youth, I had seen many people who seemed to be little more than helpless pawns or victims of life: they “got pregnant”, “got married”, “got into trouble”, “got hired”, “lost a job” – life for them seemed to be a series of passive verbs.  I made a resolution early in my life that to escape this environment, I would exert a greater level of control over my life than they had their own.

But still, I could see that my college friend had a point.  After all, in spite of her love of spontaneity, and contempt for a regimented life, it was plain to me that she was not a victim like so many of the kids in my neighborhood had been.  She was in fact doing very well in college, and later went on to a very successful professional career.  As I contemplated our respective behaviors, as well as those of my childhood peers, I finally concluded that there were two equally perilous extremes that one could succumb to in the management of one’s life.  At the one extreme there was the over-controlled life, which I likened to a ship that visited the same ports at rigorously scheduled intervals.  For the captain and crew of such a ship, existence was a very circumscribed thing, with a very predictable and repetitious sequence of experiences.  The captain was in complete control of his ship, his crew, and his destiny, but this complete control effectively eliminated any opportunities for learning, growth, or change.  At the opposite extreme were those who were lost at sea on a makeshift raft, without a sail or oar, completely at the mercy of the elements, tossed to and fro by the random waves that hit the raft.  Such an existence was also a pathetic one, in its own sort of way, and an extremely dangerous one as well.  Between these two extremes there was the explorer, a captain who, while in control of his ship, regularly steered it into uncharted waters, in search of new lands to discover and explore.  There were risks, to be sure, from the elements, as well as from peoples and animals that might be encountered in foreign shores, but the rewards generally outweighed the dangers.  And even when the ship was sailing into unfamiliar territory, its captain was doing so with a purpose, and with the benefit of years of accumulated knowledge acquired from many such voyages in the past.  I would like to think that my college friend and I both – at least in our better moments – were like the explorer, though while she occasionally ran the risk of ending up on that life raft, I, on the other hand, regularly risked succumbing to the temptation of limiting my voyages to familiar ports.

If a machine, then, could be programmed to emulate the behavior of an explorer, endeavoring to broaden its boundaries of perception by branching out into new and different environments, but also endeavoring to maintain some degree of control over these encounters, then I think it would most effectively mimic the behavior of a living being.  But I do think that this would merely be a successful act of mimicry, or simulation, rather than a genuine replication of the life process.  After all, in this case, the machine would still simply be following a programmed set of instructions, and the procedure would be just as open to Searle’s critique.  It represents, then, a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the attainment of something like living consciousness.

What would give genuine meaning to this process would be two things.  The first is a conception of self, a feeling of identity.  To be alive, there must be a sense of an I: these things are happening to me; I want to do this or that.  Would a self-concept arise naturally out of a sufficiently complex process of information processing, as some believe happens with our own vast network of billions of neurons in our brains?  Would the programmed machine explorer eventually attain self-consciousness after expanding its sphere of perceptions and accumulated information beyond some threshold?  (This is certainly a popular motif in science fiction, though exactly how such a thing could happen is never, of course, satisfactorily explained.)  Or is something else required – something that we have yet to discover?  In any case, without this sense of identity, this self-directed frame of reference, there could not possibly be something that is manifesting an authentic existence.

And even the existence of an I would not be sufficient for genuinely meaningful experience.  Imagine yourself in a universe where you were completely alone, living in a room that contained (aside from whatever was required to sustain you physically, such as food and water) a set of simple puzzles to solve.  As soon as you have completed these, a door opens onto a wider space, with more elaborate furnishings, and where there are more puzzles and other diversions, of a higher level of complexity.  You set about working on these, and when you successfully master them, yet another door opens, into an even wider space, with a set of more diverse and interesting surroundings, and even more challenging puzzles to contend with.  You eventually surmise that this is – and will be – the sum total of your existence.  You are within what may very well be an infinite set of concentric enclosed spaces, with each wider space moving outward containing more elaborate and interesting scenery and a more sophisticated set of challenges to grapple with.  As you successfully master the puzzles in each wider space, both your locus of control and your locus of perceptual awareness increase.  At the end of such a life, regardless of how “successful” you were (as measured by the number of widening spaces you were able to attain, during your lifetime), will you feel that your life was a meaningful one?  Will you feel that it was a satisfying one?  I suspect that you wouldn’t, nor would any reasonably intelligent being with a sense of self.

What’s missing?  An “other”: one or more beings, also existing in your universe, that are able to engage with you and your projects: competing with you, collaborating with you, evaluating you, and seeking evaluation from you.  The philosopher Martin Buber talked of two dimensions of relationship that one has with one’s external environment: “I-It”, and “I-Thou”.  The first relationship is a strictly instrumental one, in which what is encountered is treated as a thing, to be manipulated, shaped, destroyed, or put aside.  The second relationship is a personal one, in which a sort of resonance occurs: a recognition that the other you are encountering is, in some sort of way, like you: more than a thing, for the same (perhaps only vaguely understood) reason that you realize that you, yourself, are more than merely a thing.

As I engage in following the “prime directive” in an “I-It” universe, in which there is only me and what I perceive to be a universe consisting only of things (even if many of these “things” are actually alive, such as trees and grass), I run the risk of falling into one or the other of the two extremes of meaninglessness.  On the one hand, I may find myself in a sterile, unchallenging environment: a gray, relatively empty world that leaves me little to contemplate or contend with.  On the other hand, I may find myself completely overwhelmed by the environment around me – crippled by it somehow, perhaps literally, for example if I stumble and plummet down into a ravine, and find myself unable to move.  But even if I am successful in widening my sphere of experience, there will still be a certain emptiness or sterility to my existence.

In an “I-Thou” universe, as I set about trying to increase my range of experience and control, I face a much more interesting, and potentially fulfilling, set of challenges.  Any encounter with a “Thou” (another being) – even a friendly one – is inherently a contest.  Each of us vies for control during the encounter, while at the same time yearning to benefit from the experience – to widen our horizons as a result of it.  When I converse with others, I relish the opportunity to draw from the experiences conveyed in their words, while at the same time I subtly compete to insert my own statements, and to thereby maintain a sufficient level of influence over the dialogue.  I want to be heard, at least as much as I want to listen.

Every encounter with an other – a “Thou” – is fraught with both opportunity and danger.  In my daily commute on the subway, there is the regular temptation to settle into that over-controlled life of the captain who never strays from the familiar ports, in this case by sitting silently next to another passenger during the entire ride.  The bold move into spontaneity – starting a conversation with that fellow traveler – opens a universe of new possibilities for experience: an enlightening discussion, a new friend, a business opportunity, or an opportunity for romance.  On the other hand, risking an encounter with the “Thou” brings dangers as well: an unpleasant exchange, an outright rejection or rebuff, or worse, violence or predation.  The struggle to maximize one’s locus of meaning becomes a much more highly charged one in a universe populated with “Thous” and not just “Its”.

And the line of demarcation between an “It” and a “Thou” is a very fuzzy one.  In many cases, we treat our fellow human beings as means solely, rather than ends (as in the case of dictators who were responsible for the deaths of millions of human lives in the service of an abstract idea or policy), while  even animals can assume a central place in our lives, such as family pets.  Each of us draws that line in unique ways, and we conduct our behavior in accordance with it. 

            I am reminded of an episode from the classic American television series, The Twilight Zone, about a man who shunned the company of other people, and who found meaning in his life only through the reading of books.  He was a lowly employee of a bank, and one day, after emerging from the sheltered seclusion of that bank’s vault, he discovered that the entire human race had been instantly annihilated as the result of a nuclear war.  His reaction was one of elation, as he hurried to the local library, and exulted in the prospect of now being able to spend the rest of his entire life alone, leisurely poring through all of the volumes now at his disposal, without interference from others.  But just as he was about to enjoy his first book in what he perceived to be a paradise of seclusion, he dropped his glasses, accidentally stepped on them, and smashed them to pieces, leaving him virtually blind.  In that moment, his heaven became a hell, as there was nobody that he could turn to replace the broken spectacles.  His one source of real pleasure was now permanently beyond his reach, and he had only a life of misery, utter helplessness, and desolation to look forward to.  He learned only too late that even for him, a misanthrope, the road to meaning entailed an ongoing engagement with the “Thou”, with the other people that could make his pursuit of the prime directive possible.

I don’t know if we will ever actually be able to program a machine to follow that prime directive: to follow a goal of maximizing its locus of meaningful experience by constantly seeking out new means to expand its avenues of experience and its capacity for exerting a reasonable modicum of control over its widening environment.  I think that it would be very interesting, in such a case, to see how such a machine would actually behave.  Would it live out the worst nightmares embodied in science fiction novels: of computers or androids who seek to conquer or even eradicate the human race?  Or would it provide a rational model for how living, intelligent beings should actually conduct themselves?  Would such a machine ever attain genuine consciousness, with the capacity to know itself as an “I”, and to engage in real relationships with others as “Thous”?  That is the far more interesting question.  If the answer proves to be an affirmative one, then it will certainly have a profound impact on how we view life, consciousness, and meaning itself.