"Decartes described a human being as a combination of the material body, which is an automaton built by God, and the immaterial soul.." (6)
I love this passage from the intro to Sublime Dreams by Minsoo Kang because it reminds me of the "chicken and the egg" dilemma, the social construction of our realities, and the idea that things that we take as absolute truth in contemporary society have changed meanings throughout their very existence as ideas.
Today we conceptualize automatons and robots as perhaps the most manmade object considering its completely mechanical duplication of a human-like life form. As the beginning of the book points out, automatons were originally thought of simply s self-moving objects. At the same time, robots and automatons can be seen on the opposite position of the "human/robot spectrum" because of their creation as mechanized human bodies, and the evolved idea that they are essentially humans, but without souls.
This passage and Decartes' ideas creates a tense conception that God built the human body as an automaton and gave it a soul. But the perspective that automatons were created in the image of the human body troubles this idea in the same way as the question of
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
-Ali Barclay
I love this passage from the intro to Sublime Dreams by Minsoo Kang because it reminds me of the "chicken and the egg" dilemma, the social construction of our realities, and the idea that things that we take as absolute truth in contemporary society have changed meanings throughout their very existence as ideas.
Today we conceptualize automatons and robots as perhaps the most manmade object considering its completely mechanical duplication of a human-like life form. As the beginning of the book points out, automatons were originally thought of simply s self-moving objects. At the same time, robots and automatons can be seen on the opposite position of the "human/robot spectrum" because of their creation as mechanized human bodies, and the evolved idea that they are essentially humans, but without souls.
This passage and Decartes' ideas creates a tense conception that God built the human body as an automaton and gave it a soul. But the perspective that automatons were created in the image of the human body troubles this idea in the same way as the question of
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
-Ali Barclay