The Philosophy Cafe

The Philosophy Café at Harvard Book Store is a monthly gathering meant for the informal, relaxed, philosophical discussion of topics of mutual interest to participants. No particular expertise is required to participate, only a desire to explore philosophy and its real-world applications. More information can be found at www.philocafe.org.

The Philosophy Café is held on the third Wednesday of each month, from 7:30-9:30 pm, in the Used Book department on the lower level of Harvard Book Store.

This month's discussion topic:

Love and Robots- Can You Be My Valentine?

Imagine this: You are in room with two “people” they each appear to be your longtime friend . One of these “people” is actually your friend. And you know that the other “person” is not a person at all, but is, in fact, an exact replica, a cyber-robot that has just shipped from a factory in China. The friend and the replica each behave similarly, you can't tell one from the other. But, in this experiment,you are told who is really your friend and which is the replica (or else, by definition, you could not tell one from the other).

How would your interactions with each “person” differ? How would the fact that the robot has no mind, no feelings, no internal experience effect your regard for it vs. the person? Would you have a conversation with the robot? Discuss you feelings? Watch a movie together?

Consciousness is very real but it has no definitive material manifestation. That we each have an internal experience is an assumption that is called Theory of Mind in philosophy. Do your meaningful interactions with people require that they have intelligence and feeling or is behavior that is human-like sufficient? Behaviorism is a branch of philosophy that attempts to deal with this by not accounting at all for internal states but only behavior.Recent research (Sherry Turkles Alone Together) suggest that even when subjects know they are interacting with a human replica, that has no internal state of feeling, their emotional reactions are surprisingly similar to what you'd expect being in the presence of a real human.

So the question is: How would you react to a robot that you knew to be a machine but upon which you could not use any of your 5 senses to distinguish from a real human ? (this is a thought experiment, let's not get bogged down on whether or not such a machine is achievable).

Love is perhaps the most mysterious and complex human endeavor. Can humans be said to love robots? What would this mean? Here are some ideas to ponder.

What are essential qualities that make a creature loveable? Does loving require the love object to have a mind? (does your iphone have a mind?) Does a love object need to be alive? What is relationship between living and loving? Would a fully lifelike robot actually have a mind? Consciousness? Qualia? Does love depend on our brains? Is it material in essence or something else

There are at least four categories of love that we can define:

Storge (or affection),Phileo (or friendship), Eros (or romance,but more in Plato's view), and Agape (or unconditional love)

For Plato: Eros can help the soul to "remember" Beauty in its pure form. It follows from this, for Plato, that Eros can contribute to an understanding of Truth. Ultimately, Plato considers Eros to be a longing for wholeness or completeness, a daemon whose aim is to reach wisdom without ever owning her. In that sense Eros is synonymous with philosophy, which literally means the love or desire of wisdom. And since wisdom is the greatest of virtues, Eros is therefore the desire for the greatest of goods.

Gilgamesh, the ancient epic shows the power of Eros:It begins with Enkidu living with the animals, suckling at their breasts, grazing in the meadows, and drinking at their watering places. A hunter discovers him and sends a temple prostitute into the wilderness to tame him. Women and sex were calming forces that could domesticate wild men like Enkidu and bring them into the civilized world. When Enkidu sleeps with the woman, the animals reject him since he is no longer one of them. Now, he is part of the human world. Then the harlot teaches him everything he needs to know to be a man.

Recommeded Readings:

wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Loves

Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-friendship/

Turkle, Sherry. Alone together : why we expect more from technology and less from each other / New York : Basic Books, c2011.

Levy, David N. L. Love + sex with robots : the evolution of human-robot relationsNew York : HarperCollins, c2007

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism