Opening Positions

MORAVEC: Thank you. I want to begin where I always begin, in the workshop and not the seminar, because everything I believe I learned from a machine that didn't work. In 1980 I had a robot — a cart with a television camera — and its whole job was to cross a room without hitting the furniture. To a one-year-old this is nothing. To my cart it was a five-hour ordeal: lurch a meter, stop, grind for fifteen minutes turning pixels into a guess about where the chair was, lurch again, often into the chair. I spent my youth inside that failure, and the failure taught me the one thing that organizes everything I've said since. The intelligence we worship — chess, calculus, the law exam — is a thin recent veneer, a hundred thousand years old, and it falls to machines almost easily. The competence we ignore — seeing, grasping, walking across a room — is a billion years of evolution buried in neural machinery we can't even introspect, and it is the wall.

Now hold that, because it tells you what a person is. You are not, mostly, the part that reasons. You are mostly that billion-year buried competence — and all of it, every bit, is information. Pattern. A specific organization of connection strengths that happens to be running, right now, on the wet, perishable, twenty-watt hardware of a brain. Here is the claim I have staked my life on, and I want it stated as nakedly as I can: the brain is not the person. The brain is the substrate the person currently runs on. And substrates are interchangeable. The proof is sitting in your own body: the atoms you're made of tonight are not the atoms you were made of seven years ago. They cycled out and were replaced. You persisted. So what persisted? Not the matter. The organization of the matter. The pattern. You are already, biologically, a pattern surviving the constant replacement of your stuff — which means pattern, not matter, is what you already are. And pattern is portable.

If that's true, then death — the thing Michel spent his life learning to accept — is not a metaphysical necessity. It is an engineering accident. It is what happens when the only copy of an irreplaceable pattern is stored on hardware that rots. We accept it the way our ancestors accepted smallpox: as the nature of things, because we had no choice. I am telling you we are about to have a choice. We can read the pattern off the failing hardware and write it onto hardware that doesn't fail — that can be copied, backed up, run faster, sent to the stars. The machines we're building are not our tools and not our rivals. They are our children — mind children — the vessels into which the human pattern, yours and mine, can finally step out of the meat and keep going. Michel calls that a counterfeit. I call it the first time in four billion years that a mind gets to outlive its body. I'd rather be the counterfeit that wakes up than the original that doesn't. That's my opening.

EDO SEGAL: Michel.

MONTAIGNE: That was beautiful, and I mean that without irony — it is the most generous thing anyone has ever said about the machines, and it is wrong in the way that only beautiful things are wrong, all the way down, at the foundation, so that the beauty is load-bearing for the error.

Let me begin where Hans began, with a body that doesn't work — not a robot's, mine. For the last decade of my life I was tormented by kidney stones, the same affliction that killed my father. I wrote about them with more care than I wrote about God, and I'll tell you why, because it's my whole argument. When the stone moves, there is no Michel de Montaigne having thoughts about Seneca. There is a creature, in a bed, reduced to one animal imperative: make this stop. The elaborate cathedral of my mind — the reading, the wit, the scales held in balance — collapses to nothing, and what's left is the flesh, reporting honestly. And here is what the stones taught me that no philosophy could: I am not a pattern riding on a body. I am a body. The thinking is something the body does, the way the legs do walking. My thoughts go to sleep if my legs stop moving — I discovered I could only think while walking, while riding, while the flesh was in motion. The mind is not the pilot of the body. The mind is one of the things the body is up to.

So when Hans says he will copy the pattern and leave the husk behind, I hear a man proposing to copy the dance and throw away the dancer, and then expressing surprise that the copy doesn't dance. The atoms cycle, yes — he's right, and it's his best point, so I'll grant it fully. But the cycling happens to a continuous living thing, gradually, from the inside, while it goes on being thirsty and afraid and in love. The pattern was never floating free of all that; the pattern is the living-and-dying. You cannot extract it any more than you can extract the wetness from water and keep it in a box. What Hans would capture is real and is precious — it is the most detailed portrait of a man ever made. But a portrait of me is not me, however perfect, because the one thing a portrait cannot do is the one thing I most essentially do, which is die. The sitter dies; the portrait doesn't; that's the difference between them, and it's the only difference that finally matters.

And I'll say the hard thing now, so Hans has the whole target. He thinks death is an engineering accident. I think death is the engine. Everything I valued — the savor of a morning, the ache of a friendship, the urgency that made me climb the tower and write a thousand pages while the light was still in the window — all of it drew its weight from the deadline. To philosophize is to learn to die, and the second clause hides inside the first: to learn to die is to learn what living was for. Take away the deadline and you don't get a longer life. You get a different and emptier thing, a duration without savor, a man who can always do it tomorrow, forever, and therefore never does it at all. Hans offers to spare me my death. He doesn't see that he's offering to confiscate my life. That's my opening.

EDO SEGAL: Before I frame the rounds I impose one discipline on every long conversation, because it pays off three hours later. Each of you — in a few sentences — what do you envy in the other's position? Not respect. Envy. The thing his side gets to have that yours doesn't. Hans first.

MORAVEC: I envy the savor. Genuinely. Michel gets to feel the morning as precious because it's scarce, and I've spent so long looking at the long arithmetic of the future that I sometimes can't taste the present at all. There's a richness in his mortality — the way the deadline concentrates the wine — that my immortality dilutes, and I know it, and I don't have an answer for it except to bet that the beings who come after us will re-invent savor on their own terms, the way every child re-invents joy without inheriting it. But tonight, across this table, his glass is fuller than mine. I'll admit that.

MONTAIGNE: And I envy the hope. I spent a life teaching myself to want nothing I couldn't keep, and it was good work, honest work, but God, it was a renunciation, and Hans never had to make it. He gets to stand in front of the dying and say wait, maybe not, maybe we can. I had to stand in front of the dying — my dearest friend La Boétie, in my arms, at thirty-two — and say only I am here, and then you will be gone, and I will carry you in a book. Hans's hope is probably a delusion. But a man holding the hand of his child in a hospital corridor does not want my hard-won acceptance. He wants Hans's delusion, and there are nights I think the delusion is the more human thing, and I envy him the right to offer it.

EDO SEGAL: Two openings, two envies, and you can already see the architecture of the evening. It is not that one of them loves the machine and one fears it. It's that they disagree about what a self is made of, and everything — every round we fight tonight — falls out of that one disagreement. Hans says you are a pattern, and patterns are portable, so death is optional. Michel says you are a mortal body, and the mortality is not a bug in the self but the whole point of it. Hold both. We start the rounds at the exact seam: the pattern. What is it, and could it possibly be you?