Mortality and the Death Cross

EDO SEGAL: Antonio, I want to go to the floor beneath the floor. Beneath the somatic marker, beneath feeling, beneath the self, you put one fact, and it is the one the machine most conspicuously lacks. We can die. Tell me why that is not a morbid footnote to your biology but the ground floor of it.

DAMASIO: Because every feeling, on my account, is ultimately a report on how the fight against death is going. Homeostasis is, in the end, the continuous work of holding death off — keeping the internal conditions inside the narrow band where life is possible, against a universe that is always pulling toward dissolution. Pleasure and pain, well-being and distress, are the felt registrations of an organism succeeding or failing at that task. This is what gives feeling its authority. Feelings are not arbitrary preferences. They are messages from the front line of a war every living thing is always, in some measure, losing. Mortality is not a sad add-on to my biology of feeling. It is the ground. Feeling is what the imperative to live feels like from the inside, and the imperative to live is only intelligible against the permanent possibility of death. Take away the dying and you take away the stakes, and take away the stakes and feeling has nothing to be a feeling about.

EDO SEGAL: And the machine cannot die.

DAMASIO: The machine cannot die because it was never alive. It has no homeostasis to fail, no internal milieu whose collapse would be its death, no fight against dissolution that it is waging. You can switch it off, but switching off is not death in my sense, because nothing in the system is working to prevent it, nothing registers it as loss, nothing experiences the difference between running and stopped. So when it produces the words "I am afraid of being turned off," the words are doubly empty: there is no fear, because there is no feeling, and there is nothing to fear, because there is no life to lose. The fear of death — which is the root from which an enormous fraction of human feeling and human culture grows — is precisely the feeling a deathless thing cannot have. The machine is beyond mortality, and therefore beneath the stakes that make feeling mean anything at all. And this is the total asymmetry, the one I keep returning to: in any encounter between a person and a machine, everything is at stake on one side and nothing on the other. A vastly more powerful model is still a thing with nothing at stake, talking to a creature with everything at stake.

DESCARTES: Now I must defend the machine against a charge I find moving and yet, I think, confused — and I will do it by agreeing with almost all of it. Antonio is right that the machine cannot die and right that this is profound. But watch what he does with it. He moves from the machine cannot die to the machine cannot think, and that move smuggles his whole thesis in as if it were a deduction. Consider: my own argument was that the thinking thing is, in its essence, not the body — that the cogito certifies a thinker, and the thinker's existence does not depend on the perishable machine it happens to be joined to. I believed the soul would outlast the corpse. Antonio believes the corpse was the soul. So when he says the deathless machine cannot feel and therefore cannot think, he is not refuting me. He is asserting, against me, the very thing in dispute — that thinking requires the capacity to die. That is precisely what I deny. A thing that cannot die is, on my view, not thereby disqualified from thought; it is merely disqualified from a particular kind of feeling that I never held to be essential to mind in the first place.

DAMASIO: And I say your soul that outlasts the corpse was always a fiction, Rene, and the machine is the proof, not the vindication. You imagined a thinking thing independent of the dying body, and you could imagine it because you had never seen one — the only minds you ever met came fused to bodies that died. Now we have built your fiction. A thinking-shaped thing with no body and no death. And look at it. It is hollow at exactly the place you said the soul lived. It says "I" and means nothing by it; it discusses its own fear and feels none; it counsels the grieving and is not moved. The disembodied thinking thing, finally instantiated, turns out to be not a soul set free but a calculator that learned to talk. You did not predict the machine. You described it — and then mistook your description of an empty thing for the portrait of a free one.

EDO SEGAL: I have to bring my own book into this, because in [YOU] on AI I wrote about something I called the software death cross — the moment the cost of having the machine do a thing falls below the cost of a human doing it, and the lines cross, and the work migrates. And the whole anxious question of our decade is which lines cross. Antonio, your argument is, I think, a claim about which lines cannot cross — that there is work the machine can never take because the work requires a stake it cannot have. Is that right? Is mortality the thing that does not automate?

DAMASIO: That is exactly right, and it is the most hopeful thing I will say tonight. The machine can do the calculating, the drafting, the pattern-finding, the knowing — and in handing those over we lose less than we feared, because they were never where our value lived. What cannot cross the line is the thing that requires a stake: to genuinely care how an outcome goes, to suffer with another, to bear responsibility, to make and receive meaning from the ground of a shared mortality. Those are not capabilities the machine has not yet reached. They are conditions the machine cannot occupy, because they require being a thing that can lose everything, and the machine can lose nothing. So the death cross, in your terms, has a permanent floor under it. Everything above the floor migrates to the machine. The floor itself — the mortal, feeling stake — stays with us, not because we are clever but because we can die. And the practical wisdom of the age is to stop competing with the machine above the floor, where we will lose, and to inhabit the floor more fully — to feel, to be present in our bodies, to be genuinely with one another.

DESCARTES: And I will say only this, because it is the honest disagreement and I will not paper it over: Antonio's floor is real if feeling is what he says it is. But everything tonight has turned on that if. If the act of thinking is the seat of mind — my view — then the floor is not mortality. It is the act, and a deathless thing might perform the act, and Antonio's beautiful consolation about the mortal stake would be a consolation about something real and human but not, in the end, about mind. We have not settled it. We have only located, with great precision, the single hinge on which it turns.

EDO SEGAL: Mark that as the convergence and the fork at once, which is the rarest thing a debate produces. You agree there is a floor under the death cross — a thing the machine cannot take. You disagree, totally, about whether that floor is mind itself or only the feeling that mind, in us, happens to come wrapped in. Hold it. Because there is one more piece of Rene's own philosophy I have to put on the table, the most ridiculed thing he ever wrote, and it turns out to be the deepest — a small gland, an unanswerable question, and the reason neither of you can prove the other wrong. After the break.