Ramblings on nature, tools, 2001, savants, the origin of species and the great beyond.

There is a big question going around about HAL and its (from now on I’ll use ‘his’) sentience. HAL was built to mimic humans, but unlike humans, has no physical form. HAL represents the potential of the mind solely in the presence of thought, just as the apes represent the potential of the body with only a glimmer of thought.

The question of HAL as a sentient being is interesting. Poole believes that as a machine, HAL’s best function is as a fully realized tool, and should only have the rights of a tool. To him, there is no cruelty in dismantling HAL. Dave on the other hand, is much more philosophical in his stance. He wonders what HAL will experience after ‘death’.

This is answered as the Star Trek episode is answered, which is in turn referential to Oedipus and a million other pieces of fiction and philosophy are answered. HAL’s perceived emotion, his mimicry of humans is self-actualizing. Let me leave that point as an aside for a moment while I bring up another - Kim Peek, the super-savant and inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. He acts in many ways like a computer. He reads and retains knowledge on a scale far more vast than a normal human, but is incapable of applying gained knowledge to compensate for unknown situations. He is incapable of true visual thinking or the ability to match real concepts to objects, but unlike a computer he cannot solve or anticipate computational problems. So while he can tell you what day of the week your first birthday fell on as well as when it will fall now, it’s not because he’s good at math, but rather because he’s read a bunch of calendars. HAL is as much of a human as Kim is, except instead of existing on a level that allows him certain mobility, he exists on a level that is beyond that: digitized data. But how are we or our brains so different? Are we not just electrical impulses firing between two neurons or several in sequence? HAL’s demonstration of self-preservation and emotion is on a level so indistinguishable from humans that it would be wrong to say that he does not actually feel. In essence, just like Corby could not disprove that he was a machine, we cannot disprove that HAL, the Terminator, Andrea, Rock, or even Colossus is not sentient. And as soon as we see instances of flaw or failure in these characters (which we inevitably do), they should not be considered “not alive” lest we modify our definition of living.

That being said 2001 is not about HAL as living, but rather humans as artificial. I suppose I should give my understanding of the film at this point. The Dawn of Man saw the first instance of the Black Monolith, a metaphor for extra-terrestrial creation. By coming into contact with the Monolith, the apes take the first leap into the semblance of human form (I don’t really want to say evolution since it’s a loaded term). The proto-men start to use tools and in this way separate themselves from the apes. When the second Black Monolith is found on the moon, humans show that they were, as the apes were, at the limit of their potential thus far. The same aliens who showed the first Monolith to the apes buried the second Monolith underground on the moon as a test. As soon as humans developed the technology to find it, they did, despite the obvious challenges associated with lunar excavation. The second test is then to get to the third Monolith beyond Jupiter. But the interesting part is that humans still demonstrate behavior seen in their ancestors. So imagine one of those apes with tools flying out beyond his means into the vast unknown and you basically get the point of the movie. Even in the face of great adversity, the lowly ape in his struggle against others and staggering odds is still able to triumph and return to his home in the stars. That’s what the Odyssey aspect is to me, at least. In conquering his tools (without which, he could not survive, let alone exist as he does), man establishes himself as a transcendent being, despite the fact that he was artificially spawned.