Terminator and Philosophy

ftoc.indd viii 3/2/09 10:29:19 AM TERMINATOR AND PHILOSOPHY ffirs.indd i 3/2/09 10:23:40 AM The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series Series Editor: William Irwin South Park and Philosophy Edited by Robert Arp Metallica and Philosophy Edited by William Irwin Family Guy and Philosophy Edited by J. Jeremy Wisnewski The Daily Show and Philosophy Edited by Jason Holt Lost and Philosophy Edited by Sharon Kaye 24 and Philosophy Edited by Richard Davis, Jennifer Hart Weed, and Ronald Weed Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy Edited by Jason T. Eberl The Offi ce and Philosophy Edited by J. Jeremy Wisnewski Batman and Philosophy Edited by Mark D. White and Robert Arp House and Philosophy Edited by Henry Jacoby Watchmen and Philosophy Edited by Mark D. White X-Men and Philosophy Edited by Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski ffirs.indd ii 3/2/09 10:23:40 AM TERMINATOR AND PHILOSOPHY I'LL BE BACK, THEREFORE I AM Edited by Richard Brown and Kevin S. 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ISBN 978-0470-44798-7 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ffirs.indd iv 3/2/09 10:23:41 AM CONTENTS Introduction: The Rise of the Philosophers 1 PART ONE LIFE AFTER HUMANITY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 1 The Terminator Wins: Is the Extinction of the Human Race the End of People, or Just the Beginning? 7 Greg Littmann 2 True Man or Tin Man? How Descartes and Sarah Connor Tell a Man from a Machine 21 George A. Dunn 3 It Stands to Reason: Skynet and Self-Preservation 39 Josh Weisberg 4 Un-Terminated: The Integration of the Machines 52 Jesse W. Butler PART TWO WOMEN AND REVOLUTIONARIES 5 “I Know Now Why You Cry”: Terminator 2, Moral Philosophy, and Feminism 69 Harry Chotiner v ftoc.indd v 3/2/09 10:29:18 AM vi CONTENTS 6 Sarah Connor’s Stain 82 Jennifer Culver 7 James Cameron’s Marxist Revolution 93 Jeffrey Ewing PART THREE CHANGING WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENED 8 Bad Timing: The Metaphysics of the Terminator 109 Robert A. Delfi no and Kenneth Sheahan 9 Time for the Terminator: Philosophical Themes of the Resistance 122 Justin Leiber 10 Changing the Future: Fate and the Terminator 133 Kristie Lynn Miller 11 Judgment Day Is Inevitable: Hegel and the Futility of Trying to Change History 146 Jason P. Blahuta PART FOUR THE ETHICS OF TERMINATION 12 What’s So Terrible about Judgment Day? 161 Wayne Yuen 13 The War to End All Wars? Killing Your Defense System 175 Phillip Seng 14 Self-Termination: Suicide, Self-Sacrifi ce, and the Terminator 190 Daniel P. Malloy 15 What’s So Bad about Being Terminated? 202 Jason T. Eberl ftoc.indd vi 3/2/09 10:29:19 AM CONTENTS vii 16 Should John Connor Save the World? 218 Peter S. Fosl PART FIVE BEYOND THE NEURAL NET 17 “You Gotta Listen to How People Talk”: Machines and Natural Language 239 Jacob Berger and Kyle Ferguson 18 Terminating Ambiguity: The Perplexing Case of “The” 253 Richard Brown 19 Wittgenstein and What’s Inside the Terminator’s Head 266 Antti Kuusela CONTRIBUTORS: Future Leaders of the Resistance 279 INDEX: Skynet’s Database 287 ftoc.indd vii 3/2/09 10:29:19 AM ftoc.indd viii 3/2/09 10:29:19 AM INTRODUCTION The Rise of the Philosophers Judgment Day, as they say, is inevitable. Though when exactly it happens is debatable. It was originally supposed to happen on August 29, 1997, but the efforts of Sarah Connor, her son, John, and the model T - 101 Terminator postponed it until 2004. We see it actually happen in the less- than - spectacular Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines . But in the new television series The Sarah Connor Chronicles , we fi nd out that it has been postponed until 2011, and apparently, from the details we can glean so far as to the plot of Terminator: Salvation , it actually occurs in 2018. This kind of temporal confusion can make you as dizzy as Kyle Reese going through the time - travel process in The Terminator . Along the way, however, James Cameron’ s Terminator saga has given us gripping plots and great action. Clearly, Judgment Day makes for great movies. But if you ’ re wondering why Judgment Day might inspire the work of deep thinkers, consider that philosophy, war, and catastrophe have been strange bedfellows, especially in modern 1 cintro.indd 1 3/2/09 9:58:18 AM 2 INTRODUCTION times. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the optimistic German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646– 1716) declared that he lived in “ the best of all possible worlds, ” a view that was shaken — literally — by a massive earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755. After Leibniz, no European philosopher took his “ glass half full ” worldview quite so seriously again. One hundred years after Leibniz wrote these perhaps regretta- ble words, Napoleon was taking over most of Europe. Another German, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831), braved the shelling of the city of Jena to deliver the manuscript for his best- known book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Again, Hegel had occasion for regret, as he had considered at an earlier point dedicating the book to the Emperor Bonaparte himself! More than a hundred years later, critical theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969) fl ed Germany in the shadow of the Nazi rise. His work as a philosopher of culture in England, then America, centered on the idea that philosophy could never be the same after the tragedy of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Despite war and catastrophe, these philosophers perse- vered in asking deep and diffi cult questions; they resisted a retreat to the irrational and animalistic, despite the most hor- rifying events. In this respect, philosophy in diffi cult times is a lot like the human resistance to Skynet and the Terminators: it calls upon the best of what we are in order to stave off the sometimes disastrous effects of the darker side of our nature. Besides the questions raised about the moral status of the Terminator robots and its temporal paradoxes, the Terminator saga is founded on an apparent paradox in human nature itself — that we humans have begun to create our own worst nightmares. How will we cope when the enemy is of our own making? To address this question and many others, we ’ ve enlisted the most brilliant minds in the human resistance against the machines. When the T- 101 explains that Skynet has his CPU factory preset to “ read- only,” Sarah quips, “ Doesn ’ t want you cintro.indd 2 3/2/09 9:58:19 AM INTRODUCTION 3 to do too much thinking, huh? ” The Terminator agrees. Well, you ’ re not a Terminator (we hope!) and we’ re not Skynet; we want you to think . But we understand why Skynet would want to limit the T - 101 ’s desire to learn and think new thoughts. Thinking is hard work, often uncomfortable, and sometimes it leads you in unexpected directions. Terminators are not the only ones who are factory preset against thinking. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) once famously remarked, “ Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.” We want to help switch your CPU from read- only to learning mode, so that when Judgment Day comes, you can help lead the resistance, as Leibniz, Hegel, and Adorno did in their day.

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