Meat Robots

Mind Over Matter

  Most scientists and many of you out there think that we are nothing more than meat robots, born a blank slate awaiting input from our programmers (parents, society, etc.). Scientists keep probing deeper and deeper into our brains and its chemistry trying to pinpoint our consciousness or our minds. Not able to find anything to measure other than electrical impulses and chemistry, they postulate that there is nothing else to find. And they conclude that when we get here, our brains are indeed a blank slate: a computer hard drive with no operating system installed yet. I heard that same argument when I was in college taking Psychology 101. My professor never had any children, and I had two. I told him that if he had raised a couple of children he would know better. My two children were born with distinct personalities, likes and dislikes, and were completely different from one another. None of which was learned behavior. They manifested these differences in character from day one. So I wasn’t buying the blank slate argument even back then. Arguing the case from either perspective is pretty futile since both sides are pretty steeped in their own belief systems and not likely to come off them by one iota. I argued till I was blue in the face with my college professor, but when it was test time – I put what he wanted to hear…hey, I’m not stupid and I wanted that A. When I see a computer sitting on a table, I can’t look at it and imagine that it didn’t have someone that built it. And when it opens up with windows and says “welcome”, I can’t imagine that it didn’t have a programmer even though I never met one or saw one, but I know without a doubt they ‘re out there somewhere. But all that aside, I can’t help wondering that if we are simply meat robots, why were we programmed by evolution the way we are? It could have gone either way as I see it. We could have been completely rational solving all of our survival issues with pure logic and instinct alone. Why have emotions and feelings to accomplish the same thing? Emotions and feelings are so much more messy and unreliable at times. Why do we need to feel love, hate, happiness, sorrow, grief, etc.? Why would we need any of these at all? Wouldn’t it be better to let logic tell us to just run from danger, fight when it was unavoidable, leave our dead for carrion when the time came and move on. Why have feelings to muddle things up and blur the lines? I love sci-fi and the stories of self-aware robots are among some of my favorite. But I don’t care how much memory we give it, or how much programing we put into it, I don’t expect that there will ever come a time when we in fact do create a truly self-aware robot.