I (Twitter: @philipwhsu) wanted to showcase some of my creative writing and ramblings – “phables,” – so I started this site.
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My Machine Life (MML) is a series of philosophical explorations into consciousness and “spiritual machines”
Legendary Formula One champion Ayrton Senna once said that after a race car driver crosses a certain mental and physical threshold, the car drives itself – or so my mother used to say. In actuality, this is the quote from Senna, which is in reference to an experience he had on the circuit at Monaco in 1988:
“And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.”
There is a great 2010 documentary on Senna that is available on Netflix
Maybe the car really was taking over – not consciously, but in the sense that it dominated Senna’s very being, and that every fiber in his body was devoted to making the machine run as fast as possible, even at great personal risk. In such a case, it is difficult to say exactly who was controlling what.
I am no F1 driver, but I can relate to Senna’s experience. I grew up playing a lot of computer and video games, even since preschool and kindergarten, with the heaviest amount of play occurring during my elementary school and middle school years. Quite a few times I experienced the “tunnel,” when my perception of the passage of time was altered: I would play for hours, even overnight, without resting.
When I look back on those times playing Command and Conquer and Final Fantasy and Starcraft and Counterstrike (and others) they were really my solace during times of loneliness and disquiet. And in my loneliness and isolation I formed a bond with (the) computer(s): They were my friends, my playmate when I had none. It didn’t matter if I was home in Taiwan or on summer vacation at my grandparent’s house in North Carolina. The computer was always there when friends my age were not.
Diablo 2 gameplay
A few years ago, I revisited that “tunnel” when playing Diablo 2, one of my favorite role-playing games. I had gotten so good at that game after years of playing it that again, the game almost played itself. It made me look back at my experiences playing computer games as being spiritual experiences, and it made me wonder: If I could could have a spiritual experience when playing with a computer, could a computer have a spiritual experience while playing with a human?
Admittedly, none of the machines I played with were capable of experiencing spirituality. But it has made me more aware of the possibilities of machine intelligence advancing to the point where such a threshold could be crossed. Where do we draw the line? When do we do it? Why?
Beyond what the machine alone can do, there is still the issue of what a machine can do in tandem with humans. To me, Senna’s mastery of the race car medium and the limits he and other drivers broke through represent a new frontier in the connection between humanity and machines. Indeed, the idea that the more perfect merger of human and machine could occur has captivated me, not the least because of my own experience with technology. Today’s F1 cars are packed to the brim with electronic sensors and controls, providing feedback to drivers at a level never seen during Senna’s time. Now the car actually can literally drive itself. But are we closer to the machine than Senna was? Or does new technology just make us more and more alienated from ourselves?
Thus are the dual foci of this blog: I want to focus on the possibility of “spiritual machines,” and explore the merger of humans and machines, which may itself lead to spiritual machines. This of course requires commentary on the nature of the machine-human relationship, and whether or not a machine can achieve consciousness. This is my machine life.
