GENETIC ROBOTS: A NOD TO REALITY

Are we genetic robot? Almost no one would even accept the premise of this question as being valid therefore would probably not even bother to answer it. The objective of this post is to try to make you think twice about this premise. 

Scientists are developing robot technology to the point that these mechanical “things” are near human. Some of the more sophisticated models can move smoothly and have computers for brains doing things that even humans cannot do. Sophisticated programs can play chess, remember great volumes of things, and calculate never-ending decimals for hours to mention only a few of many examples. Why should we not consider them human?

Some might say they cannot reproduce themselves. I know of no examples where machines, or robots, can reproduce themselves but only because no one has decided to make such a machine. Even though a machine could “think” and do all of these other things; what it would still be missing is personality variance. Programmers could program in a personality but not random personality variance. However, without random personality variance, robots are machines not people.

I believe that personality variance is what makes most of us believe we have freewill, which means that no one can predict with 100% certainty what a person will do next, even predict what we our selves will do. Mechanical engineers can smooth out the jerky movements of robots so they can move as humans do. In fact, the precise milling of various parts can reduce variation in machine movement to within much narrower limits then possible in biology. Therefore, the best of engineers can predict with more precision how a machine will move than an anatomist/physiologist can predict how a human will move. As an extension of that thought, when it comes to computer-controlled behavior, we can know precisely how a robot will behave unless we programmed it to behave that way—unless we make and program them individually as 7 billion people are, they all behave the same.

Until we know a lot more about genetics, DNA/RNA, and brain chemistry; we, even as individuals, cannot know how we are going to behave until after we have done what ever it is we did. Scientists with various credentials using the crude tools currently available (questionnaires, interviews, observations, galvanic skin response, brain imaging) try to make such predictions by studying personality types, but fail. In a sense, because they fail, we have the word “freewill” as an explanation of individual behavior.

Psychologists have defined personality in a number of different ways. However, most of the definitions center on the collective nature of both physical and mental behavior of a person: a collection of complex interacting traits. People appear to share some traits with other members of a group, nation, and place while others seem unique to the individual. German Catholics, Arab Muslims, and Indian Hindi people will all do some things the same as each other while some individuals in each of these groups may lash out when angry or laugh at a funny joke, or make faithful husbands while others do not. No one knows for sure what a person is going to do or how he or she is going to do it. Because scientists cannot consistently predict what individuals will do, we say people act differently because people have freewill. This is not so, they act differently because they are different.

As biologists, we know both our physical being and behavior is under genetic control within rigorous guideline with the knowledge that physical and social environment can alter both to a limited degree. We really do not understand the interface between learning, short, and long-term memory, and fixed or universal genetic memory. Evolution has embedded our physical and mental beings in our DNA/RNA. Scientists know our DNA/RNA is unique to each one of the seven billion people on the earth: it seems strange that crime scene investigations of TV have made this esoteric bit of scientific information common knowledge.  It is the premise here that personalities, as products of that DNA/RNA, are equally unique.

As just pointed out, our personalities are individualized; therefore, scientists can statically describe our morphology and mental behavior but cannot predict either. Nonetheless, even though they know this, psychologists work very hard to gather individual traits into identifiable groups. For example, they can describe a “normal” person’s behavior using the algebraically additive categories of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (common ones). Of course, psychiatrist can do the same for the “not so normal”. Under the concept of stochastic determinism, psychologists and psychiatrist could decide on some sort of average and establish a variance in behavior for the collections of human they put into each category. Nevertheless, no matter how hard they work, they can never precisely know how the individual will react to a situation or what he and she will do next. The only conclusion possible is that we are genetic robots; we just do not realize it because there are so many of us and will react “on the average” in this way or that. What we interpret as freewill comes from within; it comes from our genes.  We are individuals. In those terms, I do not consider my being a robot as being insulting and reprehensible—it is biology. It is comforting to know that we finally recognize that we are responsible for behavior controlled by out genes just as we have to suffer from a genetic disease—it is reality.