The Most Human Human by Brian Christian Read Free Book Online Page A

unease over artificial intelligence in general, is, then, the story of our speculation and enthusiasm and unease over ourselves. What are our abilities? What are we good at? What makes us special? A look at the history of computing technology, then, is only half of the picture. The other half is the history of mankind’s thoughts about itself. This story takes us back through the history of the soul itself, and it begins at perhaps the unlikeliest of places, that moment when the woman catches the guy glancing at her breasts and admonishes him: “Hey—I’m up
here.
”
    Of course we look each other in the eyes by default—the face is the most subtly expressive musculature in the body, for one, and knowing where the
other
person is looking is a big part of communication (if their gaze darts to the side inexplicably, we’ll perk up and look there too). We look each other in the eyes and face because we care aboutwhat the other person is feeling and thinking and attending to, and so to ignore all this information in favor of a mere ogle is, of course, disrespectful.
    In fact, humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species. This fact intrigues scientists, because it would seem actually to be a considerable hindrance: imagine, for example, the classic war movie scene where the soldier dresses in camouflage and smears his face with green and brown pigment—but can do nothing about his conspicuously white sclera, beaming bright against the jungle. There must be
some
reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs. In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clearly, and from a distance, which direction other humans are looking. Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed in a 2007 study that chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s
heads
, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s
eyes
. So the value of looking someone in the eye may in fact be something uniquely human.
    But
—this happens not to be the woman’s argument in this particular case. Her argument is that
she’s
at eye level.
    As an informal experiment, I will sometimes ask people something like “Where are you? Point to the exact place.” Most people point to their forehead, or temple, or in between their eyes. Part of this must be the dominance, in our society anyway, of the sense of vision—we tend to situate ourselves at our visual point of view—and part of it, of course, comes from our sense, as twenty-first-centuryites, that the
brain
is where all the action happens. The mind is “in” the brain. The soul, if anywhere, is there too; in fact, in the seventeenth century, Descartes went so far as to try to hunt down the
exact
“seat of the soul” in the body, reckoning it to be the pineal gland at the center of the brain. “The part of the body in which the soul directly exercisesits functions 1 is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain,” he writes. “It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland.” 2
    Not the heart at all—
    Descartes’s project of trying to pinpoint the exact location of the soul and the self was one he shared with any number of thinkers and civilizations before him, but not much was thought of the brain for most of human history. The ancient Egyptian mummification process involved, for instance, preserving all of a person’s organs
except
the brain—thought 3 to be useless—which they scrambled with hooks into a custard and scooped out through the nose. All the other major organs—stomach, intestines, lungs, liver—were put into sealed jars, and the heart alone was left in the body, because it was considered, as Carl Zimmer puts it in
Soul Made Flesh
, “the center of the person’s being and