CHAPPIE: Human or not?

A film about AI’s that has recently intrigued me is the film, Chappie. This film truly made me think about what it is to be a human. In the film a robotics scientist creates the first completely artificially intelligent program. This program acts much like a brain and can’t just function on its own so the scientist puts the program into a lifeless robotic doll. The doll then becomes aware and alive, however like a human child it knows nothing and must be taught about the world. This moment reminds me of when we talked about Descartes and dualism in class. Dualism is the belief that the mind and body are not identical. I feel like this film is parallel to the concept of dualism. The program, represents consciousness or a soul, while the lifeless doll represents the human body. This idea is further established when Chappie learns that he can encode anybody’s consciousness into a computer program. At the end of the film, Chappie encodes the scientist consciousness into a program and installs it into another lifeless doll. The scientist dies and the doll comes to life, with the same personality, and memories as the scientist. The scientist’s human body essentially dies but he lives on in the body of a robotic doll instead. This film challenges what it is to be human, is it just our consciousness that makes us humans or actually a combination of both our physical bodies and consciousness? If what makes us ‘human’ is a combination of both our physical bodies and consciousness then does that mean that people with mechanical lungs, or hearts, aren’t considered humans since they don’t have a human body in its natural state? Or if being ‘human’ is just a matter of having consciousness and not dependent on having an actual ‘human’ form than does that make Chappie a human from the start since he had consciousness in the form of a program, but just didn’t have a body. Was the program a human then? We will never know the answer because as of right now we cannot determine what ‘consciousness’ actually is. I believe that the film Chappie would argue that being human is just a matter of consciousness. If consciousness was all it took to be human, then if we can find a way to transplant our consciousness into an eternal body, like how Chappie transplanted the scientist’s consciousness into the robot doll, than humans could essentially live forever without the fear of death.