Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Machines as Persons?
- The Importance of Being Human
- Response to McNaughton
- Response to Diamond
- Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind
- Personal Identity and Brain Transplants
- Personal Identity and the Idea of a Human Being
- Imagination and the Sense of Identity
- Radical Critique, Scepticism and Commonsense
- Getting the Subject back into the World: Heidegger's Version
- Incarnational Anthropology
- How Many Selves Make Me?
- Sartre and Our Identity as Individuals
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Machines as Persons?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Machines as Persons?
- The Importance of Being Human
- Response to McNaughton
- Response to Diamond
- Real Selves: Persons as a Substantial Kind
- Personal Identity and Brain Transplants
- Personal Identity and the Idea of a Human Being
- Imagination and the Sense of Identity
- Radical Critique, Scepticism and Commonsense
- Getting the Subject back into the World: Heidegger's Version
- Incarnational Anthropology
- How Many Selves Make Me?
- Sartre and Our Identity as Individuals
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
I begin, as I shall end, with fictions.
In a well-known tale, The Sandman, Hoffmann has a student, Nathaniel, fall in love with a beautiful doll, Olympia, whom he has spied upon as she sits at a window across the street from his lodgings. We are meant to suppose that Nathaniel mistakes an automaton for a human being (and so a person). The mistake is the result of an elaborate but obscure deception on the part of the doll's designer, Professor Spalanzani. Nathaniel is disabused quite by accident when he overhears a quarrel between Spalanzani, who made Olympia's clockwork, and the sinister Coppelius, who contributed the eyes (real eyes, it seems).
His fellow students are not sure what to make of Olympia. They find her behaviour oddly disturbing, it is true; but it is far from clear that they are not likewise duped. Siegmund remarks that
[S]he has appeared to us in a strange way rigid and soulless … She might be called beautiful if her eyes were not so completely lifeless. I could even say sightless. She walks with a curiously measured gait; every movement seems as if controlled by clockwork. When she plays and sings it is with the unpleasant soulless regularity of a machine, and she dances in the same way. We have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to have nothing to do with her; it seems to us that she is only acting like a living creature, and yet there is some reason for that which we cannot fathom.
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- Human Beings , pp. 11 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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