Sartre's Anguish

I remember the first time someone told me what would happen if you were outside on a cold winter day and you stuck your tongue to a metal post; how you were likely to find yourself securely fixed until the paramedics arrived.  This idea held a grip on my imagination for days, weeks, even months after that.  I was afraid that I would find myself in a situation where I would just go ahead and...stick my tongue to a metal post.  It wasn't that I wanted to do it.  I wasn't particularly curious about what would happen, and I had little cause to doubt what I'd been told.  And I could hardly imagine a situation where I would need to stick my tongue to a metal post.  In fact, I really had no conceivable reason what-so-ever for sticking my tongue to a post, but despite all that, I was still afraid that somehow I was just going to go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that many of you at one time or another have had a similar experience.  Sartre calls this feeling "anguish."

Anguish, as Sartre uses the term, is a special breed of fear: fear before one's self.  A soldier going off to war may understandably be afraid of the enemy, of battle, of leaving home, and many other things, but there's another sense in which he may fear the potential of his own actions.  He may be afraid that he won't measure up in his duties as a soldier.  He may fear that he'll run when he should have taken cover, or that he'll take cover when he should have ran.  He may spend long, sleepless, hours possessed by the thought of inexplicably sticking his head up out of a hole at the wrong moment to see what's going on and catching enemy sniper fire right between the eyes.  More even than the fear of being killed, it's the fear of doing something stupid and getting himself killed that seizes the soldier's heart with such a powerful rush of anguish that it takes his breath away.  So he tries to be a soldier, as a thing in a uniform equipped with a weapon, a machine designed exclusively for war.  If he must die, he wants to die as a soldier, not through his failure to fulfill the responsibility of that role.

Of course, we don't need to invoke the special circumstances of war to find anguish.  There is, perhaps, no more common or appropriate illustration of our experience of anguish, than our morbid fascination with suicide.  I'm sure that most of us probably have no pressing wish to kill ourselves or serious plans of doing so, but yet the thought does flutter in now and then, doesn't it?  We think of the opportunities that might present themselves, the rigged noose and the chair, the gun laid in our lap.  We sense all too well that we are capable of pushing through all those layers of resistance, all those reasons not to do it, and with a quick flip of the foot or twitch of the finger we could end our lives....Snap! Just like that.  It's enough to turn your blood cold.  It's the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing that you could just say the hell with it and hurl yourself over the edge and nothing would stop you.

It's not a all a question of mortality.  It crops up in a number of little ways.  I remember a while back when I debating some of the finer points of free will and determinism with Mr. John Myste, I used the example of how I had to continually force myself to get up for work night after night, how I had to perpetually sustain my role as a responsible family man.  I told him that I could throw it all away at a moment's notice.  I could just get in my car and drive off into the dark, never to be seen from again.  Even writing those words gave me a flash of anguish, a dizzy spin of vertigo from the cliff's edge.  It's not even that it's a particularly terrible prospect.  It's just that facing the fact that you could change your life so radically at the snap of your fingers is exhilarating and yet horrifying at the same time.

Naturally, a determinist would insist that these are baseless fears, a odd glitch in our psychological programming.  They would say that this agonizing over suicide, for instance, is a pointless waste of time.  They would say that no one has ever been seized by such a reckless impulse of self-destruction; no one has ever pulled a trigger because they were overcome by their own willpower.  But yet, people do kill themselves, do they not?  Who's to say that all of those people had better reasons for doing it than you or I do?  Where do you draw the line?  Where does the determinist stand over the body lying on the floor with the smoking gun and say, "causality led to this"?  I submit that not only would I disagree that no one has ever pulled the trigger out of sheer willpower, I'll go as far as to say that it always goes down just the way we fear.  It's rarely a clear cut case of a person just wanting to kill themselves.  There's struggle, conflict.  There's nearly always some reasons to live.  But the person pushes past all that, says the hell with it, and does it anyway.

This all makes anguish sound like a negative thing, but it's actually a necessary part of our existence.  It serves much the same purpose psychologically, that physical pain serves biologically.  It is the constant pin prick, keeping us on our toes, reminding us of our responsibility for our actions.  It drives the soldier to train, to learn, to sustain his role as a soldier.  The sobering awareness that he is not merely a soldier, as a thing, that he has within him the capacity to fail to live up to the demands of being a soldier, prods him and drives him on.  To try to defuse that feeling, as determinism does, is dangerous and deadly.  A soldier without anguish, a soldier who has fallen into bad faith, has sealed his fate.

And suppose I'm wrong, and Sartre's wrong, and free will is all just a big delusion.  Well, then what difference does it make?  Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and I have no more control over the fact that I believe in free will than I do over my own eye color.  Ironically, there's always, behind a determinist's argument, an implicit subtext that they came by their position by choice.  They keep telling you why they're a determinist and why you should be a determinist, even though from their position "why" shouldn't matter a bit.  They are a determinist as the western wind blows and nothing more.  So, if I'm wrong, it makes no difference, and I can't even help being wrong anyway.  But if I'm right, and we really are free, then believing in free will makes all the difference in the world.  It means that you assume ownership of this life, and all the possibilities open to it.

For now, we end our adventures in Sartre's theory of free will out along its most paradoxical outskirts: will beyond reason, choice beyond control.  We face the disconnection between the person we dream ourselves to be and the consciousness which is free and unbound by the limitations of that dream.  We face anguish with that nauseating drop in the pit of our stomach as well fall into nothingness, free almost even from ourselves, overwhelmed by that freedom.  Sartre said that we are doomed to be free.  Well, so be it.  Let's make the most of it.             

Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.                             

Sartre's Question (Act Three)

When Sartre speaks of the question, he is referring to more than just an interrogatory statement with a piece of punctuation fixed to its tail.  He is speaking of an attitude of uncertainty towards being.  Although this attitude may only occasionally be expressed through a literal, explicitly outright question, it is nearly always with us, close at hand.  It is a fundamental part of our relationship with being.  It is the glance elsewhere.  It is the grounds for proposing otherwise.  It is the nexus, the crossroads of our creativity, our imagination, and yes...our freedom.

If it were not for the question, our consciousness would coincide perfectly with our experience of being.  It would become absorbed completely by being.  I would only ever find the thirteen dollars in my wallet.  I would only ever encounter being at my door.  Without the question, nothingness would never enter the picture.  In fact, there would be no sense in which we could discuss what was and what was not in "the picture."  There would only be the picture, and us smiling serenely at it, our satisfaction completely exhausted in it.  Without being able to question the picture, we would have no means of proposing other possibilities.

In such a case, determinist causality would simply work its way through our actions like a run of dominoes.  There would be a knock at the door, and we would inevitably answer it without even so much as speculating about who might be on the other side.  Action and reaction, we would fall as just another link in the chain.  We would respond to being without any means of considering that response.  So, we begin to see that the question is more than just another domino in the run.  It disrupts the dominoes.  It says, "Hey, wait a minute.  What if...?"  It holds up the show.  When the knock comes and we say, "I wonder who that is.", we immediately put possibility and choice into play.  "I hope it's not Tom.  I don't really want to see Tom.  Maybe I shouldn't open the door.  Maybe it's Jill.  Maybe I should open it!"  Now we begin to see that the act isn't merely contingent on the knock, as simple action/reaction.  It becomes contingent instead on the question, the possibilities raised by it.  We search ourselves for the grounds on which to choose our answer, and we act on the basis of that choice.  We decide it's Jill.  We open the door.  We decide it's Tom.  We hide in the basement.

Suppose being doesn't leave us in suspense.  Suppose we peek out the window and see that it is Tom standing on our doorstep.  The questions still present themselves, "Do I really like Tom?  Do I want to deal with him right now?"  Suspense may arise on other levels.  "I wonder what he wants?"  Again, our actions become contingent on what questions we pose and how we answer them for ourselves.  And yet, there seems to be no contingency for the question itself.  Under determinism, the knock should simply provoke a response.  You'll answer it, or hide.  Raising doubts and dilemma places the subject in an ambivalent position, requiring choice.  Causality is a very strict, definite thing.  Cause leads inevitably to effect.  There's no room for ambivalence and uncertainty.  It cannot, as Sartre says, "contain the tiniest germ of nothingness."  The question, on the other hand, requires a break with being, a nihilating withdraw, a distance from being in order to gain perspective on it and consider it's possibilities.  This break cannot be provoked by being, because, by its very nature, it is a transcendence of being, and therefore also a transcendence of causality.

In the determinist view of the world, we see everyone going through the motions like so many figurines in a vast, complex toy that is wound with a single key.  Bills come in the mail, and people pay them or fail to pay them.  The ice cream truck rolls through the neighborhood and the kids catch it some days, and some days they don't.  You can stand back from it all and see that this gear turned this cog, and it's all an incredible display of interlocking order.  The question is completely superfluous to this process.  What purpose does the question serve when the outcome is certain and inevitable?  How would this endless trip of dominoes ever give rise to uncertainty?  It seems that the question can find no gainful employment in the lock-step world of causality.  In fact, it seems that consciousness itself is superfluous to the determinist model.  What does these figurines need with consciousness when all their actions are set in motion by the winding of the key?

But it's not that consciousness arises from the question, but rather the question arises from the nature of consciousness.  The withdraw from being puts us in this position of uncertainty.  It provides the breathing room necessary for the question to be asked.  Consciousness is not the apple, but rather an awareness of the apple.  Therefore it can take an attitude of uncertainty towards the apple.  It can transcend the apple and consider its possibilities.  Consciousness steps back and considers these possibilities from the far hill, and once again it's able to transcend them to further possibilities.  There is nothing between consciousness and the apple, and yet it is precisely this nothingness which provides consciousness with a certain amount of leg room in its relationship with being, what Sartre calls the "decompression" of being. Consciousness slips back, gains firm ground, and poses the question to being, and from the question determines its own destiny.

To be clear, I am not, nor do I believe is Sartre, suggesting that causality has no bearing what-so-ever on human actions.  Free will is a transcendence of causality, not an exemption from it.  We are driven by causality, rather than determined by it, just as hunger might drive a person to seek food, or even in extreme cases, has driven people to resort to cannibalism.  Circumstances pushed people to these desperate extremes where these possibilities presented themselves, but these possibilities arose out of their capacity to question.  "Can we live with this?  Is there some other way that we might get food?  Can we hold out until a rescue party arrives?"  The circumstances provided the occasion for these questions, but ultimately the choices were made on the basis of the questions themselves.  The knock at the door drives us with the necessity to make the choice, but the choice is ours to make.

In this disparity between being driven and being determined, lies a world of difference.  In the next, final, two posts in this series we will consider the concepts by which Sartre explores this difference and the rather curious chasm between consciousness and being.

A Brief Interlude Where I Literally Leave You Hanging

Imagine that there's a very large rock poised precariously on the edge of a precipice.  Tremors from an earthquake shake the ground beneath it just enough to dislodge it and send it falling to the ground far below where it shatters into several pieces.  This is causality in nearly its most elementary form; basic physical interaction, the shaking ground disturbs the rock and causes it to fall.  But let's suppose for a moment that this rock was equipped with retractable claws or hooks which could be deployed to anchor it and keep it from falling.  We see a possibility of saving the rock, but of course the rock doesn't see this.  It's just a piece of inert matter, incapable at any rate of deploying the claws itself.  So, unless a second chain of causality reaches the rock by another path, and some other physical force interacts with the rock, say a smaller rock falling against a button on the rock that deploys the claws, then the earthquake will dislodge the rock just as it did before, and it will again fall and shatter.

Clearly this is a rock in need of a fighting chance.  The claws alone aren't going to do it much good without the means to deploy them.  So let's equip our trusty rock with a certain basic level of consciousness, say an animal consciousness, one that relies on instinct rather than intelligence.  We'll assume for the moment, hypothetically, that it's incapable of transcending these instincts.  Now the rock possesses its own internal means of deploying the claws, but it can only do so on the basis of its instincts, and unfortunately it's instincts only drive it to use the claws as a defense mechanism in the presence of dangerous predators.  So, unless there's a predator in the area when the earthquake strikes, the tragedy will unfold just as did before.  We've graduated to a more complex level of causality, but it is still causality nevertheless.

I'd say we've increased the rock's odds of survival to some degree.  Rather than relying on a small object to hit a certain exact spot on the rock, now all we need is a wild animal in the vicinity.  Still, it seems that the rock's survival is out of its hands, and beyond its control.  It needs a little something more to give it an edge.  So, instead of just consciousness, we're going to give it human intelligence as well.  Now the rock has the means to appreciate the predicament it's in.  When the earthquake hits, it should be able to take matters into its own hands...or claws...or hooks...or whatever.

When the quake hits this time, the rock is now capable of understanding the alternatives it faces: to hold on or to fall, to live or to die.  The question provides it with the means of understanding this, by enabling it to split the outcome into different possibilities which it can choose between.  So it deploys its claws and chooses life.  Seems like a fairly easy choice; one might even be tempted to call it an inevitable one, having every appearance of causality behind it.  The rock desires to live, therefore it chooses to hold on.  Simple as that.  But as the quake goes on, and the rock grows tired and weary, another desire comes into play: the desire to let go.  It grows in intensity with every passing second.  The choice the rock faces is a perpetual one, and the alternative begins to look more and more appealing.  It goes from alluring to downright seductive; a moment of sweet relief, then pain, and then the ordeal will be over.  Meanwhile, the desire to live is still there as well, burning like a desperate, ragged thirst.  But then there's the rock itself, not the physical thing perched on the edge of the precipice, but the consciousness which we endowed the rock with.  It views these conflicting desires as though from an eye of calmness in a chaotic storm.  It is not the the desire to live.  It is not the desire to let go.  It is...something else, something which is aware of these desires, something which can consider them as objects, something which can question them and consider their possibilities.  In short, it is something with a will of its own to choose between them.  So the rock chooses to live, and it throws the full weight of its will behind this desire, fanning it like a flame, and that will extends from the core of its consciousness all the way out to the tip of its claws which it digs in tighter with an even deeper resolve.  

But wait.  Surely, you say, there must be some causality behind this will, something which determines it to throw itself towards the desire to live with such abandon.  Ah, but you're forgetting that the choice is a perpetual one, and the struggle goes on.  Now, only a fraction of a moment later, the rock isn't the thing which threw itself behind the desire to live.  It is an awareness of this thing, and as such it can consider it, question its motives.  The rock is in control now, and it may even flirt with the desire to let go, loosening its grip ever so slightly, enticed by that thought of sweet relief.  Fortunately, the rock isn't the thing flirting with the desire to let go.  It's an awareness of that flirtation, and it can second guess it, and question the reasons behind its moment of weakness.  It renews its resolve and its fast grip.  But the rock isn't the thing that renewed it's resolve either.  The struggle goes on, and consciousness continually slips away, perpetually faced with the choice.  Second by second it has to choose to live all over again, and it constantly has to re-evaluate the reasons for making the choice.  The thing controlling the claws can not be locked down securely with causality.  It keeps falling back behind cause, splitting it into possibilities with the incredible fission of the question.  This may not lead to an atomic detonation, but it results in something every bit as cataclysmic.  It opens a tiny point of nihilation, releasing the "worm coiled in the heart of being", and providing the opportunity for Free Will.                      

Sartre's Question (Act Two)

At this point you may be wondering, "If it all comes down to our ability to question, then why this circuitous route through consciousness and nothingness?  Why even bother with Sartre to begin with?"  A fair question.  Well, as I said in the previous post, determinism builds its case entirely on the basis of causality.  So, any argument that wishes to challenge determinism must begin by establishing some human capacity to transcend causality.  Since free will is such a powerful intuition to us, we're almost tempted to argue this transcendence of the basis of free will itself.  It's tempting to push through out of frustration and declare, "But our actions obviously proceed from choices!"  However, since determinism refuses to grant credibility to this intuition and regards it as a delusion, then we're faced with a bootstrap problem where we're arguing free will on the basis of free will.  So, it becomes necessary to find some other foundation for this transcendence.  Sartre turned to the nature of consciousness itself, and began building from there.

Trying to argue a transcendence of causality is no easy task.  Causality is one of the most fundamental principles of science.  The idea of something being beyond or exempt from causality strikes some as a sort of voodoo or mysticism.  It strikes some as an appeal to the superstitious.  This is why the determinist tends to feel that they have science and logic on their side.  They reason that since causality has provided us with a better, more rational, explanation of the workings of nature, then it seems to follow that it would also provide us with a clearer understanding of how human beings work as well.  Their mistake, I believe, is in their assumption that causality is an unlimited commodity, a remedy for whatever ails you, applicable to any situation.

Consider a volcano.  Ages ago, when a volcano erupted, people took it as the explosive wrath of the gods.  Then science revealed to us the truth about tectonic plates, the molten rock in the Earth's core, and so on, and the superstitious explanation gave way to the causal explanation.  It was not the manifestation of a living being's wrath, but rather the blind forces of matter interacting with one another like the cogs and gears of a machine.  Or consider disease.  People once took it as punishment from a vengeful deity, displeased with their sinful existence.  Then science eventually discovered that it was caused by the spread of bacteria, and again the causal explanation dethroned the superstitious one.  Or finally consider the sun itself.  Long, long, ago people believed it was being driven across the sky by a divine charioteer.  Our ideas about the sun have undergone many transformations since then, but these days causality has expunged nearly every trace of the divine from our magnanimous fire in the sky.  It burns at the expense of its own nuclear power, rather than at the whim of any god.

My more quick witted readers may begin to see a common theme emerging here.  In all of these cases, prior to the causal explanation being given, these things were all ascribed to the will of a conscious being.  In other words, as explanations go, causality is an alternative to consciousness.  It stems the anthropomorphic tide.  It keeps us from projecting our own nature onto inanimate matter.  It grants us a means of understanding the mechanisms of non-conscious things.  This is how causality has gained its reputation as the exorcist of superstition.  The determinist has grossly confused the matter.  Rather than understanding that the superstition lies in ascribing a free will to things which don't possess it, the determinist has concluded that free will itself is a superstition.  The determinist says, in effect, "Well, we've outgrown the notion that earthquakes are controlled by something with a mind of it own, now we should outgrow the notion that a human body is controlled by something with a mind of its own."  You know...for science.

A compelling argument, I know.  Thank you.  But yet it's still not quite enough to completely establish free will, although I feel it does get determinism on the ropes at least.  Arguing for free will takes more than just undermining determinism.  It has to be established in own right.  And it's going to take more than just declaring that our ability to question transcends causality.  In fact, I suspect that some people may be largely unimpressed by that proposition.  If I had led with that, or I simply left this proposition from the last post to stand without further explanation, I would hardly consider it a compelling argument against determinism in its own right.  It requires further qualification.  It requires further explanation.  It needs to be tied in with Sartre's concepts of consciousness and nothingness, so that a complete picture might emerge.  This will be the goal of my next post.

(...to be continued.)                   

Sartre's Question (Act One)

When we first began this little existential adventure, I briefly mentioned the basic rudiments of the theory of determinism.  I said at the time that the theory seemed to be missing something, but that it was hard to put my finger on exactly what that was.  Well, I think that perhaps the time has come to go back and take a closer look at determinism, and see if we can't pinpoint the problem, and having perhaps pinpointed the problem, see how this all relates to Sartre's concepts which we have established thus far.

Determinism proceeds on the basis of causality.  Any human act, the theory argues, can be traced back to a cause, to which the action is the effect.  The theory draws on any number of sources for these causes, genetics, environment, condition & response, biology, and so on.  The particular recipe of these combinations of causes may vary, but it is the principle of causality which ties it all together.  Place any action under consideration, and a cause can be found for it, having every appearance of inevitability, and seeming to leave little room for the concept of choice.  If we shop at a certain store, it's because the store is the closest, or has the cheapest prices.  If we refuse to ride on an airplane, this can be traced back to factors of conditioning, childhood trauma, possibly even genetic makeup.  If we like a certain food, prefer a certain movie, listen to a certain type of music, the determinist is right there, ready to dissect the entire thing back to its causal antecedents.  Behind the "illusion" of choice there lies at every turn a cause which led us step by step along the path with no possibility of deviation.

We can certainly admire the thoroughness of determinism.  It leaves no stone unturned, and it's always there to trump free will with a causal explanation.  In fact, it's so comprehensive, that it seems almost like stubbornness and wishful thinking to try to resist it.  It provides a complete map of human behavior with everything accounted for.  Or so it seems.  There's still that nagging sense that something is missing.  Pressed for an answer we might say that this automaton proposed by determinism just seems so...mindless.  But what do we mean by that?  Certainly determinism provides for the fact that we have thoughts and passions and dreams.  It admits to the appearance of making choices; it just insists that there are strings underlying these choices, determining the outcome in advance.  It admits to our thoughts and passions; it just insists that these were preprogrammed in advance by factors behind our control.

So, where is this mindlessness?  Determinism leaves us with a thinking, feeling human being.  It's just that it leaves us with no control over what we think, feel, and do.  This is the part that seems wrong.  This is the part where something seems to be missing.  The determinist tries to assure us that we're merely holding on to our preconceived delusions of free will, but no...there's something really off here.  We look at this determinist automaton and we sense some fundamental lack of something we find in ourselves.  What is it?  The determinist insists that we stop questioning it, and learn to accept it.  And that's when it hits us.  That's what the automaton is missing: the ability to question; the ability, as it's being swept through these various illustrations on a river of a causality, to stop and turn and look up at us from the page and quietly ask, "why?"  It's missing that little vital spark.  That's what we mean when we say that it's mindless.

Let's take another look at our determined human being, and just consider one of the examples of determined behavior: which store we shop at.  If we look very closely, we begin to see that determinism has worked a certain sleight of hand here.  It has robbed its automaton of the ability to ask the questions, "Which store should I shop at?  Why?  Do I want to save money or stay close to home?  What matters most to me in my life?"  It has posed these questions implicitly, provided the answers in advance, given the appeal of these answers the weight of causality, and sent its automaton off to the store without further objection.  It does this time and again.  Everything it credits to cause implies a question asked, an answer provided, and an action taken on the basis of it, all without giving the automaton a say in the matter.  The alcoholic isn't allowed to ask, "Why must I have this drink?"  The business man is rendered incapable of standing back in wonder and asking, "What is the true value of money?"  Determinism prods us continually with the stick of causality and denies us the ability to turn around, to consider it, to question it, and in this questioning, to decide how to react and deal with it.

Determinism doesn't, of course, deny that we ask questions.  It just tries to sweep them under the rug of causality, along with everything else.  But if you press the matter, you find that it's not quite so simple.  You can pull the puppet's strings and walk him down to the store and back, but it's hard to imagine what string you would pull that would lead the puppet to question the sense and meaning of it all.  What string do you pull to make the puppet ask, "Why must I be driven by these strings?"  Once you give the automaton the ability to question, you've opened a real can of worms.  An automaton that asks why at every opportunity is really no kind of automaton at all.

You can try, as determinism does, to claim that these "why's" originate from a sub-routine in the automaton's programming, but these "why's" eventually transcend the program.  They have the ability to stand back from the program as a whole, and consider it as a subject does an object.  They slip away from any attempt by the program to contain them.  The automaton breaks loose and runs free.  The causalities of being try to hold it, but the question allows the automaton to distance itself from being, to place it under consideration, to break the link by link chain of causality.  Suddenly, this is all starting to sound quite familiar, isn't it?

(...to be continued.)                     

Sartre's Nothingness

"Nothingness can be nihilated only on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before or after being, nor in a general way outside of being.  Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."  Jean Paul Sartre

But what is nothingness?  It seems like a simple enough question to answer.  It is that which is not.  It is the absence of something...anything.  But what are we to make of Sartre's statement that "nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being"?  In a reality defined essentially by the fact that it exists, in a universe filled completely with Being, where does non-existence come in to play?  How can there be such a thing as nothing?  Being simply is what is.  Unto itself it suffers no lack or excess of anything.  It is the fullness of everything.  It is complete.  It is.  What possible commerce could it have with nothingness?

Yet, we're all quite familiar with the concept.  Let's say you're sitting around in your living room with a spouse or a friend, and at some point this person insists that they heard a knock at the door.  You get up to check, and then you come back and tell them, "there was nothing there" or maybe "there was no one there."  You had opened the door and found this absence of a person, this nothingness on your doorstep.  You shrug, and then go back to reading your book without giving it a second thought.  Well, it's precisely this sort of commonplace occurrence that Sartre asks us to stop and give some fresh consideration to.  

Now the first thing to notice here is that this nothingness doesn't make its appearance until you open the door.  Prior to that there is only being beyond the door...the porch, the steps, the front walk, the whole wide world out there.  It is only when you open the door expecting to find someone there, that you in fact find no one.  Those few cubic feet of space above your doorstep don't acquire meaning as an absence of a person until you open the door and give them that meaning.

Sartre illustrates this point time and again with the idea of a wallet.  Let's say my wallet is in my pocket right now and it has thirteen dollars in it.  The wallet, the money, it is what is.  The thirteen dollars is not too much or too little.  It simply exists.  But then I pull the wallet out, and I could have sworn I had fifteen dollars, or I had hoped to find fifteen dollars, or maybe I just needed fifteen dollars.  I have now discovered the absence of these two dollars.  Either from want or expectation, my wallet, which only a moment ago was absolutely complete in its being, is now short two dollars.

The conclusion is obvious.  It is through us, through our perceptions, that nothingness comes about.  It is because we were looking for someone beyond the door, that we found no one.  It is because I was looking for fifteen dollars in the wallet, that I found the actual amount come up short.  At this point, though, Sartre cautions us not to just dismiss nothingness as a quality of our judgement, a simple disparity between reality and our expectations of it.  He insists that this nothingness is a fact.  If we consider a few other scenarios concerning our door, perhaps we'll see what he means.

Let's say we answer the door, and we actually do find someone on the other side.  Our perception of the world beyond the door converges on this person.  They are the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  They are the focal point of our attention.  This attention may drift in tangents, something they're carrying in their hand, their clothes, their car in the driveway, or any number of things depending on the person we find.  But these tangents connect and lead back to the person.  We perceive the world beyond the door as though it were arranged around this person.

Now, let's say we were to go to our front door now and just open it and look out.  We're not opening it to see if someone is there.  We're not expecting to find anyone.  We're just randomly looking out, and any number of things could grab our attention.  We could watch a bird settling on the telephone line with a slight flutter.  Or our attention could drift to the clouds or the traffic passing along the street in front of the house, even the refreshing breeze that sweeps in.  Our attention draws these things into focus for a moment, and then lets them go as it moves on.  We're just gazing serenely out the door, and no specific thing arrests our attention, demanding that our awareness of the world converges on that point.  

But when we return to our original scenario, where we opened the door and found no one, we find that something else happens.  We again find the same converging phenomenon at work that we found when we were greeted by a visitor, but we find now that our perception of the world has arranged itself around this void, this nothingness where we expected to find someone.  This non-existent shadow of a person is the figure to which everything else becomes the ground.  This nothingness pursues us wherever we look.  We think maybe someone is hiding in a bush, playing a prank.  We see nothing there.  The world converges around this empty space we discover behind the bush.  In short, we perceive this nothingness; we experience it.  If we were in a poetic mood we could return to the person in the living room and inform them, "I encountered nothingness on our doorstep.  I found nothingness haunting me wherever I looked in the world, and before this nothingness I saw the world itself fade away before my very eyes."

So we see that while nothingness originates with us, and is sustained by our perception, it is still a very real experience.  When you say, "There was no one there", you are speaking a clear and undeniable fact.  There really was no one on your doorstep.  And yet, there is still the temptation to dismiss this as simply failed expectations.  The void was only on your doorstep because you posed the possibility that you might find someone when you opened the door.  Well, this is precisely where Sartre's analysis of consciousness comes into play.

You'll recall that we established that consciousness was always removed from the focus of its awareness, as a subject to an object.  This perpetual withdraw from being creates a certain ...decompression of being, which allows us to slip this nothingness between us and being.  In the next post on this matter, we'll explore this further, and see how this ability of the mind to deviate from Being is a crucial part of the nature and function of consciousness, as well as a crucial part of our free will.                   

Sartre's Consciousness

You have before you the picture of an apple.  You see it.  You are aware of it.  At some point you become aware that you are aware of it.  And now that I've mentioned it, you've become aware that you are aware of your awareness of it and...well, we could go on like this all day.  Consciousness is an elusive little bugger.  It constantly slips away.  Try to catch it working, and you find yourself falling into this kind of infinite regress.  Many people have misinterpreted this as a layering of consciousness, but actually it's a demonstration of its method of operation.

For instance, when we say that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, we mean that you've set up camp across the hill, trying to catch consciousness in the act.  But once you've done this, the immediate awareness of the apple that you're trying to perceive at work is only a concept of awareness.  It has no living vitality.  You're no longer viewing the apple through this "awareness."  You're no longer see anything through it.  You're only seeing the apple indirectly from your vantage point across the hill, as part of a composition involving the apple and this concept of immediate awareness.  When we say that you are aware that you are aware of your awareness of the apple, this mean that you've moved to yet another hill more distant than the other.  Now you've postulated two concepts of awareness, and you've positioned them in a relationship with one another, one viewing the apple, the second viewing the first.  But again, these are just concepts, ideas of awareness.  You're not really there.  You're up on the distant hill, viewing a broader composition involving the apple and these inter-related concepts of awareness.  So, you're not descending through layers of consciousness; you're shifting its vantage points.  You're only ever viewing the situation from one perspective.

Sartre's idea of consciousness is like a perfectly translucent lens having neither depth or substance.  You can never get around behind it or beside it or above it to see it, because it's consciousness itself that does the seeing.  Furthermore, consciousness only exists as consciousness insomuch as it is consciousness of something.  It is a subject exhausted entirely in its object.  It's existence lies completely in its function.  Your awareness of the apple exists as a view of the apple, as a relationship with the apple and nothing else.  And yet this awareness is not the apple.  It is a perception of the apple.  It is something other than the apple.  This gulf between subject and object was the crucial point for Sartre.

It is when consciousness is turned inward, that this gulf becomes significant.  Consciousness is the seat of our being.  It is the nucleus of ourselves.  It is the eye of our soul that peers through this lens.  When I am aware of the apple, it is I who has the immediate involvement, consumed entirely for the moment in my focus on the apple.  When consciousness shifts to consider this awareness, it is I who am viewing it from the new vantage point.  I am the subject, always withdrawn from my object.  I am not the apple.  I am not my concept of my awareness of the apple.  I am always something else.

So when we turn this lens on ourselves and view the things which constitute our person, we find this same withdraw.  I possess a body,  I own it, but yet I am not my body.  I am not my job, or my house, or my name, or my memories.  I'm not even my thoughts.  I am removed from these things as a subject is to an object, just as I am from the apple.  I have these things.  In some cases, I control these things, but yet I am not these things, not at the core foundation of my being.  I find myself constantly retreating to the far hill to gain a perspective on them.

Thus Sartre proposes the fundamental paradox of our existence.  Our consciousness, which holds our very being, continually slips free from any defining attributes or any substance that could constitute its identity.  It's always somewhere else.  It is always something else.  It exists entirely in not being the object of its focus, and yet its existence lies entirely in its focus on those objects.  You chase it down and it falls continually away into the dark.  It is a void, a tiny black hole drawing perception into it, and existing exclusively through this perception.

This will be the starting point of my next post on this matter.    

Sartre's Defense of Free Will

Free will seems to make good common sense to us.  It appeals to our gut instinct.  It fits naturally and comfortably with our sense of ourselves.  It feels right.  But yet, it's a very difficult position to defend on philosophical grounds.  Try to make a rational argument for free will, and you'll probably find yourself stammering incoherently.  Finally, you'll end up blinking and shaking you head in confusion, as you realize that it's all a little more complicated that you thought.  Meanwhile, the advocate of determinism will stand there, smiling smugly with their arms folded.  They believe they have logic and causality on their side.

Determinism is the idea that choice and free will are an illusion, that all human actions are "determined" by a combination of environment, biology and conditioning.  Just as everything in nature has a root cause that leads to an inescapable effect, so too with every human action.  Just as the tides rise and fall not by choice, but by cause, so too, as the determinists would have it, whether a man goes to a doctor or refuses to see a doctor, it's all still determined by factors beyond him and beyond his control.  The belief that the decision was his to make is just a lie he tells himself.  It was all "determined" in advance by his childhood, his genetics, and so on.

If you're like me, you immediately get the feeling that something is dreadfully wrong with this idea.  It's not just that you don't like it.  You get the sense that something is being overlooked, but you can't quite put your finger on it solidly enough to form a decent rebuttal.  Well, I'm not one to let sleeping dogs lie, and I'm definitely not one to let such depressing claims about the nature of my existence go unaddressed.  Free will is a big deal to me, and I would pool all my resources into constructing and argument in its favor, if someone, thankfully, hadn't already done the job for me.  Jean-Paul Sartre has constructed such an argument, and it's far more brilliant than anything I could dream of coming up with.

Make no mistake about it.  I'm not proposing some radical interpretation of Sartre.  Free will always held a prominent place in his ideas, and he was clearly a firm believer in it.  However, a casual reader might not fully appreciate how central it was to his ideas.  In fact, free will is a big part of existentialism in general.  While the determinists had environment dragging human nature along behind it and human nature in turn dragging human being like some fatalistic daisy chain, the only objection the traditional defenders of free will could make was that there was some mystical element in human beings that rose above mere causality.  The existentialists took this whole argument and turned it on its head with their dictum "existence precedes essence."  This is really just a fancy way of saying that a human being is a work in progress.

Existence is given to us, but, the existentialists argued, its up to us to define the essence of that existence.  A chair is just a chair, but a human being is a creative process generated from within.  The determinists had the environment and society creating human nature, but the existentialists had the human being creating their own nature, day by day, second by second.  For the existentialists, a person didn't run away because they were a coward; they were a coward because they ran away.  To them, the action emerges first, freely chosen out of a kind of void of our existence and then it comes to define the person afterwards.  More importantly, the person is always free to redefine themselves by a new act.  A man who has defined himself as a scoundrel is free to choose to be a hero at the next opportunity.  We aren't bound and confined by our past.  The choice is always open.  Or as Sophia put it in Vanilla Sky, "Every passing moment is another chance to turn it all around."

Now this "existence precedes essence" might sound arbitrary and unsubstantiated, but it was the roads the existentialists took to get there that that made all the difference.  Different philosophers of the school approached the problem from a variety of angles.  Friedrich Nietzsche rearranged the furniture of morality around the creative act.  Soren Kierkegaard proposed a leap of faith, suggesting that there will always be a chasm of doubt between us and even the most fundamental things that we hold to be the truth, a chasm that evidence and argument alone will never be able to fully bridge, and so ultimately it comes down to making a choice, a "leap", an act of will.  

Sartre approached the problem on more....I guess you could say "psychological" grounds for lack of a better word.  He placed consciousness itself under careful analysis, and under his microscope he revealed things about its nature too problematic for the determinists to dismiss.  He showed that a human being is not a rock or a chair and so can't be held subject to the same causality.  A human being isn't just a different kind of thing.  A human being has a completely different kind of existence.

Following the road Sartre took is going to take much more than one post.  Consider this as just a preamble.  From here we'll take his ideas step by step, and I'll post new installments through-out this 2nd season(?) ...semester(?) ...whatever.  It may not be apparent at first how any of it relates to free will, but as the ideas build upon each other like layers of brick onto a foundation, the design of the entire edifice will start to come into focus.  It's a fascinating theory.  It's definitely my kind of theory.  It's definitely a nuclearheadache kind of theory.         

Memento: The Burden Of Memory

Memory may be the most essential element of the human mind.  It serves as our connection to the past, all that we have known, learned, and experienced.  It also serves as the expansive reservoir of our personality, which we draw from moment by moment in all of our responses, our actions and reactions to everything in our lives.  It is the weathered and worn seat of our souls and the cornerstone of our emotional existence.   A song or faded photograph or even a faint scent in the air can tap into this deep well of stored feelings.  All of our triumphs and regrets, our shame as well as our fond recollections, reside in out memories.  But even aside from all of these lofty characteristics, memory also serves a simple, utilitarian purpose.  It facilitates our practical ability to function in life.  It grants us the ability to retain the knowledge of who, what, and where we are, and most importantly, what we need to do.  It is primarily with the nature of memory in this last capacity that the movie Memento is concerned.

To start with I want to share three examples of things I do to help me remember things that I need to remember.  They're certainly not unusual examples, but they'll serve as useful illustrations that I'll be able to refer back to.  Anyway: 

1. When there's one important thing that I absolutely need to remember I usually write myself a note with a pen on the back of my left hand between my thumb and my forefinger.  Being left-handed, it would probably be easier to write the note on the back of my right hand, but being left handed also means I use my left hand more, so I definitely see more of the back of that hand.  So the gain in visibility is well worth the awkward effort of trying to write with my right hand.
2. I don't make a routine practice of making "to-do" lists; it's definitely not something I do every day.  But when I feel like I have an overwhelming pile of stuff to do, and especially when I feel like I'm having a hard time jumping in and getting started, sitting down and making a "to-do" list can be very helpful means of breaking it all down and making it all seem just a little more manageable. 
3. Like most people I keep a list of contacts in my cell phone.  I have it all organized by people's home, cell, office, email, etc.  One of the first things I do when I get a new phone is sit down and copy all the contact information from my old phone.  I refer to this list regularly.  If I'm talking on my home phone, I look up the number on my cell phone before dialing.  If I'm using the cell phone itself, I don't dial; I just hit a button.  If I'm filling out a job application, I have the numbers of many of my previous employers saved on the phone, so that I can refer to them.   

 Now, I noticed something about the first two things.  Although their primary purpose is a means to remembering things, I find that they also bring a certain sense of relief.  Once I write the note on the back of my hand, I'm pretty much free to forget about it.  I can release the tight grip my concentration has on this little piece of information.  I no longer have to worry about forgetting it.  The information is right there on the back of my hand.  In fact, I find that nearly 80% of the stress in my life comes from this endless responsibility to remember things.  That's why the "to-do" list comes in so handy.  More than half the aggravation of having a pile of errands to attend to is the necessity of having to remember it all and keep it straight in my head.  The "to-do" list removes that problem, and reduces it to the simple task of checking things off one by one.  So while these techniques help me remember, they also help me manage stress.  They take the edge off the burden of my responsibilities.

However, like most things in life, there's a trade-off, which brings us to the third item on the list.  Since putting these numbers on my cell phone, I've noticed a definite drop-off in my ability to remember phone numbers.  In the old days, I used to have dozens of phone numbers floating around in my head that I could recall effortlessly at a moment's notice.  Now that I've started putting them on my phone, I have trouble even remembering my own mother's number.  I don't even remember the number to the cell phone itself.  It's on the the phone itself under "phone information", so why bother?  So it seems the phone has taken the place of my memory.  While this relieves the stressful burden of remembering the numbers, I'm in serious trouble if I lose or break the phone.  

Although this may all sound like a dry and difficult subject to present dramatically,  Memento manages to pull it off.  It does so by presenting an extreme case, a man who has no short term memory whatsoever, a man who relies completely on the kind of reminders described above.  Rather than writing notes on his hand, he covers his body in tattoos that remind him of who he is, where he is, and what he has to do.  The task of which needs to be reminded is more that simply buying groceries and paying the water bill.  He's trying to to find the man who murdered his wife and robbed him of his ability to form new memories.  Yet, despite these exaggerations, the essential principles remains the same.  

For Lenny, the protagonist of the film, these "mementos" take on a life of their own.  Others take advantage of his condition and use this system of his to confuse and manipulate him.  In  fact we eventually learn that Lenny has even used the system to trick himself.  He is at the mercy of these mementos.  If he writes a note on a Polaroid telling him to trust someone, the note itself achieves the status of an unquestionable judgment, even if it turns out that he made a huge mistake when he wrote the note.  The mistake is long forgotten, and only the note remains as his sole guide.  Even his own drive and purpose fade way, replaced completely by task set down for him in this accumulated pile of notes and information.   In the end it seems that the task may have even been completed long ago, or might not even have been real to begin with, but Lenny deliberately perpetuates it because these notes and what they tell him to do are the only sense of direction and purpose he has left.

By showing us a man robbed of his memory, Memento demonstrates the importance and function of memory through its absence.  Lenny is a man adrift in life.  He lives in motel room, and the only reason he knows he lives there is because he has a picture of it in his coat pocket.  His entire world revolves around the leads that he believes will help him find his wife's killer.  He thinks of nothing else.  He has surrendered completely to his mementos.  He has been freed from the stressful burden of memory, and he has lost all control of his life in the process.  So the next time you write a note reminding yourself to "buy milk" or you jot down a phone number, and you breathe a sigh a relief that now you don't have to worry about the information slipping your mind...just remember that relying on your own mind might not always be a bad thing.  

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotions

It is generally assumed that as computing processes are refined and sophisticated that eventually a point will be reached where they will achieve a virtually indistinguishable simulation of human intelligence.   But the basic problem of artificial intelligence is not merely one of technological advancement.  The basic problem of artificial intelligence is emotions.

A true and authentic artificial intelligence would be required to make decisions on its own.  Now, at this point we can create programs capable of making crude decisions within extremely limited parameters, or at least computers running these programs appear capable of these decisions.  But these computers are merely running calculations of equations and formulas behind the scenes.  The programmer designs the program to react in certain ways and to perform certain functions on the basis of a wide multitude of foreseeable contingencies.  They convert these contingencies into variables and assign them numeric values.  So, in effect, the computer isn't really making decisions at all.  The decisions have all been made in advance by the programmer.  This is why a program is unable to respond effectively to unexpected developments or to appreciate the subtle nuances of unique situations.  It is the programmer that was unable to expect the development or anticipate the situation.  The program itself is merely processing variables.  If X happens it does Y, and so on.  This is the stage at which even the most sophisticated computers are at this point.  

So, what is needed to move towards an intelligence that makes genuine decisions?  All decisions are based on values.  In the present scenario, mentioned above, the programmer uses literal, numeric values.  The programmer holds the computer's hand, so to speak, and walks it through which functions to perform when the values are at certain exact quantities.  The next step would be a computer capable of making independent evaluations.  This would place the programmer one step removed from the computer's actions.

At this level, the computer would have to move beyond the mere calculation of variables.  Of course, calculation will still and will always be its primary method of functioning, but at this level the process will need to be more fluid and complex in a way I can hardly imagine.  The programmer would designate in advance certain states and conditions as being "desirable" to the computer, and the computer itself would have to devise the means by which to achieve these states and conditions. It would no longer be merely acting on the basis of preset equations.  It would instead be calculating its own equations.  It would have to figure out on it's own the best strategy to achieve its preprogrammed ends.

We're talking about an incredibly advanced computer here; one capable of its own versatility. We've moved beyond the fumbling glitches of a computer acting on rigidly defined equations. This is a computer that could anticipate new situations and could respond to unexpected developments in a way unthinkable today.  This is a computer that would write its own programming.

Consider this hypothetical illustration.  Let's say there's a computer programmed to maintain a certain energy state.  At present, the programmer would consider all the possible situations that could disturb the equilibrium of this energy state.  Then the programmer would figure out how to translate all of these situations into equations and numerical values.  Through this translation, the programmer instructs the computer how to respond to each and every particular situation.  There is nothing resembling a thought-process involved on the computer's part, just the processing of numbers and binary states of circuitry.  Now, at the next level, the programmer would simply assign the computer the task of maintaining the energy state, then the computer would program itself with the best means to fulfill this task.

Again, we're talking about an extremely sophisticated piece of technology.  The rudimentary buds of actual consciousness are beginning to blossom here.  This is a computer that has moved beyond calculation and taken the next step on the road to actual thought.  It can evaluate; it can plan; it can formulate strategies.  This is a computer that can do what our minds do, even if only to a limited degree.  If we're tired, we find a place to sleep.  If we're hungry, we find something to eat.  We devise means to achieve certain ends.  We program our own thought and actions, in a sense.

But as impressive as this hypothetical computer is, it still hasn't quite achieved the breath of life.  It hasn't quite reached the state of actual artificial intelligence.  It may be as close as we ever come, and it would still be an incredible achievement, but there's still a vital ingredient missing.  A truly artificial intelligence would have to be capable of feeling.

In the second level scenario proposed above, we have a computer capable of devising its own means.  The problem is that the ends still have to be programmed.  The computer still has to be assigned the task of maintaining the energy state.  The computer still has to be told that this is a desirable state of affairs.  The computer is incapable of desiring on its own that the energy state be maintained.  For all of its impressive abilities, its still incapable of comprehending why the energy state needs to be maintained.  Now, at the very limits of this second scenario, I suppose it would be possible to program a nearly unimaginable super computer with the ultimate end of maintaining its own survival or the entire human race or possibly the survival of the entire universe, to which the computer could conceivably devise an infinity of sub-ends to meet the requirement of this one ultimate end.  Such a computer would, of course, have to have a far broader perspective than the maintenance of a single energy source.  

Such a computer would stand nearly head and shoulders with our own intellect, but it is still only acting according to a preprogrammed end.  Its own survival or the survival of the human race, and so on, still means absolutely nothing to it.  It doesn't feel anything about it one way or the other.  It's still just doing what it's told.  A true artificial intelligence would have to be able to devise its own ends, not merely sub-ends contingent on one ultimate preprogrammed end.  It would have to want to survive; it would have to want the world to survive, if it were to be capable of true independent decision making and genuine thought.  

For human beings with natural intelligence all of our decisions have a precedent which lies in our emotions.  If we decided to get out of bed to go to work, it's because we want to keep our jobs.  If we want to keep our jobs, it's because we want to get paid.  If we want to get paid...you get the idea.  We choose the things we value.  We choose the ends we want to achieve.  We are able to do this, because all of our choices are ultimately based in a fundamental foundation of emotion.  In the end, true artificial intelligence is about choice and independence, and these things are impossible without emotion.  Only a computer endowed with emotion could decide on its own which ends it wanted to achieve; ends that wouldn't be contingent on an ultimate preprogrammed end, but rather contingent on the feelings and desires of genuine intelligence. 

On the one hand, such a machine might never be possible, but on the other hand, it might come about simply through the natural course of things.  If we ever do design computers that reach the second level and are capable of programming themselves to achieve preset ends, they might move on to that next third level all on their own.  Once the wheels are in motion, once the design of these machines are refined and sophisticated over time, once you have a machine capable of evaluating the best course of action on its own, there's no telling what it might achieve.  An advanced enough computer might finally figure out that achieving consciousness and emotions might be the best way to accomplish its predetermined goal.   At that point it may be hard to draw the line between where the programming ends and the consciousness begins.

We like to believe that the next steps of evolution will be our own, but perhaps such a hypothetical machine will be our true predecessor.  Maybe the world of the future will be populated by these children of our natural intellects.  We dream of traveling between the stars, but our own feeble mortality seems like an insurmountable obstacle to achieving this.   An artificial life form would not be bound by our physical limitations.  Life on Earth may one day reach across the great divide of space and make contact with life on another world, but perhaps it won't be human life that makes this contact, but rather the new life we helped create.