Pinocchio Shrugged: Character intentionality as Artificial Intelligence – Suspending Disbelief in Self-Aware Robots By Gary Gillespie more

Abstract Creative writers report characters sometime take over a story by choosing to act on their own independently of the author. Well-crafted characters appear to possess intentionality of self-aware agents. Realness of literary characters ends on the page. In virtual worlds we are faced with the emergence of artificial agents who not only appear increasingly life-like, but also interact with humans realistically. This paper applies insight from symbolic interactionism to the creative writing process by suggesting that believability of characters in stories will be greatly amplified in virtual reality gaining acceptance of synthetic autonomous agents as persons. The philosophical feasibility of strong artificial intelligence (AI); the dramatistic nature of self; character intentionality as AI; reception of realism in literature and AI; and predictions about the believability of robots as persons are discussed. Conclusion: Since we are tempted to accept literary characters as real, how much more will robots beguile us? Key words: artificial intelligence, narratology, symbolic interactionism, robots, consciousness. Pinocchio Shrugged: Character intentionality as Artificial Intelligence Suspending Disbelief in Self-Aware Robots By Gary Gillespie If your heart is in your dream No request is too extreme 1 When you wish upon a star As dreamers do Jiminy Cricket 1 Once there lived a sculptor named Pygmalion who chipped away at a block of marble to create a statue of the most beautiful woman in the world. Pygmalion fell in love with the statue. Each day he came to converse and offer her gifts. He became so enamoured that he went to the temple and begged the goddess Athena to make the statue into a real woman. Athena looked down and heard Pygmalion s prayers. She granted his request and changed the statue into a real woman. The couple lived happily ever after. The story may be a myth. But, in the real world advocates of strong artificial intelligence (AI)2 inspired by advances in computer science, are following Pygmalion s example of begging the gods of science to turn matter into mind. What if they succeed? Could technical innovation lead to the invention of an artificial person capable of thought and consciousness? Or will robots merely be thought to do so? This paper argues that believability of fictional characters in literature is evidence for the acceptance of synthetic autonomous agents as persons. After reviewing the philosophical debate over artificial intelligence and explaining key theoretical concepts from symbolic interactionism and creative writing, we will see how our cognitive response to literature may contribute to the project of creating believable virtual characters and robots. I. Debate Over AI Feasibility First, let us consider feasibility. Would simulating consciousness even be possible? As AI pioneer Alan Turing put it in the 1930 s, Can a machine think? 3 Many AI advocates argue that the brain is a biological based computer. Thought is a neurological function. Because it is possible to build other highly complex machines, it is believed that when technological methods permit computer designs that duplicate the function of a human mind, artificial intelligence will emerge. Philosophers have wrestled with the relation between the mind and the brain for 2,500 years. While we have learned much about the nature of physics and 2 neurobiology in the last sixty years, experts are divided on the nature of consciousness, mind and self. Is the brain all there is to the mind? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to introspection and self-awareness? Can the qualitative part of experience how it feels to be a living self in a world of senses be captured in purely physical terms, or is the soul irreducibly nonphysical? The mind-brain debate has implications for traditional artificial intelligence since the goal is to create a thinking computer. The debate is divided into at least two camps. Functionalists argue that self-awareness and thought is a product of discrete chemical processes in the hardware of the brain that mind is no more than the calculations of the meat computer. We are essentially an information pattern. Others believe that reducing personhood to a physical process, an artefact of the brain, fails to explain the mysteries of human subjectivity. How is it that we come to think of ourselves as subjects instead of objects? While functionalists may deny it, solving the hard problem of consciousness is far from settled. While it may be easy to know a lot about brain functions, it is hard to know how a mass of neurons becomes a self-aware person. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is far more complex than we imagine -existing as a non-computational geometric form or fundamental force in the universe, just as gravity or mass are irreducible to simpler properties. 4 Or perhaps consciousness finds its origin on the subatomic level as a quantum wave function as Roger Penrose speculates. 5 The point is if consciousness transcends physics as we know it, then that would be a serious blow to the project of creating an artificially intelligent robot. What kind of computer technology could bottle up the soul? Research by brain specialist Wilder Penfield showed that when a patient has part of their brain stimulated with an electrode causing his or her arm to move, they report, I didn t do that. You did that. Dr. Wilder asked himself, who is the I making the subjective evaluation about the behaviour? Extensive probing throughout the brain never found the part of the brain that is the I choosing the 3 action. There is no place where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide . 6 According to Penfield, The patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body. 7 He believes that rather than being the source of the self, the brain is more like a radio receiver picking up the signal of consciousness. 8 On the other side of the philosophical debate, functionalists dismiss the hard problem of consciousness. They accept the scientific perspective holding that all human behaviour, including the inner life of subjective experience, should be explained using the rules of physics and biology. If human experience is like other observed phenomena it is quantifiable. They put their faith in progress. Given the right methods someday we should be able to simulate those experiences in a computer. Douglas Hofstadter sums up what he calls the AI Thesis: As the intelligence of machines evolves, its underlying mechanism will gradually converge to the mechanisms underlying human intelligence. « AI workers will just have to keep pushing to ever lower levels, closer and closer to brain mechanisms, if they wish their machines to attain the capabilities which we have. 9 Upholding this mechanistic view, Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University, maintains that the mind depends on the brain. If you change the brain, you change the mind. If you damage the brain, you damage the mind. If you turn off the brain, you turn off the mind, he observes. And now with more sophisticated tools, when we are looking at brain function with functional MRI, for example, we can see that brain activity precedes mental activities and that makes sense, because causes come before their effects. The conclusion that the brain causes the mind is overwhelming , says Novella. 10 Whether brain functions cause the mind or merely correlate with it, current neuroscience lacks a comprehensive understanding of how consciousness works. Based only on what we do know, computer programmers trying to simulate a human mind would fail to achieve much more than a mechanistic, pull string doll of pre-programmed responses. With more powerful super computer databases the 4 linguistic interface will make intelligent machines and virtual characters increasingly appear life-like. For the last forty years, traditional AI researches have sought to simulate rational thought in digital computers. This research led to the invention of logic machines , powerful computers like IBM s Deep Blue11 capable of beating top human chess players by searching algorithms to find best options among a immense database guided by heuristic programs that provide rules to speed searches. While solving mathematical problems like playing grand champion chess games is impressive, it is still unlike the kind of thought that humans do every day. Deep Blue is merely a giant calculator unable to view itself as an object and make value judgments to guide novel action. Advancements in the science of AI are promising. Voice recognition software permits the Apple Mac Handbook to speak and respond to vocal commands. Facial recognition increases security at airports.12 Software that replaces call centre workers with automated agents is now on the market.13 Digitally rendered facial expressions are becoming more realistic.14 Still the differences are greater than the similarities. While computer programs sometimes appear outwardly to be thinking or acting like a human, they lack the inner light of subjective introspection. Developing robot consciousness would depend on the possibility of synthesizing human intentionality the part of the self that initiates action. How else could a computer ever be programmed to laugh, create original ideas, express affection or have free will? AI enthusiasts hope that future discoveries mapping neural networks in the brain will permit new designs overcoming these obstacles, claiming that computers may evolve selfhood in the same way that human consciousness emerged once the brain grew in processing capacity. 15 Could a self ever be encoded? Functionalists affirm that in principle it could be, arguing that the mind is essentially software programmed by society. From the symbolic interactionist perspective, the self is a complex symbolic pattern created by the resources of language. Rather than a ghost in the machine, the self is more like a pattern of messages coursing through computer circuits. The social programming, not the size or nature of the brain, is the source of personhood. As 5 Douglas Hofstadter observes: [T]he key is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist. 16 If this perspective is true, someday it should be possible for the science of AI to duplicate the linguistic and cultural codes that form the symbolic, non-material aspect of mind and self. The speed of technical innovation makes finding a recipe for the soul more realistic than it might at first sound. In a speech for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Historian and former United States Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich points to evidence of a coming knowledge boom. In the next quarter century current scientific understanding is expected to increase four to seven times. Trying to plan today for the changes that science may bring within 25 years would be like someone in 1880 trying to imagine what life would be like today, he said. In 1880, there were no electric lights, long-distance telephones, radio, television or internal combustion engines. It is hard to imagine how one lived in a world like that. If scientific knowledge actually increases sevenfold, as some experts predict, then it would be comparable to Sir Isaac Newton attempting to plan in 1660 for the innovations that would occur during the next 346 years. 17 In The Age of Spiritual Machines,18 Raymond Kurzweil observes that if the exponential growth curve in computational speed and cost effectiveness continues computers will gain the processing power of a human brain around 2030 and the processing power of all brains in the world around 2050.19 At a Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference, Kurzweil predicted that in the next 25 years nanotechnology will eventually map in detail how the human brain functions. 20 Similarly, the Blue Brain Project is an attempt to build a model of the human brain now underway in Lausanne, Switzerland. After successfully modelling a rat brain, Henry Markram, Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique, anticipates that the biologically realistic human brain simulation will be complete by 2018. 21 It is believed that fully mapping the brain would lead to the development of 6 computers capable of mimicking the symphony of neural networks that produce thought. We would then be faced with the question of whether or not such machines possess conscious selfhood. Or would they only appear conscious, elaborate imitations without the inner light of introspection or aesthetic feeling, becoming what philosopher David Chalmers calls zombies ?22 II. Symbolic Interactionist Theory of the Self Here concepts from symbolic interactionism shed light on the nature of consciousness and the architecture of the soul necessary for simulating believable persons. First, symbolic interactionism holds that humans are best understood as symbol using animals.23 The interaction between our non-thinking animal-like preferences for satisfying emotional urges and the language and values given to us by culture makes human self-consciousness and mind possible. The self is a symbolic process provided by the resources of culture. In this way the self transcends the physical brain just as the words of a novel transcend the paper and ink of a book. For a novel to be meaningful, we need a whole community of agents interacting just as human beings are fundamentally social creatures. We learn who we are and help others do the same through communitarian interactions. The theories about the nature of self devised by George Herbert Mead, a founder of symbolic interactionism, have already proven useful in the creation of AI models since the late 1980s when researches applied his ideas in designing programs in a field of research known as Distributive Artificial Intelligence (DAI).24 A branch of AI studies, DAI rejects the traditional project of seeking to create a single mind-like computer, proposing instead a sociological model that stresses the creation of meaning in collaboration with many agents working together. More specifically, Mead s theories of the self and mind refute the mechanistic limitations of traditional AI endeavours. In Mind, Self and Society,25 he suggests that the human self is formed by constant internal dialog between the part of the self he called the I that impulsively initiates action and another part of the self called the ME that evaluates the action. It is a person s I that spurs creative actions to obtain desires, 7 while the ME keeps an eye on the I and demands conformity to norms and values. Whichever side of the inner dialogue wins determines a person s attitudes or actions. Commenting on Mead s theories, Paul Pfuetze explains: The ME as the organized attitude of the group which one assumes, limits the I and thus provides for social control; while the I asserts itself within the limits of its community and thus makes for novelty, social change, and reconstruction. Taken together, the I and the ME as phases of the self, constitute a personality. 26 The scene in the film Lord of the Rings when the creature Gollum debates with himself about whether or not to hurt the hero Frodo is an example of what Mead is referring to when he describes human self-consciousness. We carry on this kind of inner dialog daily whenever faced with personal choices: I - Should I eat that chocolate cake? ME I ME No, you are cutting back to get into shape. But it looks good. I haven t tasted dessert for several days. Eating that violates your goals. As Pfuetze observed: In the process of becoming an object to itself, the self knows itself in the same way it knows things other than itself. 27 Once we realize that inner dialogues constantly mediating emotional desires with rational checks form the substance of self-awareness, it is hard to imagine a realistic AI program failing to model it. Mead goes on to say that we learn how to evaluate proper action by taking on the perspective of significant role models in our lives or society. Without the influence of role models the mentor, coach, minister, teacher or parent a person would be morally disabled, unable to control the onslaught of unthinking urges. Looking up to the role model as a reference point, new neural pathways are laid down permitting personal growth. Only by thinking the thoughts of another, putting on another s symbolic mask, and sharing another s soul do we find our own. 8 Consider the intellectual development of children. Babies first experience the world non-verbally through the five senses, responding to stimuli emotionally crying when distressed and laughing when pleased. Continued exposure to spoken conversations adds linguistic meaning to its world, usually about fifteen months when the first sentences are uttered. Besides Momma or Dada , one of the first words babies learn is "no" almost as if binary opposition, like computer code, is inherent mechanism for organizing thoughts. For the rest of the child's life, the cultural values and norms learned from family and friends continue to shape identity and mediate emotional impulses. Mead noticed that children spend hours in play, talking with imaginary companions, and pretending to be adults. From these observations of child s play, he realized that the inner life of self-talk and role taking is necessary for the formation of human self-identity. This symbolic dance in the cranium is why Mead and other symbolic interactionsist insist that the ability to use language defines our humanness. While animals may be aware, they are not aware that they are aware. 28 Being nonlinguistic, animal thought is based on fleeting mental images. Cats, dogs or birds (clever as they may be as every pet owner knows) do not possess the linguistic tools necessary for self-evaluation, or take the perspective of another being. Unlike animals, human introspection is pervasive. We talk to ourselves in planning how to act, wonder what others may think of us, compare ourselves to role models and strive to live up to social expectations. While mental imagery plays a role, human level self-awareness appears to require self-talk. Inspired by mathematician Gödel s revolutionary Incompleteness Theorem, showing that any mathematical proof needs an independent observer to evaluate it, Douglas Hofstadter realized that human consciousness also requires an internal dual perspective. To understand meaning, our minds must be able to think subjectively, to symbolically stand apart and observe our selves acting in the world. Self-reference, he muses, is analogous to a figure eight Möbius strip looping back upon it self to create the elusive feelings of subjective experience. In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter develops his argument that the complex isomorphic patterns of 9 symbols laid down in the brain by a person s experiences and interactions with others explain the formation of the self. (In his writings self, self-symbol is synonymous with consciousness or soul.) Let us use this [strange loop] as a metaphor for thinking about human souls. Could it be valid to suppose that the magic of human consciousness somehow arises from the closing of a loop where by the brain s high level its symbol level and its low level its neurophysiological level are somehow tied together in an exquisite closed loop of causality? 29 The dividing line between humans on one side and animals and computers on the other is this strange loop the linguistic ability for self-understanding. The biggest hurdle in creating artificial intelligence is devising a program to imitate the intuitive, child-like, or animal-like impulses and desires of human selves. It may be an impossibly high hurdle. Computers are by definition number crunching machines. Can emotions be crunched? If symbolic interactionism is true, computers must be made to understand emotion before an AI program would be able to view itself as an object the hallmark of self-awareness. Traditional research has focused on modelling the brain as a logic machine, missing the fact that affective meaning is an inherent component of human communication. Since the 1950s scholars have developed models of communication. One of the first is the linear, four-part Berlo model: Source, Message, Channel, and Receiver. Berlo saw communication basically as transmission.30 Wilbur Schramm added feedback, noise and situation to stress that communication is a two-way process involving interaction.31 Others still sought a less mechanistic heuristic, noting that humans are acting personalities who create meaning with both sequential verbal codes and holistic non-verbal codes and offered the transactional model.32 In the past traditional AI advocates seemed to operate with the mechanistic give-and-take interactional model of communication, rather than the more humanistic transactional perspective that combines cognitive and affective meaning generated in human relationships. While disembodied computer communication may fit the patterns of the Berlo and Schramm models, 10 contemporary computer science is realizing the need to process nonverbal and affective information as well.33 Nonverbal communication such as gestures, eye contact, facial expressions and tone of voice can only be expressed through a body. In Mind Over Machine, philosopher Hubert Dreyfus critiques traditional AI assumptions and points out that the mind-as-machine metaphor is inadequate.34 He argues that the mind uses more than rational analysis for coming to understand the world. Experts in any field are shown to rely on intuition based on a storehouse of experiences in which action is determined without deliberate thinking. He speculates that memory may be more like a hologram that records information all at once holistically rather than piecing together bits of information to form conclusions sequentially. Grand champion chess players instantly see patterns among 50,000 stored in their minds without thinking about the next move. Dreyfus says that the brain may be machine-like, but the mind transcends the machinery of the brain in ways that digital encoding in a computer can never simulate. Since human thought is irreducible it is impossible for today s computers. [W]e are able to understand what a chair or a hammer is only because it fits into a whole set of cultural practices in which we grow up and with which we gradually become familiar, he said. I wondered more and more how computers, which have no bodies, no childhood, and no cultural practices but are disembodied, fully formed, non-social, purely analytic engines, could be intelligent at all. 35 While a firm critic of overly optimistic hopes for the future of AI, Dreyfus does not rule it out entirely. He rejects as unworkable attempts to simulate thought as logic machines, asserting that before computers might achieve human-like intelligence they would need what Heidegger called being-in-the-worldness : bodies similar to human beings as well as the influences of a cultural system. 36 In a television interview he goes on to say that, based on his research of expert intelligence, the mind is more like a story than a machine. Rather than following algorithmic-like rules similar to computer code, human experts rely on 11 thousands of past experiences remembered as visual scenes. It is intuitive insight from stories that best capture human understanding. [Experts tend to think in] Parables, models, paradigms, and all that. The only philosophers who thought this two philosophers who were very sort of philosophical rebels were Wittgenstein in England, who said the best way to explain things is to give a perspicuous example for a paradigm case; and Heidegger, who had his own notion of paradigms and the important role they played in understanding. But it would be a disaster for conventional artificial intelligence if this were true, because it would say, in effect, that if you get an expert to give you his rules, you re forcing him to regress to a beginner where he had rules. « I think narrative is much more important than giving principles and deductions, if you want to understand anything in the everyday world. 37 His view about the importance of stories is consistent with those sociologists who define humans as the story telling animal.38 Rather than being a logic machine, the mind is a story-generating machine. The narratives that we tell ourselves and hear from others construct our identity. In We are all Novelists, philosopher Daniel Dennett explains that the self is the centre of a narrative gravity.39 Like a hand holding strings of helium balloons, in which each balloon is a different selfreferential narrative, the self orchestrates its identity. Self-narratives then are essential to consciousness. Similarly going back to Mead, we see that even the inner I and ME dialogue that forms self-awareness is story-like containing shifting points of view, problem solving, motivation, and moral judgments. Dramatic tension arises in that we are not sure which side of the inner conflict will win out. In the same way, simulated consciousness would require the creation of a narrative centre of gravity for any synthetic mind. Authors provide narrative gravitas for characters in fictional literature that make them appear real. The same should be true for virtual characters or robots. III. Applying Dramatistic Theory to AI 12 Stories are comprised of five elements that symbolic interactionist and literary critic Kenneth Burke calls the Pentad: Scene, Act, Agent, Agency, and Purpose.40 To fully understand any human communicative act, we must be informed by all five of the Pentadic questions where and when, what, who, how and why. In a critique of B F Skinner, Burke argued that the flaw of deterministic behavioralism is that it reduces human beings to Scene and Agency alone.41 Burke s humanistic perspective casts humans as actors in the social drama. Humans are motivated to achieve self-identification and group affiliation by living out cultural themes. For a computer to gain human-like intelligence, we would need to see all of the elements of the Burkean Pentad on display not merely the how (Agency) of powerful computer technology at work, or the when-where of the right time and place (Scene), but something like a human self (Agent), an actor, with a distinct point of view, driven to achieve a purpose consistent with a social narrative. In designing an experiment with robots acting parts, a team of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists reports that researchers have created software that creates believable storytelling for virtual agents that demonstrate emotions.42 Allison Bruce, et al, suggests that integrating dramatic structure and play architecture into programs would give artificial agents human-like motivations. Fictional characters display recognizably human characteristics they are the best believable agents that humans have invented. Understanding how fictional characters are built and how they operate is important to understanding how humans are built and how they operate. The context in which they exist, the story, provides a framework that defines what their behaviour should be. In addition, a story is designed to be entertaining and interesting. Because the major application of believable agents so far has been for entertainment purposes, this is an important context for further research. Rather than merely behaving emotionally, agents should be able to behave in ways that make sense within a narrative. 43 13 In other words, if an artificial self is given a part in a dramatistic narrative, it will begin to look and act human. Once a robot achieves emotional sense experience, understands non-verbal meaning, possesses desires to act, and can assume a point of view in a narrative field, subjective experience would be possible. Only then could an artificial mind mediate affective urges with cognitive judgments to become self-conscious. Igor Aleksander, professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, has proposed the technical steps necessary to construct such an emotional robot. 44 More recent advances in computer science seem to make artificial emotions feasible. Emotiv is a company that is trying to teach computers to recognize and respond to emotional meaning. Based on the need to make computer gaming interface more life-like, the company created a head set that reads brainwaves, giving gamers the ability to manipulate virtual activity by thought. Instead of consciously choosing to move a mouse to cause an avatar s movement, the player may control actions more intuitively in a non-verbal manner. For example, the player may push an object by thinking of pushing alone. In the same way that we do not consciously think about hand gestures or facial expressions in daily interactions, so the player is not forced to translate an intended action into a rational intension before moving his body. The walking and gestures occur automatically as they do in real life, freeing the player to think about strategy or forming a sentence. The first commercial use of thought interface with computers, the headset replaces the joystick used for the last thirty years with a device that responds to the video gamers emotional state. The device turns the on-screen sky different colours according to emotions of the player. 45 Like Emotiv, Microsoft s Kinect is a video game platform that permits recognition of non-verbal and emotional meaning. Users interface with virtual characters through gestures, spoken commands or presented objects and images without touching a control device. Players are able to talk to a virtual character who picks up on the player's facial movements to detect emotion and converse based on what was said, as well as what may have been implied. Character express 14 moods and mannerism of their own. 46 Non-verbal interfacing in Emotiv and Kinect were developed by earlier research in robotic emotion. Cynthia Breazeal in Emotive Qualities in Robot Speech, explains that AI scientists have long realized that no synthetic agent will appear realistic without fluency of emotional reactions: for robotic application where robots and humans establish and maintain a long term relationship, such as robotic pets for children and robotic nursemaids for the elderly, communication of affect is important. She surveys a number of projects where AI researchers explored models of emotion in the search for life-like artificial characters.47 What would computer based emotions look like exactly? According to the James-Lange Two Factor Theory of Emotion, in order for an emotion to be felt, two factors must be present: 48 Physiological change: the person feels physiological arousal such as elevated heart rate, or sweaty skin. Cognitive label of the physiological change: the person assigns a label to the physiological change based on the symbolic context of the situation. Put otherwise, emotional responses require that a body reacts physically to some stimuli and, using the memory of past experience, a mind assigns meaning to the physical state. Applied to computer selves, we see that emotion is only possible if a body exists. Without a body, the computer cannot experience emotion. It would seem that other forms of non-verbal meaning also require Being-in-the-Worldness. Before we see a realistic computer-based self emerge, we need a program able to simulate bodily affective experience. These bodies would then need a social environment to permit communication and the sharing of norms and values. The program would have to endow the agent with the capacity for self-talk, introspection, recognizing points of view, understanding emotion, and role taking. It may be easy to imagine all kinds of requirements that must be achieved in the distant future before the age of conscious robots arrives. But, in literature we find an approximation of intelligent agents today. In fact literature has produced believable artificial selves for hundreds of years. Characters have bodies, experience emotion, understand non-verbal information, assume points of view and introspect 15 to devise ways of acting. They are motivated to resolve conflict and to act ethically. Authors give characters the ability to think. Readers can listen into a characters private life of introspection. Characters have I ME dialogues. They do all of the things that people in the real world do. Good writers know how to endow their character with rich detail such as a recognizable personality, interior motivation, an ethical bent, memories, or social status, all constrained by the values and norms of a distinct culture and time. A typical exercise for creative writers is to invent past histories for all characters to add realism to the story. J R R Tolkien wrote detailed backgrounds for his sub-creation world of Middle-earth published later as The History of Middle-earth series. And just as the human self emerges from the interaction of language in society, literary persons are symbolic entities, composed of coded information. This means that the literary character is soul-like, able to assume many incarnations and live on in multiple stories. Ancient Greek play-writes tapped Prometheus or Achilles in retellings the myths in different venues. In Roman times, Virgil brought the Greek heroes back to life in The Aenied. Falstaff became such a popular character in King Henry the V that Shakespeare was asked to put him in The Merchant of Venice. Later Verdi created a whole opera for Falstaff to inhabit. The character Rabbit Angstrom appears in three volumes of John Updike s series. When all of the elements of a good story are laid down we see that characters begin to take on the appearance of real persons. Such characters even begin to act on their own, at least from the author s perspective. Creative writers often report that as the writing process develops and the story has gained a degree of complexity that characters begin to take over the story by telling the author what they will do. They seem to have what John Searle calls the ability to produce causal intentional states. 49 Flannery O Connor reported that she was able to write the short story Good Country People in only four days partly because the characters determined story details and plot twists for themselves. As biographer Brad Gooch points out: 16 To her own surprise, Before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. Even more startling was the appearance of Manley Pointer, the Bible salesman, who tricks Mrs. Hopewell s thirty-twoyear-old daughter, Joy (she prefers Hulga ) out of her prosthetic leg in a low joke of a hayloft seduction. As O Connor later revealed at a Sothern Writers Conference, I didn t know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized that it was inevitable. This is a story that produces a shock for the reader, and I think one reason is that it produced a shock for the writer. 50 Tabitha Suzuma, a contemporary young adult author, discussed the writing process saying that she knows that she is at her best when characters become very real to me, more so than the people around me. This perception of realness is revealed in the experience of character self volition: As I write, I fill in the detail and ideas come to me as I go along. Often the characters seem to take over, and start pulling in directions I had not previously thought about. I go with them, and sometimes this results in a very different book from the one I set out to write. But it also means that the end result is almost always richer and fuller than the idea I started with. In an article for would be writers, Charles Connor at the Harriette Austin Writing Program suggests that fictional characters can be made real enough to act on their own: Once a character is created, that character must think and act as if he were real. For our purposes the character is real. « It is common for authors to talk about their characters taking on a life of their own. This is the way it should be. Authors also talk about characters taking over a story and turning it in a different direction than the one the author had intended it to go. This is a normal part of writing and should not be resisted. Let your characters do what they will do. 17 52 51 A personal anecdote makes this creative writing principle standout to me. Over the last years I have enjoyed trying to write a novel and have experienced characters telling me what they will do next. More than once the actions that they insist on are crucial for the resolution of conflict in subsequent chapters. I find myself feeling the same way that patients in the Wilder Penfield electrode brain probing experiment: I didn t do that. You did that. Intentionality the free will to act is an attribute of moral agents. A personality willing to behave in a certain way implies that he or she has inward thoughts and intensions unobservable by outward actions. Vividly rendered characters set in a story s drama assume a volitional identity separate from the consciousness of the author. Is this subtle observation from creative writing evidence for the feasibility of artificial consciousness? If full-blown autonomous AI is asking too much, perhaps advanced neural net simulations of persons will yield a hybrid transhuman 53 consciousness in which humans suspend disbelief to accept robots as one of their own? Critics of AI argue that the self cannot be reduced. But, fiction writing proves that human thought and personhood is reducible on one level: an author is able to translate holistic images of a character into the analogical code of written language. The result can be a compelling, life-like persona able to step off the page to influence author and readers alike. Because self-reference is birthed by taking the perspective of others, the literary concept of point of view is one of the most powerful techniques that an author uses to create the feeling that we are encountering an authentic person. Readers are invited to take the perspective of characters. By seeing through the character s eyes, the reader s thoughts are synchronized with the character s pattern, causing alignments of empathy exactly as occurs in all forms of inter-subjectivity shared in social groups.54 Like Mead s doctrine of role taking, aspects of the fictional character is assimilated into the reader s self. This cognitive basis for reader receptivity produces the uncanny feeling of encountering a real person. 18 The creative process begins with a right-brain flash of intuition as an author sees in the mind s eye the idea of the character. The writing process may require that an author gets to know the character by thinking vividly about him or her before setting pen to paper. The character therefore exists in the author s mind in addition to its life in the story. The reader completes the feedback loop by becoming immersed in the story and receiving the character in his or her mind. The character moves from influencing the author s imagination to influencing the reader s. Once embedded in the reader s consciousness it may become nearly as real as other persons. As Norman Holland says concerning reader receptivity, it is we who recreate the characters and give them a sense of reality. In Shakespeare's phrase, we give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. 55 In Hamlet s Big Toe: Neuropsychology and Literary Characters, Holland discusses how literary theorists have over the years viewed the reality of characters. Realist critics beginning in the neo-classical period considered literary characters as real people, not merely constructs of words, as do formalists of today. The realist view was typified by Maurice Morgann's influential essay of 1777 in which he noticed that because strong characters have a charisma that transcends the author s mind, they must in some way be real: As writers like to say, The character took on a life of his own. [or] The character himself decided what he was going to do. Holland says that Morgann practically invented the realist concept of character. The realist perspective is out of favour for most critics today, except for psychoanalytic critics who have championed it insightfully. Holland s own take is a middle way between realists and formalists based on discoveries in cognitive science: In short, the paradoxical nature of the literary character -- Is he real? Is he human? Does he have a big toe? Does he get hungry? arises from the very nature of our brains. Because our brains can separate what from where, we can have this illusion that literary characters in books or onstage are real people. 56 19 Cognitive science is unravelling mysteries of the mind in support of AI. For Douglas Hofstadter, the feedback loop of Gödelian brain processes explains our own sense of being real, authentic persons. We are symbolic constructs no less than characters. He goes on to say that while the self resides primarily in one brain, the self-symbol pattern may resonate in other minds, so that spouses or friends share aspects of the same soul. He asserts that even imaginary characters of art and literature may develop enough depth to take on human-like souls. He quotes the artists M C Escher, whose paintings are used as metaphors for the strange loops of self-reference, saying that that as the artist worked, the characters and animals of his paintings came alive and told him how to construct the artwork: It is as if they themselves decide on the shape in which they choose to appear. They take little account of my critical opinion during their birth and I cannot exert much influence on the measure of their development. They are very difficult and obstinate creatures. 57 Hofstadter says that Escher s conclusion that his creatures had free will is a near perfect example of the near-autonomy of certain subsystem of the brain, once they are activated. When discussing how aspects of the self-symbol pattern survive death by living on in the brains of loved ones, he supports the view that literary characters approach artificially intelligent entities: What was the nature of the Holden Caulfield symbol in J. D. Salinger s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if on a miniature one. 58 Literary characters like Holden Caulfield first reside in the brain of the author as a cognitive subsystem. Using the technology of novel writing, authors translate the character s persona into a story world encoding its symbol pattern so that the readers might decode the pattern to make it come alive for them as well. By composing narratives that mimic the same sociological conditions necessary for 20 the development of the self, authors create a neural subsystem or a complex symbolic pattern resembling a self that permits a character to assume a level of autonomous consciousness. Readers who come to think of the character as a genuine person share the character s mental pattern. How real are the characters? Symbolic interactionism teaches that all persons are formed as a sociological, dramatistic process akin to creative writing. When authors claim that well developed characters begin acting like real persons perhaps we should take the testimony seriously. Could it be that on some level literary characters are real? James Phelan s theory of literary personhood argues that a character has two facets the mimetic, or how real the character is made to appear, and the synthetic, or in what ways a character is unlike reality. From the time of Aristotle,59 literary theory has maintained that art, as a means of commenting on the human condition, should imitate reality, but not copy it. Art, including the art of literature, is best when it communicates, what Kenneth Burke calls, perspective by incongruity . 60 The goal of art is not to reproduce reality, but to inform it. In order to invite the reader to identify with the story, an author will create the illusion of a plausible person, giving his or her character the mimetic dimensions of reality. At the same time, says Phelan, the other part of being a fictional character, is being artificial knowing that he/she/(it?) is a construct. 61 It is undeniable that if strong artificial intelligence is achieved it will be just that an artificial artefact of human creativity. Still the soul of the virtual person may become real enough to pass the Turning Test of carrying on conversation exactly like a human being.62 As Hofstadter observes: Minds exist in brains and may come to exist in programmed machines. If and when such machines come about, their causal powers will derive not from the substances they are made of, but from their design and the programs that run in them. An the way we will know they have those causal powers is by talking to them and listening carefully to what they have to say. 63 If realistic fictional characters currently demonstrate hints of causal powers made through the medium of stories, possessing a personal charisma that surprises both author and reader, why not through the medium of computers? Efforts to build 21 life-like robots are in the early stages. Robotic researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have undertaken the task of building a humanoid robot capable of interacting with people and objects in a human-like way. As improvements are made, so it is believed, Cog and other robots like it will follow human evolution and eventually gain intelligence.64 More recently a ground breaking pet dinosaur robot named Pelo, equipped with the ability to mature as it interacts with owners, may be the precursor of future emotional robots. 65 In Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds, Dennett refutes objections to the dream for AI, arguing that because consciousness is the product of symbolic processes, while untenable with today s technology, it is conceivable that these mental processes might eventually be electronically engineered. He admits the technical feat would be extremely expensive. 66 Compared to building a life-like robot, an author inventing a character is technically achievable. Unlike physical robots, a literary character s physiology is inferred and may be unspecified. Physical appearances of the body are given only when it is necessary to tell the story. The character remains believable because the reader willingly participates in the construction of the dramatistic persona by a suspension of disbelief. As we have seen, when all of the dramatistic elements of the story world are added, the character takes on causative intentionality. According to the testimony of the vast majority of authors, as well as readers who become enthralled by realistic characters, literature-as-AI succeeds where robotics has thus far failed the artificial self in literature is an actor initiating what it will do and where it will go. Granted that the character borrows the minds of the author and reader to assume volitional identity, its will to action still resembles the sought after causative intentionality missing from known robots today. IV Suspending Disbelief While characters initially are put into their world with the aid of the author s mind, someday it may be possible for artificial persons to be formed by computer programs providing extensive details of a character s virtual life, such as a myriad of relationships and set of holographic memories. We approach something like selfvolition for characters in stories. Imagine if super computers aided the writing 22 process? The developmental conditions that generate selves in society could be simulated to create believable artificial selves in virtual worlds. Already video gamers report that non-player agents are beginning to act like persons with a mind of their own, showing emergent, unscripted behaviour.67 The speaking script for on-screen characters in the video game Mass Effect is 300,000 words.68 Artificial facial expressions have become so realistic that the New York Times announced the arrival of technology that captures the soul . 69 The full acceptance of virtual persons will be achieved only when technology passes the uncanny valley barrier a term computer animators use for the point at which people experience revulsion upon seeing a nearly real human face, similar to the disgust of looking at a corpse. The closer to reality animation becomes, the eerier the reaction. This is why some animators purposely simplify human characters so that players will immediately recognize that a character is not real. "There came a point where animators were trying to create a face and there was a theory of diminishing returns," says Raja Koduri, a graphics technology officer with Image Metrics, who worked on the creation of the life-like Emily.70 Koduri predicts that techniques will continue to improve so that the line between what is real and rendered will be completely blurred around 2020.71 Video game companies have long created cyber universes for entertainment purposes. Constructing one specifically as an experiment in human communication could be useful. Like a particle accelerator looking for new subatomic properties, we could then study the virtual society for evidence of intelligence in characters. The first realistically simulated agents accepted as persons may take the form of characters in video game-like worlds. Future programs may grant artificial humans a richness of dramatistic detail approaching the experiences of a real person equipped with emotional introspection and free will to act. In this sense, virtual persons may be like richly rendered fictional characters only with the ability to interact with the viewer, creating the possibility of intersubjective relationships. The ability to speak to characters and have them respond would become a spectacular new genre of fiction. The next step might be to build a robotic body for 23 the artificial self to become actors in our world. Science fiction, as it has done numerous times in the past, would be realized. Synthetic persons intrigue us because we sense that we resemble them a self constructed by society. In our desire to become authentic, we identify with them, just as readers have fallen for fictional heroes for generations. Heroes of myths and protagonists of literature have always been our teachers, informing us of our humanity. By providing a vital reference point for our center of narrative gravity, we learn from them who we are. Since traditionally we are tempted to accept literary characters as real, how much more will robots beguile us? Therefore, whether strong AI is possible or not, we can anticipate that virtual reality and robotics will rise from the uncanny valley to the broad uplands of transhumanism an age where mind and machine form a grand alliance. Advancements in artificial intelligence could surprise us beyond imagining. Some day when confronted by an artificial self we might react the same way that we do when reaching out to touch what we think is a bouquet of silk flowers only to discover that the arrangement is real. Then the dream of Pygmalion and Pinocchio will come true. 1 Ned Washington, lyrics, When You Wish Upon a Star, Pinocchio (Los Angeles: Disney Motion Picture Company, 1940). 2 Strong AI aims to build machines whose overall intellectual ability is The term "strong AI", now in wide indistinguishable from that of a human being. use, was introduced for this category of AI research in 1980 by the philosopher John Searle, of the University of California at Berkeley. B J Copeland, Strong AI, Applied AI, and CS , AlanTurning.net, May 2000, date accessed: 8 June 2010, < http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/what_is_A I/What%20is%20AI02.html >. 24 3 The Turing Test in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 13 May 2008, date of David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford access: 20 March 2009, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/>. 4 University Press, 1996). In an interview about his theory, Chalmers says, So what we have to do when it comes to consciousness is admit it as a fundamental feature of the world as irreducible as space and time. Then we need to look at the laws that govern it, at the connection between the first person data of subjective experienced and the third person objective physical properties. Eventually we may come up with a set of fundamental laws governing that connection, which are akin to the simple fundamental laws that we find in physics. From Susan Blackmore, Conversations on Consciousness, What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and what it Means to be Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 42. 5 Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 6 Wilder Penfield, Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975) 77-8. 7 Penfield, Control of the Mind , Symposium at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, 1961, quoted in Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967) 203. 8 Many of the greatest scientists and philosophers have been dualists, from Plato, Aquinas, and Descartes to pioneering neurophysiologist and Nobel Laureate C.S. Sherrington, pioneering epilepsy neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, Nobel Prize winning neurophysiologist John Eccles, and philosopher of science Karl Popper. Michael Egnor, Materialist Neuroscience and the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Discovery Institute, 15 January 2008, date of access: 5 April 2009, <http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/01/materialist_neuroscience_and_t.html>. 25 9 Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979) 579. 10 Carl Zimmer, Mind Over Matter , Popular Science, 1 February 2004, date of access: 5 April 2009, <http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-02/mindover-machine>. 11 Deep Blue opens the match with a victory , IBM.com, date of access: 20 March Facial Recognition , EPIC.org (Washington, DC: Electronic Privacy Information 2009, <http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.10.1.html>. 12 Center, 2010) date accessed: 8 June 2010. <http://epic.org/privacy/facerecognition/> 13 Replacing human call center agents with an AI system, Smart Action Virtual Agents, a company in Los Angeles, CA, has created automated agents able to carry out complex transactions with live callers. Hear dialogue examples: < http://www.smartaction.com/Resources.htm >. 14 Karlo Smid, Igor S Pandzic, Conversational Virtual Character for the Web , Proceedings of Computer Animation, 2002, 1 6, date accessed: 8 June 2010, <citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.104.6938&rep=rep1&type=p df >. Also see See How Emily Was Made , Image Metrics, Ltd, 2008, date accessed: 8 June 2010, < http://www.image-metrics.com/project/see-how-emily-was-made >. 15 16 G M Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (Allen Lane, London, 1992). Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 4. Paul Recer, Gingrich: Unprecedented Change is Coming and the U.S. Isn t 17 Ready , American Association for the Advancement of Science, 27 July 2006, date of access: 3 April 2009, <http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0727gingrich.shtml>. 26 18 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 19 Singularity.com, date of access: 21 May 2010, <http://singularity.com/images/charts/ExponentialGrowthofComputing.jpg>. 20 Kurzweil, Why We Can Be Confident of Turing Test Capability Within a Quarter Century , KurzweilAI.net, 13 July 2006, date of access: 21 May 2010, <http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=10>. 21 Naik Gautam, In Search for Intelligence, a Silicon Brain Twitches , Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2009, A 14, date of access: 20 May 2010, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124751881557234725.html#>. 22 Susan Blackmore, David Chalmers in Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and what it Means to be Human (New York: Oxford University Press 2006) 42. 23 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1966) 3-24. 24 Larry T Reynolds and Nancy J Herman-Kinney, Handbook of symbolic interactionism (Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2003) 555. 25 Charles W Morris, ed, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934) 173-186. 26 Paul E Pfuetze, Self, Society, Existence: Human Nature and Dialogue in the Thought of George Herbert Mead and Martin Buber (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954) 89. 27 Pfuetze, Self, Society, Existence, 91. 27 28 It is true that parakeets and chimps have been observed recognizing themselves in mirrors, but this level of self-reference hardly compares to the depth of human self-awareness. 29 Hofstadter, The Mind s I, 281. David K Berlo, The Process of Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and 30 Winston, 1960). 31 Wilbur Schramm, ed, How Communication Works , in The Process and Effects of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954) 3-26. 32 Rob Anderson and Veronica Ross, Questions of Communication: A Practical Introduction to Theory (New York: St. Martin s Press, 1994). 33 Daniel Yates, Dept. of Communication, Seton Hall University, compares the three perspectives with his interactive Communication Model page, date of access: 25 May 2010, < http://pirate.shu.edu/~yatesdan/model.html>. 34 Hubert L Dreyfus and Stuart E Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1986). 35 Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine, 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson 36 (Malen MA: SCM Press, 1962). 37 Jeffrey Mishlove, Mind Over Machine with Hubert Dryeyfus, PhD , television interview transcript, The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery. No date, date accessed: 20 March 2009, <http://www.intuition.org/txt/dreyfus.htm>. 38 Don Browning, "Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues", Christian Century, 17 May 2000, from FindArticles.com, date accessed: 19 28 March 2009, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_16_117/ai_62324461>. 39 Daniel Dennett, "Why we are All Novelists", Times Literary Supplement, Sept.16-22 1988. 40 Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1969). Burke, Towards Looking Back: Essays Reviewing B.F. Skinner , Behaviorism (Fall 41 1976) 57-71. 42 John Bates, A B Loyall and W S Reilly, An architecture for Action, Emotion, and Social Behavior , Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science: Technical Report (May 1992) 92-144. 43 Allison Bruce, Jonathan Knight, Samuel Listopad, Brian Magerko, and Illah P Nourbahsh, "Robot Improv: Using Drama to Create Believable Agents", 7 March 2000, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, date accessed: 18 March 2009, <www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/PAPERS/robotimprov.pdf>. 44 Igor Aleksander, Artificial Neuroconsciousness: An Update , 1997, Igor Aleksander Home Page, date accessed: 15 May 2010, < http://web.archive.org/web/19970302014628/http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/ neural/publications/iwann.html>. 45 David H Freedman, Reality Bites: The scientists at Emotiv have done the impossible created a brain-wave-reading headset that lets you conjure entire worlds using nothing but your mind , 1 December 2008, Inc.com Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs, date accessed: 6 April 2009, <http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081201/reality-bites.html>. Also see video clip of Tan Le, Emotiv founder, Mind Control Device Demonstration , ForaTV, 2008, date accessed: 10 June 2010, < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40L3SGmcPDQ >. 29 46 Alex Pham and Ben Fritz, Project Natal from Microsoft promises to give the thumb the boot , Los Angeles Times, June 2 2009, date accessed: 25 May 2010, <http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/02/business/fi-ct-microsoft-games2 >. 47 Cynthia Breazeal, "Emotive Qualities in Robot Speech", Proceedings of the 2001 IEEERS (Maui, HI: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2001), 1, date accessed: 29 May 2010, < robotic.media.mit.edu/pdfs/conferences/BreazealIROS-01.pdf>. 48 P C Ellsworth, William James and Emotion: Is a Century of Fame Worth a Century of Misunderstanding? , Psychological Review 101 2 (1994) 222-9. 49 John R Searle, Minds, Brains and Programs , cited by Hofstadter and Dennett in The Mind s I: Fantasies and Reflections on the Self and Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 364. 50 Brad Gooch, Flannery, A Life of Flannery O Connor (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009) 254-5. 51 Ambrose Musiyiwa, When Characters Take Over: An interview with Tabitha Suzuma, author of 'A Note of Madness' , 4 April 2007, Ohmynews, date accessed: 15 April 2009, <http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_print.asp?menu=c10400&no=3 56038&rel_no=1&isPrint=print>. 52 Charles Connor, Elements of Fiction , Harriette Austin Creative Writing Program (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia, 2002), date accessed: 10 April 2009, <http://harrietteaustin.home.att.net/AdvancedFction/advanced-Fict.html>. 53 [Transhumanism] views the human being as capable of being seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of 30 Chicago Press, 1999), 3, cited in C Christopher Hook, Tanshumanism and Posthumanism, Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd Edition (New York: MacMillan, November 2003) 2517-20, date accessed: 10 June 2010, < www.gale.cengage.com/pdf/samples/sp657748.pdf >. 54 Ralf Schneider, Toward a cognitive theory of literary character: the dynamics of mental-model construction , Style (Winter 2001), date accessed: 9 May 2010, < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_4_35/ai_97114241/ >. 55 Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response in The I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) 278, online version date accessed: 29 May 2010, < http://fulltext10.fcla.edu/cgi/t/text/textidx?c=psa;cc=psa;sid=0556c0860c4c27c59f6205d519951d8f;rgn=main;view=text;i dno=UF00003033;node=UF00003033>. 56 Norman N Holland, Hamlet's Big Toe? Neuropsychology and Literary Characters , University of Florida Department of English, 9 September 2003, date accessed: 24 May 2010. <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/2003/Litchar.html >. 57 58 59 Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 387 Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 239 Aristotle, Poetics, Perseus Digital Library edition, date accessed: 31 May 2010, < http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristot.+Poet.+1447a&redirect=tr ue >. 60 Burke, Perspectives by Incongruity, ed Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.) 61 James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) 2. He adds a third facet to literary personhood, the thematic how a character embodies the stories theme. Mimetic and synthetic are most relevant for this paper, but thematic element will be developed in a future article on robot victimage. 62 63 See note 3 for explanation of the Turning Test. Hofstadter, The Minds I, 382. 31 64 I Harvey, P Husband, D Cli, A Thompson, and N Jakobi, Evolutionary Robotics: the Sussex Approach , (Brighton, UK: School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences University of Sussex) 10 May 1996, date accessed: 2 June 2010, < ftp://ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk/pub/users/inmanh/Monteverita.ps.gz >. 65 Ada Brunstein, Robot Dinosaur Finally Released: Pleo blurs the line between pet and toy , Technology Review, 17 September 2007, date accessed 9 June 2010, < http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/19899/>. 66 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds , Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, presented at IIAS Symposium on Cognition, Computation and Consciousness (Kyoto, September 1-3, 1994), date accessed: 29 May 2010, < http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/concrobt.htm >. 67 What's more striking about the latest generation is the appearance of unscripted, emergent behavior - the AI stumbling on new ways of responding to the world, strategies and behaviors that weren't deliberately planned by the designers. Fans of the game have created sites to share anecdotes about the bizarre or uncanny deeds they've coaxed out of their creatures. Steven Johnson, Wild Things: They fight. They flock. They have free will. Get ready for game bots with a mind of their own , Wired, Issue 10.03, March 2002, date accessed 20 May 2010, < http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/aigames.html >. 68 Jonathan V Last, Immersed and Confused , a review of Tom Bissell s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (Pantheon, 2010), Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2010, A17. 69 Sharon Waxman, Cyberface: New Technology that Captures the Soul , New York Times, 15 October 2006, date accessed: 10 June 2010, < http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/movies/15waxm.html?pagewanted=print 32 70 Meet Emily - Image Metrics Tech Demo, video clip, 2008, Jonathan Richards, Lifelike animation heralds new era for computer games: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiX5d3rC6o>. 71 'Emily' will set a new precedent for photo-realistic characters in video games and films, says her creator, Image Metrics , Times on London, 18 August 2008, date accessed: 27 May 2010, < http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece >. 33