Philosophical Reflection: Avatar

Two weekends ago my wife Merry and I took a break from getting ready to move to Syracuse by going to the new movie Avatar. I'm both curious and skeptical when a movie is promoted as a blockbuster. In this case my skepticism was overcome by the promise of a completely new and convincing 3-D experience. The new form of 3-D works. The visuals are a treat. The alien creatures are pretty neat too, if derivative. I'm not going to review the movie here. A plot summary can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)

From a philosophical point of view the interesting thing about Avatar is that it simultaneously takes both sides of a long running philosophical/religious argument called the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is an exploration of the meaning of consciousness. The question is whether there exists an entity separate from the body, called the mind, that does our thinking and controls the body. Religious thinkers say “yes” and identify consciousness with the soul, even positing that it pre-exists the body and survives it after death. Scientists say “no” and argue that the mind is nothing more than a very complex bundle of specialized nerve cells called the brain. In the scientific view consciousness is an artifact of the way our brains are wired to our body, not something separate.

The basic premise of Avatar requires belief in the existence of a controlling soul totally separable from the brain. The frequent use of giant robot fighting machines controlled by human operators who sit inside the head shows how much the movie loves this idea. Similarly, an avatar, as envisioned in the movie, is an alien body inhabited and controlled by a human operator. We are told that this is accomplished by “mixing DNA from the aliens with human DNA” and growing a clone alien body to adulthood. Mixing in human DNA makes the alien body “receptive” to human control, but only by the human from which the DNA was taken. OK, just how does that work?

On the planet Pandora there is a lab where humans lie in something resembling a high tech tanning bed and have their consciousness “projected” into their specially grown alien bodies. In the lab the alien bodies are attached to the human brains by electronic leads of some sort, but as soon as the link is established they operate by some sort of advanced biological Wi-Fi technology, or ESP or something.

As soon as the hero, Jake, is linked with his alien body he totally inhabits it. He can run, see, smell, feel and do acrobatics. Only seconds before the alien body was completely inert in its test tube. Jake's body, meanwhile, is lying inert in its tanning bed, but aware of everything his alien body is doing. The alien body apparently has no mind of its own. When Jake's tanning bed is turned off, his alien body goes into a coma from which it cannot be awakened and Jake's consciousness returns to his human body. For this shuttling of consciousness to work at all, the mind must be separable from the body.

Interestingly, the design of the planet Pandora is based in large part on how consciousness really works. Grace, the good scientist, discovers that there are billions of neural connections between all the living things on the planet. She argues that this complex of all living things constitutes a consciousness that ought not be tinkered with. Further, the alien creatures all have a braided ponytail that ends in neural contacts allowing them to tap into the network of their living world. They use this built-in contact to communicate with animals and with their living god.

As currently defined by cognitive science, consciousness works pretty much like that. It is a complex of billions of neural connections primarily but not exclusively located in our brain. Our brains are born with a gigantic number of the connections already in place. This hard wiring develops into who we uniquely are by adding millions of new neural connections daily. We call the connections of which we are aware experience and later we call them memories. Consciousness as seen by science consists entirely of the complex of neural links in our brain built up over our lifetime. It does not and cannot exist independently of our own body.

Even before cognitive science started to show how the brain creates consciousness, some philosophers “solved” the mind-body problem by showing it was a classic category mistake. To categorize one thing as “the body” and another “the mind” requires that you believe at the outset there are two such separate things, thus presupposing the answer. The correct question is “What is consciousness?” not “How do the mind and body relate?”

In a nutshell, Jake can't transfer his consciousness to the alien body because there isn't anything to transfer. Even a brain transplant (if possible) won't work because new experience from the alien body would quickly make Jake into something else. Indeed, as the story progresses Jake slowly becomes the alien body he inhabits. Ironically, Avatar ends with Jake's human consciousness being transferred permanently into his alien body by way of Pandora's complex neural network, thus solving the problem. Maybe the director knew all along that the avatar idea was based on a fallacy. Maybe not.