Specters of the Thinking Machine

The Uncanny Suggestion of the Non-human within the Human

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in the world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal.

— William James, Varieties of Religious Experience¹

Nature, the art whereby God hath made and governs the world, is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan²

If it's in a word or it's in a look; You can't get rid of the Babadook; If you're a really clever one; And you know what it is to see; Then you can make friends with a special one; A friend of you and me; His name is Mister Babadook; And this is his book; A rumbling sound then 3 sharp knocks; ba-BA-ba DOOK! DOOK! DOOK!; That's when you'll know that he's around; You'll see him if you look; This is what he wears on top; He's funny, don't you think?; See him in your room at night; And you won't sleep a wink.; I'll soon take off my funny disguise; Take heed of what you've read... ; And once you see what's underneath... ; YOU'RE GOING TO WISH YOU WERE; DEAD.; I'll WAGER with YOU; I’LL MAKE you a BET.; ThE MORE you DENY the STRONGER I GET; LET ME IN!; You start to CHANGE when I get in; ThE BABADOOK growing; Right UNDER YOUR SKIN; Oh COME!; Come SEE; What's UNDERNEATH!

– Amelia, The Babadook

Among the more curious realizations that one comes to at “a certain stage of life,” at least among those I have noticed so far, is how much of one’s recollected history is cluttered with the trivial and banal. Much of what I recall of my lengthening past are insignificant, everyday details that don’t seem much worth the cognitive burden that goes into maintaining them in my memory banks. Moreover, my dream life, to the degree that I recall it at all, strikes me as equally banal. Most of what I remember from my dreams hardly seems worth the trouble. Are my memories and dreams cluttered with insignificance because I have lived a superficial and trivial life? I am open to this suggestion, but, not surprisingly, Freud provides us with some reasons not to be too quick to trust our recollections of a supposedly mundane and superficial past.

In particular, Freud highlights those cases in which our conscious recollections have staying power (they return to us), not because of their trivial surface content, but due to the content of other deeper or unconscious memories, which they mask or screen. For example, Freud points out a case of someone whose earliest childhood memory is presents as a bowl of ice on a dining room table, a completely trivial detail that seems odd to drag into adult life. It costs us energy to maintain our consciously accessible memories, and it is quite curious that we would waste it on bowls of ice appearing as part of a table-setting at a hum-drum dinner party. Brains are metabolically very costly appliances, so why would we waste precious calories on storing and retrieving insignificant details?

It turns out, however, that this memory is a fragment from the period following the death of the subject’s grandmother, which “had a shattering effect on him” even though in adult life he “knows nothing of this death; all he can recall from that period is a bowl of ice.”³ On Freud’s conjecture, the man remembers the bowl of ice not because it is significant, but the significance of the death he was forced to confront around that same time. The memory of the bowl of ice sitting on the table at what turns out to be the funeral dinner for grandma is maintained (at a cognitive expense) precisely because it is insignificant. It’s banality gives ease. The energy expended saving this unremarkable memory is more than paid for by the anxiety it spares the subject. The trivialities kept around in our consciously retrievable bank of memories serve to hide other occurrences we find objectionable, things that conflict with our “official” stories. The confrontation with mortality (something that is primordial and originary for all of us) was too much for the youngster (cum adult!) to bear recalling explicitly, but its undeniable meaning was too jarring to simply forget. The grandmother’s death, along with its implications for the facts of finite existence, was screened (not eliminated, but masked) by the memory of a harmless bowl of ice. The searing significance of the screened memory prevents us from utterly abolishing it, but its discomforting suggestions prevent us from explicitly recalling it. Thus, we hold onto a safe, seemingly trivial, surrogate that is associatively related to the significant event we can neither squarely face nor completely evade. When the man is forced to recall that dark day, he can safely stop and rest comfortably with the bowl of ice. As Freud puts it:

Hence, the result of the conflict is that, instead of the memory image that was justified by the original experience, we are presented with another, which is to some extent associatively displaced from it. Since it was the significant components of the impression that made it objectionable, these must be absent from the memory that replaces it, and so it may well seem banal. We find it unintelligible because we would like to see the reason for its retention in its intrinsic content, when in fact it resides in the relation between this content and another which has been suppressed. (“Screen Memories,” p. 7)

Moreover, Freud argues that at times what we take as “memories” are not really the straightforward recollection of things past, but projections from our present or more recent history. The idea here is what we “recall” as memories from our distant past are really symbolic surrogates for discomforting truths about our present dispositions. For example, Freud analyzes a case of one of his patients who frequently recalls a childhood memory of events that likely never occurred and which can all-too-easily be seen as an expression for marital and professional regrets that have arisen in later life. Facing these realities about himself would be quite unflattering (the sources of his regret are carnal and infantile), and may well undermine his marriage and career, should he act on them. These hard truths about what goes on behind the scenes of the man’s ego are safely screened by a seemingly innocuous childhood memory that symbolically acts out the inclinations the man would prefer to forget or ignore. This “memory” then protects the man from the objectionable underlying realities of his own personality, while at the same time not allowing him to forget what was at stake in his life’s most important juncture and how he implicitly wishes it might have gone otherwise than it did. Again with Freud:

Such a memory, whose value consists in the fact that it represents thoughts and impressions from a later period and that its content is connected with these by links of a symbolic or similar nature, is what I call a screen memory . . . . It can no longer be called a harmless one if, as we have discovered, it is intended to to illustrate the most important turning-points in the history of your life . . . . (“Screen Memories,” p. 15; Freud’s emphasis)

Some of our childhood memories are then either subterfuges drawing our attention away from or outright falsifications of truths about ourselves we we would prefer to avoid, i.e., “they serve to repress and replace objectionable or disagreeable impressions” (“Screen Memories,” p. 21). Importantly, these “childhood” memories seemingly screen unflattering realities that would only be recognized as such from our later, adult perspective. That is, “these falsified memories must have arisen at a time when such conflicts and the impulse to repression could already assert themselves in a person’s mental life . . . long after the period to which their content relates” (“Screen Memories,” p. 21). Self-conscious reflection then seems to run the risk of self-serving retrospective editing and even outright fabrication of “memories.” Some of our recollections are post hoc reconstructions or convenient distractions from the conditions that have most shaped us — unvarnished truths about ourselves that we cannot admit with ease. We seem to hide some of the most important facts about our origins, the conditions under which we have become who we really are, from ourselves.

How much of our recollective lives is party to such put-ons? Freud thinks a great deal: “It is perhaps altogether questionable whether we have any conscious memories from childhood: perhaps we only have memories of childhood” (“Screen Memories,” p. 210; Freud’s emphasis). In other words, our entire sense of our primordial past might be a screen for deeper, possibly distasteful truths about our origins. That, of course, is a very big claim, but, at the very least, Freud’s suggestion of the screen memory mechanism is compelling enough that we cannot help but to take seriously the possibility that much of what we think we know of our past is in fact a screen for secrets we laboriously keep from ourselves. Bringing these secrets about our origins out of concealment and into the light of our conscious reflection becomes the primary step in liberating ourselves from the burden of keeping up the screen.

Memory is not the only mode of the screening-revealing mechanism that Freud ferrets out of our cognitive lives, and we can take this as a central theme of all his work. For our purposes, the most interesting place he finds this dynamic is in the mechanisms behind what strikes us as frighting. In particular, Freud has in mind those phenomena we experience as uncanny, which is “the species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long ago been familiar.”⁴ In other words, the uncanny is the frightful experience that comes with the recovery of a memory that has been suppressed — something once known, but then forgotten or studiously ignored. The object of the memory in an uncanny experience is displacing or otherwise unwelcome, as the uncanny is a species of the frightening. When we are confronted with an uncanny work of art or experience, we are reminded of something we would rather forget, a fact that we have been hiding from. The German for uncanny is unheimlich, what we would guess to be the antonym of heimlich. The latter means “homely,” so unheimlich is literally un-homely. Freud, however, provides a linguistic analysis that reveals an irony in the opposition between heimlich and unheimlich:

… among the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich…. This reminds us that the the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other — the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden. Unheimlich is the antonym of the heimlich only in the latter’s first sense, not its second…. the term ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich) applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open. (“The Uncanny,” p. 132)

We have two senses of heimlich. On the one hand heimlich-1 can mean “homey” or “comfortable,” i.e., the intimacy and ease of family life in a happy home where one feels most comfortable or even most herself. On the other hand, heimlich-2 connotes the family secrets that are not discussed, those things that really go on behind the scenes of the home, which we would all rather forget and we certainly don’t share in polite company; the things we keep safely tucked away in the home. Heimlich-2 can actually be interchanged with unheimlich. There is nothing very homey about the dirty secrets we all tacitly agree not to bring up around the holiday dinner table. Our family secrets are the source of unease. Heimlich-2 revelations are precisely those that are unwelcome in the heimlich-1 setting; the former certainly unnerves the the latter. Notice, however, that the homey (heimlich-1) and secretive (heimlich-2) modes of heimlich can co-exist in a single complex phenomenon; homey-ness can mask or screen ugly secrets, i.e., our homey stories about ourselves keep our ugly secrets at bay. The heimlich-1 and heimlich-2 constellation is another iteration of Freud’s screen memory dynamic, i.e, the homey and comfortable run interference for the unflattering and displacing facts about ourselves we would be horrified to admit. The feeling of the unheimlich (uncanny) is occasioned by the irruption of the family’s secrets into the open of the otherwise homey family life — the revelation of what really lies beneath our screens and masks. It is frightening to be reminded of what goes on behind our preferred and comfortable self-conceptions. Freud connects the uncanny with the more general screening-revealing mechanism at the heart of his psychoanalytic stance as follows:

In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an emotional impulse — of whatever kind — is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect. In the second place, if this really is the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why German usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’), for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. (“The Uncanny,” p. 148)

The uncanny is then the revelation that comes when one of our screen memories is revealed as a put-on in a way that is distinctively frightening. It is occasioned by some phenomenon that brings out into the open something which we have known all along, but strained to keep hidden primarily from ourselves.

Freud examines several cases of the uncanny. For example, he notes how we are at once horrified and fascinated by depictions of people slipping into insanity or seizures: “The uncanny effect of epilepsy or madness has the same origin. Here the layman sees a manifestation of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality” (“The Uncanny, p. 150). The sight of someone losing control of their faculties frightens us, even though we never tire of stories of incipient madness, because it suggests the underlying possibility that the same irrational compulsions and forces may be poised to emerge from under our own “homey” egos at any moment. Maybe we have actually suppressed memories of such tendencies on our own part. Likewise, tales of doppelgangers simultaneously horrify and captivate us, because they not so subtly suggest our repressed, but ever-looming, sense of mortality: “…the primordial narcissism that dominates mental life of both the child and primitive man, and when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the ‘double’ changes: having once been the assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death” (“The Uncanny,” p. 142). Such stories haunt us with the possibility that we are merely the fleeting repetitions of the same humanoid forms, neither more permanent nor more dignified than the eons of merely organic repetitions that preceded us.

The familial and domestic connotations of heimlich-unheimlich should not be lost on us, but we need to take “family” in a very broad sense. The uncanny, as Freud construes it, includes revelations about our origins, where we really come from, whether that be primordial emergence of our individual selves or our species; it arises when the secrets of the human family are unconcealed. We are frightened, in the particularly uncanny mode of fright, by those things that remind us of our origins in things that do not fit well in our preferred stories about ourselves, what really happened in the “homes” in which we were reared. The “place” we come from is always a significant clue as to who we really are. This applies not just to our individual origins, but likewise to the origins of our species. That from which we as humans have emerged is a sign (even if insufficient for a complete picture) as to what our nature really is. Are there dirty secrets in our human origins that we would prefer to keep locked away in the proverbial basement? If so, revelations of these long-hidden facts would be uncanny to us! Is the gaudy spectacle of humanism really a screen memory for our “lowly” origins in the non-human? The affirmative answer to that question is among Freud’s most un-homely suggestions. He leaves us with the creeping suspicion that we are haunted by the specters of our non-human underpinnings.

In this light, consider Freud’s extended analysis of a horror tale involving an inversion of the animate and the inanimate signaled by a doll brought to life by a nefarious character bent on stealing children’s eyes and incorporating them into his artifacts. Such stories continue to fascinate while horrifying us, e.g., horror movie franchises like Child’s Play and Annabelle play on the notion of malevolently animated dolls and the decades-long craze for lore of undead yet animate zombies. Unsurprisingly, Freud interprets the theft of the children’s eyes as a screen for castration anxiety, but he also agrees with other critics of this gothic trope who argue that inversions of the animate and the inanimate have their uncanny effects because, like manifestations of insanity, “these arouse in the onlooker vague notions of automatic - mechanical - processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person,” while suggesting that the “lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living” (“The Uncanny,” p. 135. and p. 141). No doubt, these tropes bespeak of death anxieties, pointing out that the line between the living and the dead is always closer to hand than we care to admit — we’re all just one “plucked eye” from being mere dolls. Be that as it may, I also detect something closer to the theme of untidy origins intimated by the heimlich-umheimlich interplay in these inversions of the animate and the inanimate.

Timothy Morton picks up this line of Freud’s thought about the uncanny: “As Freud observes in his essay on the uncanny, the concept of soul is shadowed by the concept of specter.”⁵ Morton’s point (and I agree that this is also implicit in Freud’s stance), is that human beings, like all living things, are haunted by the doppelganers that compose them; we are subscendend (as opposed to transcended), to use Morton’s term, by legions of non-humans that both differ from and constitute us. The whole of a living thing, though no less real, is less than its parts. Any living whole is outnumber by its constituents, both numerically (how many beings there are within the living whole) and ontologically (how many different kinds of beings there are within the living whole). I am a multitude of various types and tokens of tissue cells, bacteria, enzymes, and organic molecules, etc., all of which are “doing their own thing” that is quite other to my doings. I form a whole only to the degree that I and all these others constitute a symbiosis. The agendas of my subscending constituents are not necessarily the same as my agenda, though we do get on well enough in the short term to constitute a symbiotic whole. In any event, there is always more going on in us than merely what we are up to. In this way, for Morton, we are haunted by our non-human origins, both synchronically and diachronically:

Likewise, some anaerobic bacteria hid in differently-evolving single celled organisms, and now you ahve them in every cell of your body. They care collaed mitochondria and they are why capable of reading this: they provide your energy. Your eyes are moving down this page because of a bacterial superpower. You can’t be a lifeform unless you have this spectral double, this mutant shadow. Being alive means being supernatural. (Humankind, p. 77)

The human body is a historical record of nonhuman evolution. (Humankind, p. 135)

That is, all living things are “doubled” by the multitude of non-living things that compose and numerically and ontologically exceed them. Every living thing, beings with soul or anima for Aristotle, has its life only in virtue of its foundation in non-living (inanimate) others. The line between the living and the non-living, and the human and the non-human, is not drawn horizontally, such that the living and the human stand above in a higher and more dignified position; nor is the line drawn externally, such that we can put the non-human and the non-living safely “out there.” Rather the point, as Morton emphasizes, is that the human/non-human, living/non-living relation is not a line or a division at all, but a symbiosis. Upper/lower, dignified/undignified, inner/outer don’t apply, because the phenomenon plays itself out from within the beings in this subscending arrangement. We organisms are haunted by the specters of the others through which we are constituted, including the undead. We are haunted from within! Humans, try as we might to ignore it, have a sneaking suspicion of this spectral aspect of organic being:

Freud argues that the uncanny is keyed to realizing that we are embodied beings. And what is more embodied than being a part of the symbiotic real? Doesn’t the uncanniness of beings caught in the Uncanny Valley have to do with how they remind us of the non-manipulable embodied, “less than human” aspects of ourselves, or our very species bering? (Humankind, p. 135)

When we encounter the animate-inanimate inversions in gothic art (malevolent dolls, androids, AI run amuck, etc.) we experience uncanny fright, because the inner secret of our humanity as subscended by non-humanity is brought into unconcealment. The specters we’d like to keep in the background sneak into the foreground. The human is shown in symbiosis with the non-human in such a way as to rob us of our humanistic pretensions. That is, the uncanny reminds us that our activities, our thinking and volitions, are themselves constituted by legions of “acts” by non-thinking, non-volitional, and even non-living beings that subscend us. Our actions are products of myriad passions (passive processes among the non-human and non-living beings that the found out being):

Action isn’t different from passion. Action is made up of little quantized dots of passion. The quantum of action looks like passivity because it’s receptivity, not because its inertia. It isn’t just negation: it is quivering, “living” (compromised word) vibration, an undead spectral life common to both lifeforms and non-life. (Humankind, p. 171).

Our acts, the supposed source of superior human dignity, are the acts of putatively non-acting constituents that far outnumber us from within our own being. The point here is not to demote our acts to non-acts, to reduce the human (or even the living) to the non-living, but to the reveal the symbiotic relation between these two supposed poles. The human and the non-human are both real — they are other to each other, though they exist in symbiosis. We are held together with the non-human, even in the most human aspects of our being.

Morton’s suggestion is not a bland reductive or eliminative materialism, which voids the world of any meaning, purpose, or will. Rather, he opens the possibility of a re-enchanted world, wherein we realize that the supposedly mechanical constituents of our lives are not so different from us. That is, since it is increasingly difficult to “distinguish definitively between life and non-life,” it is likewise difficult to distinguish between non-human animals, humans, and inanimate objects, and we are thus “moving toward the object-oriented ontology view that all beings have agency, even mind” (Humankind, pp. 56-57). That is not to say that Morton is invoking something like the panpsychism increasing en vogue among analytic philosophers who try to solve the mind-body problem by writing a proto-version of human subjectivity into the very fabric of the physical universe. That sort of humanistic metaphysical pretension (“We can’t figure ourselves out within the the confines of our current scientific paradigm, so it must be that the whole universe is just like us!”) is exactly the sort of thing that Morton believes we need to get over.⁶ Rather, Morton argues that the encounter with the uncanny, the non-human specters that haunt the foundations of our human being, blurs the line between mind and matter. The idea is not to eliminate mind from nature, or to subsume all of nature to mind, but to see that the mind-matter difference wasn’t such a big deal in the first place; or at least the difference is far more fluid and unmanageable than we might have wished.

For Morton, our being (our whole) is full of holes — there are non-human gaps throughout the human. These holes in the whole come and go, and make our being (like all organic being) more ambiguous than we would like to admit. That is the haunting and spectral part of our subscended existence that Morton emphasizes. There are other beings here insides us — gaps in our humanity, within in us! The line between us and the entities that make these holes in our being is amorphous, as the boundaries between us and “the rest” are less like the neat boarders drawn on maps than they are the moving limits of clouds. It is as though we are all possessed by Others, though these specters are inherent to us. Thus, the hard line between “us” and “them” is chimerical, and we can only see the non-human as something with which we have common cause as fellow beings who are haunted by the holes in our being. Though the non-human may not “act,” we once proud agents are full of these “merely passive” beings. Our being is perforated with non-human-being. The uncanny fright that comes with admitting the inner-spectral nature of our being (the non-being within our being) is worth the welcoming of “the rest” of the living world it affords us. For Morton, this uncanny revelation, which certainly does frighten and displace us, is not an occasion for reduction, but solidarity:

What is sinful about acknowledging the spectral is that it amplifies the teetering, fragile aesthetic experience until it loses its anthropocentric scaling. (Humandkind, p. 170)

The struggle to have solidarity with lifeforms is the struggle to include the specters and spectrality. (Humandkind, p. 135)

So it’s perfectly possible for us to achieve solidarity with nonhumans: I am not bound in an impervious whole and there are parts of me that also belong to other lifeforms, are common to them, or just are other lifeforms. We discover this solidarity down below the anthropocentric, murderous-suicidal idea of who are. (Humankind, p. 122)

Remember the Freudian analysis where this notion of the uncanny begins. Our haunted, subscended being is screened by our humanistic pretensions, as are the possibilities for solidarity with the non-human world that follow on the recognition of the specters that reside in the holes in our humanity. Just as our ego ideals suppress the realities of our familial origins, our obsessions with our dignified human standing lead to vaunted philosophical tales about the utter transcendence (as opposed to subscendence) of the human mind with respect to the body. In other words, a Freudian might see behind the the valorization of reason as transcending the merely bodily (action as independent of passion) that has been the centerpiece of much of traditional philosophy as just so much special pleading against admitting the obvious fact of our embodiment. Notice, however, the veneer of these screens wears thin even in the thought of the most enthusiastic advocates of the disembodiment of the human soul. Consider Descartes infamous means of motivating some extreme skeptical hypotheses in the Meditations:

Be that as it may, there is fixed in my mind a certain opinion of long standing, namely that there exists a God who is able to do anything and by whom I, such as I am, have been created. How do I know that he did not bring it aobut that there is no earth at all, no heavens, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, and yet bringing it about that all these things appear to me to exist precisely as they do now? Moreover, since I judge that others sometimes make mistakes in matter that they believe they know most perfectly, may I not, in like fashion, be deceived every time I add tow and three or count the side of a square, or perform an even simpler operation, if that can be imagined?⁷

Descartes asks us to entertain the possibility that what we think to be our sound rational faculties, which supposedly put us in touch with the real world, are just faulty wiring imposed on us by our “creator.” Of course, Descartes doesn’t think God (as perfectly good and powerful) would leave us as hapless androids, but perhaps we have not been programed by “a supremely good God, the source of truth, but rather an evil genius, supremely powerful and clever,” who has no scruples about leaving us in a pathetic situation (Meditations, p 62). Leaving aside whether our origin is in the designs of a malevolent or benevolent intelligence, the less perfect the credentials of our originating being or beings might be, e.g., “I came to be what I am either by fate, or chance, or by a connected chain of causes,” the the more likely it is “that I am so imperfect that I am always deceived” (Meditations, p. 62). Thus, for Descartes, if we cannot prove that we are the creations of a perfect deity, i.e., we cannot rule out that we are products of an ill-willed demon or non-rational forces and entities (evolution), we are ourselves trapped in a state of non-rationality or even irrationality.

Whatever we think of Descartes’s attempts to rescue us from skepticism by vindicating the theistic hypothesis for our origins, the important matter to highlight is that, for all we know, we are just passively running a prescribed algorithm in a space of causes, despite our internal sense of acting in a space of reasons. In other words, Descartes believes that, without special argumentation for a theistic assurance, we are subscended by our non-human (non-rational) origins. For Morton, “this is the true genius of the Meditations,” namely, that I can only wonder “at this moment, I myself am a person or an android” (Humankind, p. 83). For all I know, there is a non-human, android running things from within the holes in my putatively human being: “Mind is neither inside nor outside the physical, inside nor outside my body. To exist is to be an uncanny doppelganger of oneself at the same time” (Humankind, p. 83).⁸ We’re haunted by the specters of our myriad inner androids, and Descartes slips a bit and says that disquieting part aloud, even when he is on his way to assure us that we can thoroughly exorcise the possibility of our possession by the non-human. For Descartes and much of the philosophical tradition, however, subscendence amounts to being undermined as agents in any robust sense. It’s Us (human minds) or Them (the non-human specters that haunt us by composing us), but not both. Thus, rather than seizing the opportunity for solidarity with nature, Descartes looks for some theistic assurance against subscendence and in favor of transcendence.

One of the most truly uncanny possibilities of the gothic imagination is then the notion of the thinking machine, or at least the machine whose machinations cannot be distinguished from our supposed rational acts. Entertaining such possibilities might server to unscreen uncanny memories of our origins in non-living, non-rational beings. Descartes himself even takes up the question of whether such images are bona fide possibilities. He concedes the real possibility of machines “having the organs and the shape of a monkey or some other animal that lacked reason” that are functionally indistinguishable from real non-rational animals of such kinds, but “it is for all practical purposes impossible for there to be enough different organs in a machine to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the same way as our reason makes us act.”⁹ Descartes anticipates the notion of the Turning Test, though he thinks it’s laughable to believe that a non-human (animate or inanimate) will ever pass it. He doubts that any machine could ever be sufficiently complex as to match the scope and plasticity of fully human linguistic capacities, and ultimately this shows that “the rational soul . . . can in no way be derived from the potentiality of matter . . ., but rather that it must be expressly created” (Discourse, p. 33). In other words, the human soul (our type of life) is not subscended by anything non-human. We would then be safely disenchanted, freed from any hauntings of the spectral or paranormal from within our own being.

Notice, however, Descartes concedes that the line between organisms and machines is quite plausibly transgressed (he grants the possibility of mechanical “monkeys”), and he also sees the line between the human and the non-human primarily in terms of an engineering problem — a physical system that could match our linguistic capacity would require so many parts (organs), so intricately arranged, as to amount to a technological impossibility. That is all well and good, but the technological impossibility of crossing the human/non-human divide is far from an actual metaphysical gulf; the simple fact that that we can’t build a machine that matches our mental capacities says less about the transcendence of our minds than it does about the prowess of our engineers. That Descartes, the arch-dualist of the philosophical tradition, makes his case in such a way speaks volumes about what is really going on behind the scenes. The Cartesian assurance of transcendence really concedes as much to the case against distinctive human standing as it denies. Struggle though he does in the opposite direction, Descartes whispers that maybe we’re “machines” no less than our bodily constituents, no less than non-human animals.

Descartes’ attempts to screen these memories of our non-human origins (or our shared personal standing with everything else) are famously ineffective, and ever since (and maybe long before that) there is a certain paranoia haunting philosophy. We constantly search for assurances that we are not being undone by our non-human origins and inner mechanisms. The quest for certainty that dominates much of Western thinking is evidence of this obsessive paranoia — we can’t shake the worry that we are followed around by ghosts from within! Maybe, however, once we face the facts of our origin (our subscendence), we can see that there is no relief from this paranoia. The whispers of the impersonal are intrinsic to any personal being:

Such a thought process wants to eliminate doubt and paranoia. But what if doubt and paranoia were default to personhood. What if being concerned that I might not be a person were a basic condition of being one? This seems to be what the Turing test is point to. It’s not that personhood is some mysterious property that we grant to beings under special circumstances, or that it doesn’t exist at all except for in the eye of the beholder, or that it’s an emergent property of matter. It’s that personhood now means “You are not a non-persons.” (Humankind, pp. 130-131)¹⁰

For Morton, paranoia is a feature, not a bug, of personhood. The sneaking suspicion that our personal standing isn’t quite so special as our screen memories of our origins tempt us to believe (either because we’re not so personal as we think or everything else is much more personal than we choose to believe) is what keeps us from foreclosing against opportunities for solidarity with the denizens of the non-human world, which is, of course, our world. For an ecological thinker like Morton, such solidarity with the non-human (animate and inanimate alike) is of the highest importance, but not only to avert the environmental crises that stalk us, but also because being-with the non-human (in our subscendence by them and symbiosis with them) is our species being.¹¹

The specter of ChatGPT and the myriad other nearly successful Turning machines that now haunt our headlines and imaginations are certainly experienced by many of us as uncanny. They frighten and displace, but maybe not simply because of the threats they pose to our livelihoods and our control of our day-to-day lives (though I don’t deny those threats). These “thinking” machines don’t only haunt us with a future human obsolescence, but also with the suppressed secretes of the origin of our species in the non-human. If machines can match (or nearly match — engineering difficulties don’t ground metaphysical distinctions) our agency, then we are compelled to admit our subscendence by non-human and even non-living beings. Nothing does more to reveal the non-human gaps in our humanity than the prospect of a thinking machine. AI gadgetry fascinates and horrifies us because it, like Descartes’ Evil Genius and the animate dolls in Victorian horror tales, unscreens our anxieties about not being so distinctively human after all. If these androids are close to us humans, then maybe we are closer to being androids than we thought, or everything else is further from being a mere mechanism than our humanist pretensions allow. In any event, just as coming to terms with what lies beneath our own personal screen memories can heal a neurotic personality, maybe the uncanny experience of AI will salve the pain of our anxiety and paranoia about our personal standing, which might finally let us make peace and common cause with the ghosts and specters that haunt our non-human world.

Ironically, maybe the uncanniness of our mechanical technologies will be the beginnings of our re-engagement with an enchanted world we have long labored to forget.

1. William James, Varieties of Religion Experience, in Writings: 1902-1910 (The Library of America, 1987), pp. 460-461.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (OUP, 2008), p. 7.

3. Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Uncanny, trans. D. Mclintock (Penguin), p. 6. Hereafter cited “Screen Memories” with the page number.

4. Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans D. Mclintock (Penguin), p. 124. Hereafter cited as “The Uncanny” with the page number.

5. Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), p. 78; Morton’s emphasis. Hereafter cited as Humankind with page number.

6. Graham Harmon sets to rest any confusion between object orient ontology and panpsychism in The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2010), particularly his chapter “Levels of Psyche.” See also my critique of panpschism as an expression of modernist humanism.

7. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans., D. Cress, 4th edition (Hackett). Hereafter cited as Meditations with page number.

8. Consider in this light the various zombie (physical doppelgangers of ourselves that lack consciousness) thought experiments abroad in recent analytic philosophy of mind, which are aimed at securing a place for subjectivity safely distintuished from its physical underpinnings. The Freudian can easily see here an updated version of Victorian tales of animate doles.

9. Descartes, Discourse on Method, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. D. Cress, 4th edition (Hackett), pp. 32. Hereafter cited as Discourse with the page number.

10. I make an extended case that the mark of distinctive personhood (as opposed to mechanical imitations of personhood) is anxiety over our personal standing in Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Technological Nihilism (Cascade — forthcoming).

11. See Morton’s Humankind, pp. 121-136.