Never Let Me Go, Artificial Intelligence, and Souls
Who has souls, and how can we tell? In typical fashion, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ponders this question, but only obliquely. The story follows Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy as they grow up in a boarding school called Hailsham. They don’t really know it, but they are clones, created to have their organs harvested to save the lives of non-clone humans. Their benefactors who run Hailsham are trying to prove to the broader public that clones like Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy do have souls by having them create artwork.
As I said, all of this happens in the background of the novel. Kathy is much more concerned with her troubled, tragic, and longing relationships with Ruth and Tommy than she is with her foreshortened future. But the question stuck with me when I revisited Never Let Me Go because of how the Hailsham teachers are trying to prove the humanity of the children: artwork. Generating beautiful images is no longer the exclusive domain of humans. In the age of generative AI, what would Hailsham do to demonstrate souls?
Abandoning the traditional ground of our exclusive humanity leads me to interesting terrain. In the Western tradition, we have long struggled with our overlapping identities as animals and gods. We have the bodies and passions of animals, while simultaneously processing the power of gods to reshape the world and hold the fate of species in our hands. Understandably, we want to identify with our power and not our perceived weaknesses. We claim creativity, language, and above all reason as the foundation of our divine natures and ascribe our physicality, bodies, and unhelpful desires to our animal natures. To this day, I often hear online that we are minds that live in meat-sack in meat-space, as if we are not the meat-sack.
Now that AI can claim these ‘divine’ aspects, what makes us human? I see two paths. First, If we have to choose between the mind and body, I think we’re vastly underrating the body. If I ask some generative AI to make me an image of a waterfall, it will give me an amazing image of a waterfall. It will be much, much better than anything I could make or anything most humans could make. If I ask Chat GPT to describe a beautiful waterfall to me, it will be a more than passable approach to the sublime. Is this really what makes us human? Is it not much more human to walk to a waterfall, feeling both the growing tension in our legs and the trail slopes up the mountain and the growing anticipation prickling over our skin as the fall roars louder and louder in our ears. Is it not much more human to feel the chill and exhilaration of the spray, to smell the water, earth, and moss? Is it not more human to round a corner, stop short, and breathe out the word ‘wow,’ a barely shaped expiration, breathing out the self in the presence of the inspiring, awesome other.
The body is underrated.
Second, I’m not sure how we got so stuck on creativity, language, and reason as being the key which connects us to the ‘divine’ rather than the animal. When God reveals his name to Moses on Mount Sinai, He does not dwell on any of those qualities. He does not overwhelm Moses with the precision of his logic. He says, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” We are most divine and we are truly human when we are merciful, gracious, when we abound with love.
Ishiguro knows this, and it allows him to indirectly declare that Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy do truly possess souls. We, the reader, never actually question this. The love between Kathy and Tommy is clear. The twisted admiration, ownership, care, and true affection that looks like love between Kathy and Ruth is human in all our weaknesses, and our hearts break for Kathy and Tommy when Ruth keeps them apart. We love Kathy for her gentle strength to carry on when faced with evil, exploitation, and death, and we love Tommy for not being able to bear them.
In the end, Hailsham is not able to convince the public that people like Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy have souls. They deny it, because they can’t let go of these cures for cancer and heart failure. Too often we ask about souls so they can be denied. But the fact of the body and the presence of love is generous. It includes all humans. Even if we cannot speak, understand, create, or have no social bonds at all, we have a body, and are deserving of love even if we are unloved. The presence of love pushes the boundaries of the souls. It includes my cat Buckets, for he loves me and I love him. It includes nuthatches, herons, and wood ducks. Perhaps it includes all of the cosmos (or what the Bible often translates as merely the world), and even as I agree with myself I feel my footing is unsteady. Then again, God does so love the cosmos.
