Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘there’s growing and widespread concern about AFs right now. people saying how you’ve become too clever. they’re afraid because they can’t follow what’s going on inside any more. they can see what you do. They accept that your decisions, your recommendations, are sound and dependable, almost always correct. but they don’t like not knowing how you arrive at them. … So we have to fight back. We have to say to them, okay, you’re worried …. What you don’t like are sealed black boxes. okay, let’s open them. Once we see inside, … we’ll learn’.[1] Reflecting on the inside of a sealed black box in Kazuo Ishiguro’s (2021) Klara and the Sun, London. Faber.

The famed questions about the nature and distinctness of human consciousness in philosophy and neuropsychology keep on returning as the Turing test and its refinements becomes ever more and more debated – often posed differently around what it is to think or feel, what precisely is that that thing which claims to think and feel and perhaps what those activities mean to it and to us who interact or witness the being thus engaged. In a sense, we don’t need to evoke debates for and against black-box functionalism (the source I believe of the many black boxes in the novel if not their consistent meaning) in the history of philosophy. After all, wasn’t reading a novel precisely always such an exercise in discrimination of the values which make a character ‘human’, whether it be in evaluating between Isabel Archer or a Gilbert Osmond or the more obvious tricks in fantasy or science-fiction novels such as H.G. Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau?

Not much deeper than that discrimination between characters on the basis of their values are necessary but precariously based judgements, not necessarily rational, about what the range of acceptable thoughts and feelings might allowed to be for a ‘human being’ as opposed to another entity. Beyond a certain threshold the humanity of the thing that thinks and feels is questioned and conclusions drawn: is this the thought and emotion of something inhuman or something either different or more liminal: an animal, a supernatural being, a space alien or a machine or almost one or more of these!

Personally, I have no doubt that Ishiguro tackles the key metaphysical questions from the philosophies both of mind and of personhood, and that I have missed some very intelligent reflections of those debates. For instance the character Mr Capaldi’s (the AI scientist from this novel) insistence that belief in individual identity is a ‘sentimental’ and regressive fiction is balanced (or it just illustrated) by Josie’s father’s belief, spoken eight pages afterwards, that the ‘human heart’ spoken of ‘in the poetic sense’ may be that; ‘(s)omething that makes us ‘special and individual’.[2] The Father, as Klara names him, asks Klara an impossible question about this, in response to the conviction, carefully implanted into her by Josie’s mother, that Klara can quite easily complete a journey wherein, according to Capaldi, she is ‘already well on her way to accessing quite comprehensively all of Josie’s impulses and desires’.[3] That question by the Father is: ‘Do you think there is such a thing?’, and therein asserts that no machine could ever to trained to imitate such qualities of personhood; ‘not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her’.

At this point Klara is flattered by Capaldi’s insistence that, though the ‘heart’ of the personhood of any one person might be ‘the hardest part of Josie to learn’, it is no less learnable than would be the geography of a complexly structured new house before it is adopted as one’s home.[4] The aim of ‘continuing Josie’ is indeed a key one for those who believe, like Capaldi, that personhood is not a unique quality and that there is: ‘Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue’.[5] According to Capaldi, Klara continuing as Josie after Josie ‘passes away’ (a euphemism Klara learns from Josie’s mother) would not be a copy or version of Josie but, in the eyes of those who know her, ‘the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now’. This assertion of identity or sameness based on the outcomes from a black box that does not need to be Josie belongs to what is called ‘black box functionalism’ of the very deepest kind. Meanwhile, the Father asserts the purest kind of essentialism with regard to what the person actually is, something not reproducable. Josie’s dead sister, Sal, for instance has never been reproduced except in the imagination of Rick’s mother and the Mother’s neighbour, Miss Helen, who thinks Sal might have been replaced, after her acknowledged death, by something that, ‘looked like Sal’.[6] Once redundant to the family (Josie having recovered and moved on ‘as a person’ (as they say nowadays)) and turned into parts in a scrap Yard and without mobility, Klara’s resolution of this debate is not unlike that of more modern trends in the philosophy of personhood. She explains to the once manager of the store that sold her, there is something in Josie that, even had Klara ‘continued’ her, would be; ‘beyond my reach’.

Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. but I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. there was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. it was inside those who loved her.[7]  

A relational theory of identity would emphasise, as does Klara here, that, if there is something special about the person, it is not unique and internal to the person but multiple, shared and malleable over the various versions of self in each of them that, as it were, add up to one co-constructed product. It would, of course, create a very fluid concept of self. One reason I think that Ishiguro was precisely working in this ball park is his play with the term ‘versions’ in relation to the emotions and cognitions of the selves that feel and think them of his novel.

An Artificial Friend’s (AF) role is to be emotionally intelligent on behalf of her owner yet Klara has to learn how to think about feeling through observation and imitation alone. In the shop window at her home store she is well placed for this delicate task of construction of phenomena of which, by the very nature of things, she has no previous experience or knowledge of the basic character sets of emotional scenarios. It is therefore a matter of reflections and patterns in shadows, much as literary creation itself is. For instance she tries to piece out the meaning of human anger by trying to ‘find the beginnings of such a feeling in my mind.,’ and yet ends up in ‘laughing at her own thoughts’. she continues, now in pursuit of emotions of love, loss and the attachment proven by reunion:

Still, there were other things we saw from the window – other kinds of emotions I didn’t at first understand – of which I did eventually kind some versions in myself, even if they were perhaps like the shadows made across the floor by the ceiling lamps after the grid went down(my italics).[8]

This reads to me like a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, wherein human beings face up to the fact that they can only know the real Sun, a domain of Pure Forms of thought, through shadows cast inside their cave.  As she learns about the ambiguity and changeability of human emotion and thought, and their absolute acceptance of this state of letting go, she begins to see not one character in persons but versions of that character. Thus her description of Rick, for instance:

Although the version of Rick who’d opened the door and faced me on the platform had been much like the one who’d ignored me throughout his visits, it was interesting to see he’d now become much closer to the person I’d talked to at the interaction meeting after the other children had gone outside. In fact it was almost as if this version of Rick was meeting me for the first time since that afternoon and continuing the conversation we’d then started (my italics).

This interplay of ‘versions’ of selves which appear, disappear and then continue as if they had never gone away, is played out you’ll notice by the decision Klara almost makes to be a version of Josie that might be actually identical to Josie. Ishiguro embeds Klara’s learning in her slowly changing relationship to the Sun. She starts the novel and progresses through most of it aware of the Sun as a personified character who can be both beneficent and angry. Directly relating to the Sun is impossible, instead Klara knows him by the patterns ‘he’ (always he) casts of light and shade. Confined for a period to the dark rear of the shop and hence ‘out of the Sun’s patterns all morning’, her second and belated confrontation with Josie is simultaneously a return of the Sun’s friendly space and nutrition: ‘but now I stepped into two bright intersecting rectangles …’.[9]

We will return to the significance of patterns and shapes in the novel, but it is important to show that the idea of how different versions of selves can be experienced as one continuous personality is resolved, almost as in allegory, through the growth into maturity of Klara’s relationship to the Sun. The ‘Sun’s palace’ is masked in the novel as ‘a dark box-like shape at the end of the furthest field’ visible from Rosie’s bedroom’s rear-window.[10] When she visits that ‘palace’ for a second, and final time, in order to request the Sun to restore Josie to substantive life, she finds that what she had thought to be the Sun’s personal ‘presence in the low corner so dazzling’ is in fact a visual illusion created by ‘something reflective … left there by chance’, glass intended to refurbish the barn.[11]

I stared at the glass sheets. The Sun’s reflection, though still an intense orange, was no longer blinding and as I studied more carefully the Sun’s face framed within the outermost rectangle, I began to appreciate that I wasn’t looking at a single picture; that in fact there existed a different version of the Sun’s face on each of the glass surfaces, and what I might at first have taken for a unified image was in fact seven separate ones superimposed one over the other as my gaze penetrated from the first sheet through to the last. …. …, whatever the nature of the images on each glass sheet, as I looked at them collectively, the effect was of a single face, but with a variety of outlines and emotions.

Almost Spenserian in its allegory, this picture of unity in multiplicity is a theory of identity like that of the novel’s resolution, and as suffused with Platonism as the Elizabethan poet’s conception of the ‘mutabilitie’ of worldly things. I think I have said enough then about this. However. it is impossible not to raise the most troubling element of this novel flowing from these ideas before leaving the novel again to its readers. If the world is a set of patterns (the’ Sun’s patterns’) in which deep meanings are found, we have to find out with some urgency how to read such patterns. This explains why for Klara the world can only be understood more as a whole when our vision is ‘partitioned’. This word chimes through the novel to show the grids, regular and irregular, through which Klara sees the world and which for readers is constantly perplexing. Is the ‘partitioning’ caused by geophysical features, like the ditches confronted in the fields on the way to the Sun’s palace, or by obstructions to vision caused by objects or an illusion created by the play of light and the shadow of objects that stand in front of the light source.

I found myself irritated at first by the constant reappearance of partitioned vision in the novel but now feel that re-reading those passages wherein it occurs will pay off if the critical reader is also a curious and open, rather than closed, one. Partitions are a means of analysing what we see by placing them in cognitive categories and I sense some of this is a means of communicating Klara’s mode of Artificial Intelligence (AI); the way she thinks (and sometimes the way she feels about the world). However, it is also a way in which what is considered normative in the visual world can be queered and the actual alienation involved in being ‘normal’ exposed.

Beyond saying that I won’t analyse the passage I chose to illustrate that, it is worth noting and re-reading as itself a kind of picture of what we mean by analysis if we refuse to jump to conclusions about what we see. It is, as I see it now, writing of the VERY HIGHEST ORDER. The passage is a description of how the children come together at the ‘interaction meeting’ held by Josie. It shows the way their normal world is actually partitioned by conflict less absurd than the supposed consensus they see in it and the threat consensus presents to those who are different. The final piece I quote after my omission is a good example of that latter, that becomes deeply relevant when you think what open plan spaces with ‘modular sofas’ actually mean about modernity.

There were young people everywhere and their bags, jackets, oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces. what was more, the room’s space had become divided into twenty-four boxes – arranged in two tiers – all the way to the rear wall. Because of this partitioning, it was hard to gain an overall view of what was before me, but I gradually made sense of things.  … Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single a single box. …(my italics) [12]

Read more of the passage. It is brilliant. This is a greater novel than I noticed on first reading.

All the best

Steve

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[1] Ishiguro (2021: 297)

[2] ibid: 218

[3] ibid: 210

[4] ibid: 219

[5] ibid: 210

[6] ibid: 149

[7] Ibid: 306

[8] ibid: 18f.

[9] ibid: 41

[10] ibid: 53 (the ‘Sun’s palace’ is named on p. 54)

[11] Ibid: 276f.

[12] ibid: 70