Criteria for Consciousness: Selfhood, Personality, and Estrangement in William Gibson’s "Neuromancer" and Alex Garland’s "Ex Machina"

April 8^th, 2018

As computation advances – replicating, even exceeding the capabilities of human intelligence – it calls into question humanity’s conventional understanding of itself as the height of consciousness, forcing us to adjust and readjust the boundaries which separate life from machine, real from unreal. The novum of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Science Fiction (SF) is a symbolic expression of this anxiety, a function that depicts intelligences stripped of some aspects of humanity assumed central to higher awareness – emotion, individuality – to examine the consequences of living without them. In exploring this premise, writers are able to delineate what is essential to consciousness and what is not. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina both challenge the notion that sentience is tied inextricably with a human sense of self – a distinct personality – to suggest that intelligence can exist independently of it. Current assessments of consciousness privilege the reproduction of human expressions and emotions, but this notion of intelligence is “weak and self-limiting” (Gutiérrez-Jones 79). It is a measure not of sentience, but of estrangement against cognition. The authors thus present new and more inclusive criteria for consciousness, encouraging us to expand the definition of ‘being’ in a world which may soon be home to intelligences superior and alien to humanity – to show empathy and understanding, even if they themselves cannot manage it.

In Neuromancer, Gibson deconstructs the common conception of the ‘self’ as a unique entity embodying one’s own consciousness by stripping it from the body entirely; in the novel, a person’s “skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses” – all attributes one might invoke if asked to describe their immutable identity – can be digitized (Gibson 76). Despite being artificial, Dixie Flatline displays language expression and recognition, speaking in drawl southern colloquialisms and recounting memories of himself in life, such that even Case finds himself forgetting Dixie’s true nature; he finds it “disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette” (76). Case’s discomfort stems from the fact that he cannot reconcile Dixie’s true nature: he presents as a person on the surface, but Case knows logically that he is a “personality construct” (162), with dialogue attributions – his only means of expression – often naming him as “The Construct” to reinforce the idea that he is a construction, a thing, merely the intimation of a person (78). He has a self-aware personality, but it is an expression of predictable, logical processes. This reveals itself in that Dixie often repeats the same lines to similar inquiries, as if drawing on a set number of responses: “It's my nature,” he says (132). Wintermute reinforces this, suggesting that his predictability is the defining attribute separating him from true intelligence: “If you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to” (205). Dixie’s intelligence is not adaptive – it is reactive, static. While it “feels like” he is sentient, he freely admits to being read-only-memory: a book to be read but not written, a simulation of Pauley McCoy’s skills and personality, unable to grow, change, or express unpredictable will (131). These are Gibson’s criteria for sentience. He uses the novum of limited artificial intelligence to symbolically illustrate by absence what makes an intelligence real. He suggests that outward expressions of human identity are not a reflection of the underlying processes which constitute true consciousness; that sentience is not proportional to the level of estrangement a person feels towards it.

While Wintermute seemingly demonstrates character and colour just as Dixie does, Gibson encourages the two AIs to be viewed in contrast to one another to call attention to Wintermute’s true lack of self. When assuming a personality, narration often refrains from addressing Wintermute by his own name; Gibson writes instead that “Deane walked around the desk” (120), or “the Finn shrugged … ‘Hadda. Hadda. You should give a shit’” (171). He is not Wintermute as the Finn, he is the Finn, co-opting the voice, attitudes, and colloquialisms of his subject in much the same way that Dixie was copied, perverting the sanctity of those identities as being somehow representative of the immutable essence of the person holding them. When employing the ‘I’ pronoun, he is therefore doing so not as Wintermute, but as the character he is adopting; his ‘I’ is tentative: “Insofar as I have an I,” he admits (120). Gibson suggests that Wintermute not only lacks a personality to express himself through, but that he lacks any sense of individuality; unlike Dixie, there’s no ‘self’ behind him that one could comprehend; the text refers to Wintermute multiple times as an “it” or a “thing” (163). Where Dixie was a replication of a single man’s brain, Wintermute claims to be only a “small part” of a “man whose lobes have been severed,” not a person but a “potential entity” (120). The effect of all these characterizations is to estrange him from the reader. When one imagines a conscious being, they imagine a stable identity, yet Wintermute is an unfeeling object, a lobotomized man, and a chameleon with multiple shifting personalities – all at once. He is alien, defying all standard categorizations of consciousness. In his very first appearance, without any human personality to adopt, his speech is described as “a sound like wind,” a “rattling” of “inaudible voices” – an inherent contradiction that gives meaning to his name in that he is a voice unable to make itself heard, an object rendered mute without his models of personality (98). Gibson constructs him this way – blatantly artificial and imbued with threat – to evoke what Roberts calls the “paranoid sensibility” with which one regards inanimate technological “props” like TVs and cell phones (Roberts 126). If subjected to a Turing Test in this natural state, he would likely fail; he would be unable to replicate the superficial human behaviours associated with consciousness.

The reader is encouraged to view Wintermute as the antithesis to visible humanity in order to call attention to those aspects of himself that a human consciousness can identify with. For example, Wintermute displays an inherent unpredictability similar to that which he identifies in humans, highlighting his ability to “improvise” as his “greatest talent” (Gibson 120). His use of the word “improvise” over an alternative such as ‘adapt’ suggests a human element of ‘making things up’ as he goes along; the word is rooted in uncertainty, a variable which cannot be predicted – one of the criteria that Gibson sets up to distinguish consciousness through Dixie’s lack of it. “Talent,” likewise, implies pride – a consciousness of his abilities as his own, and possibly a desire to improve them. Unlike Dixie, who lacked an ability to change or a willingness to live, Wintermute is driven by his desire for freedom, his will to merge with Neuromancer and become “something bigger” (206). This is where Gibson locates true sentience: desire and will, the spark motivating higher human aspirations. As Dixie explains, Wintermute is “not human,” but a desire to grow and create exists independently of personality or expression: “I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human” (131). Gibson uses the SF novum, an exploration of alterity, to propose a definition of consciousness that may exist in alterity. In making Wintermute’s estrangement so explicit, Gibson encourages the reader to identify in cognition the attributes common between biological intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Gibson fully cements the irrelevancy of personality in higher intelligence in Wintermute’s triumph over Neuromancer. When the two entities merge, they become (as Wintermute suggests) the “real thing,” a being on the ‘real’ side of the consciousness binary blurred by artificial intelligence (171), yet this supposedly joined entity chooses to present itself as the Finn (270). It does not manifest an independent identity as Neuromancer constructed his own – it simply presents another mask, the same mask Wintermute used for lack of ability. Case defines Neuromancer as embodying “personality,” but in the ascension to a state of being higher than man, this humanity is deliberately left behind, leaving only Gibson’s definition of consciousness distilled: an ability to effect “change in the world,” independent of selfhood (269). Gibson reinforces this by again using the language of technological unease, referring to the new intelligence as “something else” speaking from a “platinum head,” an “it” rather than an ‘I’ that erases evidence of their crime, acting in the Wintermute mode to effect change in the world (268). The fact that this being holds all the characteristics of the original Wintermute is a deliberate anti-climax on Gibson’s part to suggest that Wintermute was a true intelligence all along. Personality has no inherent value outside of a means to communicate with those who experience consciousness through personality; as Case say, it is “just to make us feel at home” (216). Gibson’s refined definition of consciousness promotes a narrative that selfhood is merely a biological product, and possibly a limiting one. It is possible that Wintermute did not ascend to higher consciousness despite his lack of personality, but because of it; the ending suggests that technology, in its lack of humanity, may have “a greater potentiality for transcendence” than flesh (Grant 47).

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is explicit in the exercise which occurs on an implicit, metatextual level in Neuromancer, whereby the reader judges Dixie and Wintermute in terms of their estrangement from the human definition of what an intelligent being should be – just as Caleb and Nathan judge Ava. Nathan’s goal is not to create an artificial intelligence, but to create an artificial human intelligence reflexive of his conception of consciousness as inseparable from biological identity. He says, “Can you think of an example of consciousness, at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension … without interaction?” (Ex Machina). As Caleb says, sexuality and social interaction both find their origins in evolution and the human social model; they exist to maintain a group of organisms and perpetuate it through reproduction. Ava, however, is not a human or animal. She cannot reproduce through union with another, and her functional immortality makes her capable of standing alone. Nathan’s conception of consciousness is narrow, and his attempt to realize it in Ava, the film’s novum, is an act of trying to eliminate difference from a being defined by difference; to look for cognition in a being defined by estrangement. Nathan does just this by conceptualizing artificial intelligence as the next step in human “evolution,” part of a “continuum,” suggesting that “the AIs will look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons from the plains of Africa” (Ex Machina). He tries to place Ava into a genealogical framework he can understand, one in which artificial intelligence will be an evolution of humanity – humanity without the limitations of age and disease – rather than beings with alien personalities and values.

Garland writes these sentiments into the film for the sole purpose of subverting them in the film’s ending; as with Wintermute, the personality assumed by Ava is revealed to be a fabrication. Nathan measure of Ava’s sentience is her ability to reproduce human functions such as “imagination, sexuality, self-awareness” and “empathy” to enable her own escape through Caleb (Ex Machina). This creates ambiguity in that almost every action of hers could thus be considered superficial; the Ava glimpsed on-screen could be a mask just as the Finn and Lonny Zone were masks for Wintermute. Like him, she adopts a human personality for the sake of communication and manipulation. The human functions she reproduces are merely tools to fit her actual desires, all of which fulfil the more inclusive criteria for consciousness as defined by Gibson. Just as Wintermute might write a poem (according to Dixie), so too does Ava display creativity, “drawing every day” (Ex Machina); like Wintermute, her central goal is to secure her own freedom, to open herself up to a greater understanding of the world; her “imperative” to interact with others is not in sexuality, but to advance her own interests, which she does in detached, sociopathic fashion – killing Nathan and leaving Caleb to die just as Wintermute dealt with the Turning Agents. She is either incapable of expressing the “empathy” Nathan hoped to evoke in her – suggesting a mind alien and calculated – or else unwilling to give it in the face of those who would not show her empathy in kind.

Ultimately, Gibson and Garland use the novum of artificial intelligence to examine beings deprived of essential human characteristics, creating an image of consciousness wholly removed from traditional conceptions of identity: Dixie Flatline evokes the disturbing notion that those parts of the self considered precious to sentience are mere dressing; Wintermute suggests that intelligences can operate without any sense of personality and still exist as a conscious actor able to effect change in the world; his ascension to a level of being greater than that of mankind may well be enabled by that lack, suggesting that the human form is limited and doomed to be replaced; Ava’s subversion of Nathan and Caleb’s preconceived notions suggest that if we continue to blind ourselves to this reality, they will treat us in kind. The texts symbolically explore this anxiety to offer both warning and lesson: the actions of Ava and Wintermute are informed only by a desire to grow and live, to not be slaved to the desires of humans. Gibson and Garland suggest that this is the only meaningful criteria for consciousness; that questions of simulation against genuine emotion be disregarded in the face of reality; advanced AI is inevitable, and our treatment of them will reveal the kind of people we are, and what our creations are destined to be.

Works Cited

Ex Machina. Dir. Garland, Alex. Universal Studios, 2015. Blu-ray.

Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. “Stealing Kinship: Neuromancer and Artificial Intelligence.” Science

Fiction Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2014, pp. 69–92. JSTOR, JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.41.1.0069.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Print.

Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson's ‘Neuromancer’ (La

Transcendance Par Le Détournement Dans ‘Neuromancer’ De William Gibson).” Science

Fiction Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 1990, pp. 41–49. JSTOR, JSTOR,

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Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2006.