Seite 4: Is There a "Strong" Claim for Fiction?

I think it has been adequately demonstrated that fiction is some kind of AL. The question is what kind, or, specifically, what ontological status we should assign it. Within the field of AL itself there is no unanimous opinion about the status of its creations, but we can distinguish three major positions: the "weak" claim, the "strong" claim, and what I am calling the "extra strong" claim.

"Weak" AL: AL simulations are just that, simulations. They can help us "illuminate and understand more clearly the life that exists on earth and possibly elsewhere" (Levy, p. 5), but they are by no means "alive" in the sense that carbon-based biological life is alive.

"Strong" AL: Many AL programs are not just simulations of life but examples of life. Digital creations can reproduce, learn, adapt, behave autonomously, develop social structures, and evolve. To say that only carbon-based biology possess "life" amounts to a kind of parochialism, or, if you will, "carbocentrism."

"Extra strong" AL: Silicon-based life represents the next evolutionary leap and may likely surpass or even replace us.

Where fiction is concerned, we can happily exclude the "extra-strong" claim: fictional characters remain safely ensconced in their respective texts and in the participating imagination of readers, and are not about to step out and edge us off our niche in the biosphere.

But what about the "strong claim"? Are fictional characters in some real sense "alive"? If they aren't, what is the basis for the strong claim in AL? If they are, what would this imply for the way we determine what is "real"? Unless I am missing something important, this is the dilemma fiction presents to advocates of the strong claim.

Dawkins and Dennett clearly consider memes to be genuinely "alive" on some level, and as shown above, fictional memes - including, notably, animate characters with distinct personalities - exhibit most of the lifelike qualities of AL entities, arguably many more. Furthermore, the human mind is a far more complex information processor than any computer yet devised. If strong claim advocates denied that fictional characters were actually alive, they would be arbitrarily privileging the computer over the computationally superior human brain, and exhibiting the same kind of parochialism associated with the carbocentric position. In short, one of the chief didactic purposes of the strong claim is to show us how arbitrary and prejudiced have been our criteria for what constitutes "life." Fair enough, but do strong claimers mean business, or do they just happen, equally arbitrarily, to be fond of computers?

My guess is that strong claim advocates would be willing to grant fictional characters a degree of biological status. In essence, this is the whole idea behind memes; to bring immaterial thought into the realm of physical processes and to settle the mind-body problem once and for all in favor of body (banishing vitalism, mysticism, obscurantism, and what have you). One problem, though, is that physical processes are never "wrong" while thoughts often are - hence the scientific enterprise, which directs human thinking along correct, as opposed to incorrect, paths, typically by testing ideas against obdurate physical reality.

And this is the dilemma that comes with accepting the strong claim for fiction. We could grant fictional characters the status of life, but, as Ra smussen postulates about computer generated life, if fictional characters are alive, their reality is just as "real" as our own: the two realities "have the same ontological status" (1992, p. 769). While this may seem plausible (though certainly not uncontroversial) in a virtual world generated by computer software, we hesitate to apply it to the world of imagination. This is because we have generally found it (to put it mildly) useful to distinguish between phantasm and fact.

Yet once we accept imagined entities (e.g. fictional characters) as living beings, we are opening a Pandora's box of other, ever more bizarre claims to the status of life, and hence to the status of reality: dreams, hallucinations, etc. How will scientists debunk UFO "experiences," when the "truth" status of these experiences vies with that of the debunking? As we are saturated more and more in images, signals, symbols, simulations and simulacra, it seems to me more important than ever that we try to keep our heads screwed on straight about what is "real" and what is "not." This is not the best time for scientists (of all people) to start spacing out on us, yet the strong claim suggests exactly such an ontological and epistemological collapse.

At any rate, we seem to reach a point in this discussion where something has to give. To stick with the strong claim and exclude fictional characters is arbitrary and capricious. Yet to accept the strong claim for fictional characters seems, somewhere down the road, to introduce a weird, frankly animistic element into the epistemology of science. In short, in rejecting vitalism we ultimately have to accept animism. Take your pick: do you want spirit inhabiting body, or body inhabiting spirit?

An alternative, perhaps somewhat dispiriting, is to retreat to the "weak" claim and try to define "life" in a more satisfactory way. Lovers of literature, after all, manage to live quite happily entertaining no more than modestly "weak" claims about the ontological status of fictional characters. Perhaps fiction lovers could form support groups for recovering strong claim advocates! In the meantime, the "carbocentric" position still appears to stand. Perhaps the strong claim will have to wait until a self-replicating mechanism can be generated out of solid, physical "stuff."

But then, of course, we will have other things to worry about, namely the replacement of human (and possibly all carbon-based) life with a silicon-based reproducing mechanism. There is not room enough here to address the much more worrisome questions that come with the "extra-strong" claim in AL. The big question is obviously, Why are we willfully engineering our potential evolutionary extinction? The short answer is that there seems to be a logical inevitability here, a "slippery slope." The strong claim introduces a great deal of confusion about what is alive and what is real and how we could possibly know the difference. The "extra-strong" claim takes this one step further and finds there is no basis, other than computational excellence and some general evolutionary imperative, for preferring one kind of "life" over another.

Thus the ontological and epistemological breakdown signalled by the "strong" claim of AL realizes itself as an ethical breakdown in the "extra strong" claim. We find that there is no basis for a "human-centered" ethic when the only available principles are mechanism and Evolution (with a capital "E"). And if we can't locate a human-friendly ethic in the logic of AL, we had better start looking somewhere else.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this article were developed in a series for the Kinjo Gakuin University *Ronshu* and presented at the Thirteenth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna, April 1996. I would like to thank my neighbor Irene Bensinger and my father Donald Taylor for help and encouragement.

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