How would our society be different if all Americans had just a little bit of Thomas Aquinas? Many of our age's most pressing questions would be answered sagely and succinctly—yet sufficiently—if Americans had the same familiarity with the Prima Pars of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae as they do the lyrics to Journey's “Don't Stop Believing” or the storyline of the original Star Wars trilogy. Yet, I'd wager, most Americans would be hard-pressed to identify who Thomas Aquinas is, let alone his most important works or ideas. This is why The Human Person: A Beginner's Thomistic Psychology, by University of St. Thomas, Houston professor Steven J. Jensen is such an invaluable text. In less than three-hundred pages Jensen effectively and accessibly introduces the most foundational concepts of Thomistic philosophical thought. In keeping with the claim that Aquinas can answer many controversial contemporary debates, this article will answer three such questions, all offered through the prism of popular American films.
Blade Runner 2049, a popular remake of the original 1982 film Blade Runner, takes place in an imagined 2049, where robot bioengineered people called replicants serve as the slaves of humans. The remains of a female replicant who died during a caesarean section is discovered by a replicant police officer, seeming to suggest that the robots are capable of sexually reproducing. Over the course of the film, the viewer is told that these replicants can feel, think, and dream just like humans. Perhaps the most salient questions raised by the sci-fi movie is then “can computers ever acquire all the traits that would make them indistinguishable from mankind?” Aquinas gives a thorough, well-reasoned answer.
We must first understand what he describes as the essential difference between transient and immanent actions. The former are actions defined by an agent (or subject) giving rise to some change in a patient (or object). Examples of this include most things we visibly witness in the material world: a person drawing a picture, fire making a pan hot, or a cat begetting cats. The latter, alternatively, are actions without a patient acted upon but that retain a certain end—the actions begin and end with the agent. Examples of this include thinking, imagining, remembering, and certain parts of the actions of seeing or hearing.
A computer can obviously do plenty of transient actions. For example, it can play chess by following mathematical computations, and then offer outputs. These transient actions can be very complex and very rapid, which can given the impression that a computer might possess the same qualities as a human person. But a computer cannot perform immanent actions. It isn't aware that it's playing chess. Nor can an arrangement of transient activities, no matter how many or how diverse, create an immanent activity like memory. As Jensen explains, a collection of transient activities only “directs the activities of the parts.” The “memory” that machines have is more akin to the memory of a notebook, rather than that of a person. The ink on the paper has no “memory” as such, but lies in the mind of the person who wrote it, or those persons who later read it. Likewise a machine only has “memory,” inasmuch as it derives from the person who created the machine, or later persons who understand how it works. Put simply, machines, no matter how complex, will never transcend their material, transitive nature.
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