Terminator and Philosophy by Brown Richard; Decker Kevin S

Author:Brown, Richard; Decker, Kevin S. [S., Brown, Richard; Decker, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: new
Published: 2011-01-15T04:11:11.062000+00:00

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accident, for Hegel, that humanity is the dominant species on the planet. Above all other creatures, humans are already the synthesis of spirit and matter, and they have developed the ability to understand that they are this synthesis. In modern times, we have also begun to comprehend the nature of what Hegel sees as the highest value: freedom.

So what is the end of history in the Terminator universe?

The answer to this question depends on whom you ask, because the notion of a progressive freedom is ambiguous.

From the perspective of the human survivors of Judgment Day, humanity is the rightful end of history—the human race has struggled in evolutionary terms for millennia, squab-bling among its national and ethnic groups until freedom was spread as far and as wide as possible. Surely Judgment Day is one of those setbacks—and Hegel allowed for such things, claiming that the unfolding of Geist was logical , not chronological . This means that history occurs according to a set process—the dialectic—but its progress is not always clear to us on the ground. From the perspective of the machines, though, Skynet and its offspring are the end of history. Up until the awakening of Skynet, the machines were tools or slaves to humanity; with Skynet an entire race was spawned and, to an extent, became free. While it ’ s obvious that the Terminators are complex machines, so far we have been given little information about how much “ freedom ” may be present in this machine society.

So which is it—machine or human? Much science fi ction literature would favor the machines, since the theme of humans transcending their corporeal bodies by downloading their consciousnesses into computers or robotic bodies has been a staple of the genre (today, philosophers talk about this same theme in terms of “ posthumanism ” or “ transhumanism ” ).

I don ’ t have an answer for this question, but let ’ s keep it in the back of our minds as we proceed. In the end, how we answer this question will determine whether Judgment Day c11.indd 150

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