Most of us dream. Sometimes a dream seems so detailed, so “real” that in waking, we can’t determine happenings from illusions. Doesn’t the dream-world feel real, and even excite all the emotions of life from fear to excitement? Descartes’s journey begins with a dream, and his next thought experiment in the dark Ulm winter was to ask: How do I know that I’m real, that I am the dreamer and not the dreamed? Descartes answers the question with his now famous line: Cogito ergo sum, or, I think, therefore I am. To doubt requires a doubter; for Descartes, at the core of all things, there must be a thinking, questioning, doubting being. From this, he forms the first principle of his method, a system of discovering knowledge that we take for granted today: never accept anything for true on someone else’s word alone, avoid all prejudice, and believe nothing unless “presented to [the] mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.”9 Descartes reverses the maxim of the ancients. The point wasn’t to accept, but prove, moving “little and little” and “step by step,” from things of least complexity to things of greater complexity. We can put it in perspective if we think of Kepler’s soccer-ball universe; he assumed a grand design, enormous in complexity, and then tried to work backward, forcing nature to divulge her secrets. If you begin committed to an idea, you may bend the facts to fit them. Descartes assumed only that he could think, and proceeded from this first kernel outward. By a circuitous route, proving one thing after another, he arrived back at a belief in a Perfected Being—a God. But it also led him to conceive of human bodies in a brand new way.
“I have now explained [. . .] from the very arrangement of the parts, which may be observed by the eye alone,” concludes in Part V of L’Homme, that the body works via mechanics, “as does the motion of a clock” and “its counterweights and wheels.”10 He compared the body to hydraulics, too, that whirr and bubble like fountains in a courtyard. Each part of our organism connected to the whole and—as gears and cams—made up a great and wonderful machine. But there arose a problem. On the one hand, Descartes was far more willing than Newton to suppose a clockmaker God, a “Grandfather Clock” that wound up the universe and then walked away from it. Though he never in fact compares the universe as a whole to a man-made machine, for Descartes, the universe self-assembled, operating as “a self-fabricating automaton.”11 How different from Newton! The clockwork didn’t need winding. But did that leave room for the mind, which was “immaterial”? He solved the problem by thinking of the mind a bit like he thought of corpuscles, where the soul, like those invisible forces, acted upon the body without being part of the body.† The force which moved us was, to quote philosopher Gilbert Ryle, “a ghost in the machine.”12 All bodily activity was material and direct, mechanical, and even “greasy” (as Descartes himself admitted). The mind, however, was free from this arrangement, uncoupled from and untroubled by the body. The philosophy that rises from Descartes’s method borrows his name—Cartesian Dualism—but in fact diverges from his work considerably. Just as Newton’s insistence on a well-ordered world begged the question about the existence of God, the mechanical understanding of our bodies left a gaping hole of doubt about the human soul. His work had been to reconcile his scientific pursuits with theological views. The materialists that came after him felt no need to do so. What was man, they argued, but the perfect automaton?
Clockwork Boys
“You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need.”
—Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
In April 2015, Toshiba unveiled ChihiraAico, a robot built to resemble a young Japanese woman.13 She talks, sings, gestures, and even cries using a responsive artificial intelligence matrix that reportedly “disconcerts” those who interact with her. A year later, at the March 2016 South by Southwest exposition, Hanson Robotics introduced their own “female” humanoid, Sophia, possessed of sixty-two facial expressions, including deep sadness. To make the robots more lifelike, some designers use casts of real-life models, right down to the teeth. These unusual creations strike visitors with the same unsteady feelings that followed my encounter with the cuckoo clock so many years ago. Why do we make such machines? And why give them emotive expressions that they cannot possibly feel as we do? Miraikan—Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation—showcased an exhibit titled “Android: What Is Human?” Exhibit designer Hiroshi Ishiguro argues that these are the wrong questions. In Japanese culture, says Ishiguro, “Everything has a soul. We don’t distinguish between humans and others.” The desk, the chair, the microphone into which he speaks—and the complex automatons he creates all potentially have “souls.”14 And because of this, he claims, they can accept this “new type of creature” easily. Here, the difference breaks down between the man and the machine.15 Materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries likewise insisted that mind and soul were dependent entirely upon the “physical properties of matter.” If man is a thinking being, and machinery is responsible for thought, you don’t need a dirigible to get from “humans may be machines” to “machines may be human.”
One of the first to make that jump was a man named Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Taking Descartes’s L’Homme as a point of departure, his book L’Homme-machine (or man-machine) broke new ground in 1748.16 Thomas Willis came along shortly after with ideas about brains and nerves, a leap, says Allison Muri in Enlightenment Cyborg, from strict clockwork to “feedback engine.”17 It was also Willis who coined the term “cybernetic,” and in fact, he’s the first to suggest that the mind was a communications hub. In other words, the human is a “sensible machine,” communicating complex thoughts through tissues and nerve endings, the cogs and wheels of the human body.18 By the mid–eighteenth century, at least, humans were being described as tidy, well-ordered machines. We could look into the complexity of gearwork (said philosophers and even physicians) as into the intricate web of our being; here were the origins of thought and of purpose. Here, and not in the mythologized, incorporeal, ungraspable soul. So the question for those who followed Descartes was not “Do machines have souls?” but rather “Does man have one?” Materialist thinker Baron d’Holbach flatly denied any soul whatever; his System of Nature (1770) begins by asserting that man would be far happier to abandon the idea altogether and embrace his mechanical nature.19 And yet, as apologist George Berkeley writes, if man is “but a piece of Clockwork of Machine: and that Thought or Reason are the same thing as the Impulse of one Ball against another,” then he cannot be held accountable.20 He becomes not the wondrous machine but, as Judith Drake had suggested, a mere machine, “a sort of Clock-Work, that act only by the Force of nice unseen Springs, without Sensation, and cry out without feeling Pain, eat without Hunger, drink without Thirst, fawn upon their Keepers without seeing ’em.”21 In the wake of Descartes’s dreams, we don’t get a unity of science, but instead the earliest beginnings of two very different stories: in one, the valorization of human machinery, like Hugo’s wistful assertion in Selznick’s novel that all machines have precise parts, working precisely—that hopeful assumption that “if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason.”22 The Invention of Hugo Cabret principally concerns a writing machine, an automaton that accomplishes by those very “nice, unseen springs” the task of careful, exact, written script—and the key to the novel as a whole. Parts for a purpose, intelligent design at its finest. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would witness the building of clockwork bodies by the score, ordering the internal and setting it to rights within the grand system of an automaton universe. But there is a second story, and it stretches a shadow over the first, like long fingers of smoke that besmirch the gears. Its representative and herald stands as evidence of something far more unsettling—and she, like Mama Engine, is also a mother.
It began with Nicholas Culpeper and his consideration of bodies, heavenly and earthly, in medicine. In 1646, his contemporary Athanasius Kircher published a similarly co
smic work, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. Compared to Leonardo da Vinci because of his vast publications and an incredible understanding of everything from geology to astronomy and theology, Kircher worked to provide evidence of the cosmic relations between the human and the divine. His diagram matches complexity with artistic unity, a kind of sublime chart that lends credence to Culpeper’s cosmic botany [Fig. 2]. That both men had it wrong isn’t entirely the point. It’s that they may have been as right, or at least as right as anyone else at the time. Who would contradict? Medical knowledge had not drastically improved in 1,400 years. Until as late as 1543 and the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s Fabric of the Human Body, medical doctors relied almost entirely on the anatomical work of Galen, though published around 100 C.E. Anatomy training didn’t really amount to much in the centuries before Vesalius; a professor (who had probably never performed a dissection) would stand at a raised chair and comment on the work of Galen, turning the pages and describing organs while his assistants would actually take apart the cadaver in front of a theater of students. Galen himself had never dissected a human either. This had not been allowed in his day and remained taboo for centuries after—and humoral theory, that we are comprised of four different humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm), held sway well into the nineteenth century. The most common reason for using a surgeon’s knife on a living body was for bloodletting, a practice supposed to cure everything from infection to mental distress. Called “barber surgeons” because they might just as likely shave your beard or cut your hair as operate, these men (and all were men) understood nothing of germs or cleanliness, still less of the body’s careful organization. Physicians fared somewhat better, in theory, though recipes for medicines sound like alchemical preparations; rabbit dung and rosemary for an aching tooth, roasted raven’s heart to cure “fits.”
The preparations for Culpeper’s treatise sound benign by comparison, mostly plants to fortify the body, tissues, and blood. In fact, though all of Culpeper’s contemporaries understood the power of blood as a life force, it would take William Harvey, through a long course of dissection on dogs, to prove that it circulated through the body. Until 1628, physicians assumed the body made all the blood each day, and different sorts of blood for veins vs. the arteries. You can imagine how many patients bled to death from their various treatments when doctors so overestimated our ability to re-create those precious red and white cells. When Charles II suffered a stroke in 1685, doctors drained him of at least two cups just to start, then forced him to undergo an enema and a purgative, all means of getting the ill humors out of the body. Failing that, they rubbed him with pigeon dung and powdered pearls, and applied hot irons to his feet. As a last resort, they even practiced a form of corpse medicine (dead bodies were consumed in powders for centuries in multiple cultures)—extract of a human skull.23 It did not work, though even Robert Boyle, member of the Royal Society, father of modern chemistry, and pioneer of the scientific method was a keen supporter of corpse medicine. For over two centuries in early modern Europe, says Renaissance historian Richard Sugg, “the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate all participated in cannibalism on a more or less routine basis.”24 The Age of Enlightenment knocked on the door of the nineteenth century before surgery was anything but a death sentence. We might be machines, but there could be no assurance that the gears could be put right once they had broken down.
Novelist Fanny Burney recounts her mastectomy in 1811: “Yet—when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves [. . .] I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision.” Awake, she hears, as well as feels, the grating of the blade, and:
When the wound was made, and the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp and forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound—but when again I felt the instrument—describing a curve—cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose and tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left—then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.25
S. M. Peters’s novel opens with a surgery too. “Bailey was not surprised when the doctor’s first incision drew up something darker than blood,” explains the narrator. “The patient writhed and struggled in the bed, fighting a pain that distorted his features into something less than human.”26 “Clacks” infects this steampunk dystopia, not so different from cancer. Reliable forms of anesthetic weren’t available until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and even then, they were not always safe or precise. Worse, germ theory didn’t catch on for decades after discovery; Joseph Lister had to defend his ideas about antiseptics against vicious critics and skeptics well into the 1870s (something I’ll return to in chapter 8). The surgery of mid-Victorian England, in other words, didn’t look very different from those at its start, but as terrible as anesthetic-free mastectomy sounds to modern ears, Burney survived. The brutal bludgeoning of the knife blade, the wretched sawing motion, the unfathomable pain are nonetheless enlightened medicine—far better than the mad guesswork of body star maps or strange potions of supposed healers, because while ingesting corpses may not save you, studying one could.
Vesalius ushered in a new means of practicing and teaching anatomy. Under his tutelage, and through his enormously powerful anatomical atlas, generations of doctors finally learned what went on beneath the skin . . . but is it any wonder that this heaving, wriggling, discolored and disproportionate cluster of organs and meat remained so long a mystery? To understand the whole, we must investigate the constituent parts. Newton explained God to man; Descartes intended to explain man to man. The mechanical metaphors of L’Homme intended to render bodies plain and legible. Descartes himself built automatons—including one that he named for his lost daughter—but the true test of man-machines would come after his death, and from the hands of makers. What better way to understand the body than to build one?
A young boy sits at his writing desk. He wears a red velvet coat and lace cravat, his bright eyes moving back and forth under sleek black curls. His head turns, stiff, but graceful, and fingers dips a quill into a nearby inkpot. I’ve used a quill. Too much ink, not enough, the end is to sharp or too blunt, and it spatters. But he doesn’t spill a drop. Built by Swiss clockmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, The Writer debuted in 1774, two years before the American Revolution, some sixty years before the dawn of the Victorian age. The serious-faced “boy” arrived during a flurry of clockwork inventions as one of the finest automatons of his day. Today, the automaton resides at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire of Neuchâtel, Switzerland [Fig. 3]. But despite being more than 240 years old, his movements remain precise and exact—and a joy to watch. Jaquet-Droz could never have imagined the tricks of laser precision and computer modeling. Even so, and operating under far less favored conditions, the clockmaker miniaturized 6,000 working parts to fit inside the twenty-eight-inch-high automaton [Fig. 4]. All the automaton needs to function, from parts to power source, were neatly puzzle-fitted into his little body: a self-contained, self-moving machine. Cam technology made it possible; the teeth, crafted small and stacked vertically, transferred linear motion to lateral movement. Sliding cam-followers translated those same grooves—through the goose quill—into words. All this makes the Writer a mechanical marvel, but Jaquet-Droz’s greatest contribution wouldn’t be entirely understood for centuries. He inserted a wheel of letters and other characters that could be refitted and replaced. Move the letters, change the message; the Writer could be programmed.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret depends on the same remarkable ability: the plot revolves around a mysterious automaton and the preprogrammed message he transmits. But Jaquet-Droz’s second mechanical wonder, the harpsichord player, not only played her instrument, she also moved with gestures and looks that “expressed delicat
e feelings”—that is, with emotions.27 Adelheid Voskuhl, author of Androids in the Enlightenment, explains that by nodding, moving her head to the rhythm, and even sighing, the automaton communicated her humanity to the audience.28 Other inventors went further still. Jacques de Vaucanson, for instance, introduced a flute player that actually breathed into his instrument, mouthing the flute with flexible lips and tongue.29 Vaucanson planned to build a machine with a working circulation system too, but couldn’t get enough India rubber for the parts (he settled instead of building the “defecating Duck”).30 In all of these creations, we see a strange commitment not only to looking like a body, but functioning like one. The machines drew excited crowds; they certainly qualified as spectacle as much as science, but here we have science all the same. Our internal functions may no longer be a mystery—the lumps of soft tissues and muscles, pumps and signals working undercover and in utter darkness have at last been laid bare. With anatomy, the light had dawned, but it was only with machines that those in the seventeenth century could put this new understanding of our well-ordered parts into practice.
Clockwork Futures Page 6