Intimate Encounter Of The Second Kind

In the spirit of mid-February (there is no way I will use the V-word), I’ve prepared three postings I thought relevant to the occasion. This second piece is from a discourse I had with a friend of mine somewhen on last November –written right on the night of the discussion.

The Brave Analysis (Or Not)
Around last November, a friend of mine and I are engaged in an interesting conversation. I forgot what we were talking about, but somehow he got to love-relationship subject. He supports the belief that human intimate relationship is no more than a learning behavior –a complex one, but still, a learning behavior. He pointed out that it is possible for a human male, in an extremely controlled condition, to fall in love with a robot whose behavioral vocabulary resembles a genuine human female (please note that in this, I suppose, girlish topic, my diction projects my aggressive effort to unnecessarily maintain my male chauvinism).

I disagreed with him of course, arguing that he underestimated human intelligence on so many levels. I believe falling in love is an event in which two essential things happen between two human species. One: an individual found him/herself in a situation where he/she admires the other person’s thoughts after a critical period of interactions. It isn’t that our own thoughts aren’t worth admiring in the first place. But it is probably that our brain works so hard on so many task simultaneously that we miss to marvel our own greatness. It is easier to see the awe happens in someone else’s.

Two: when two people enjoy each other’s companion, that means they think compatibly. Throughout our lifetime, our living tissues –especially our brains– evolve. So do our thoughts. As our elderly put it, we mature. The reason relationship last, I presumed, is because couples co-mature also compatibly. They don’t need to mature the same way, just compatibly –relatively the same speed and predictable direction to name a few.

I don’t see how a robot, however advance the model is, would qualify on both accounts.

But that only answers how we fall in love. The most adventurous question in the history of time has always been why.

It is a very far extent to how I adore Darwin’s theories. I love the idea that there is always a reason why we are what we are –that there is a reason for our existence and everything that we do. It is amusing how they all have the same end-game: survival. Though the theory sound far-fetched and may only serve self-fulfilling-prophecies principle, they still keep our hopes up, thus we survive anyway.

I like to think that our affectionate behavior patterns have something to do with death. We human fear things we don’t understand. And the thing we don’t understand the most is death. Even to this day, with so much of our technological advances, we still have no clues to what happens after death –another life or just a full stop.

There was a good movie in 1991, Defending Your Life. In the story, Daniel Miller (played by comedian Albert Brooks) found himself in a cosmic terminal after his death. Life turned out to be a series of qualification tests. And the terminal –called Judgment City– is where we wait for our grades announced. If you score high (read: mature) you get to live the next more difficult life but if you score low you go back down. Apparently, there’s a lot more after-life than we ever think of. Either way, we stay living. That’s good, as long as we forget that it’s fiction.

The real deal is, we’re in constant doubt that heaven-hell scenario is valid (some lucky people constantly believe it’s valid, some unlucky ones constantly believe it’s false). And one thing is certain should the worst-case scenario (read: nothing after death) reveals to be true: we will be forgotten in time (short time, probably). That means we die twice. And so we need to come up with some counter-strategies to live on, or pseudo-live on at the least.

There are always small groups of people who conduct obsessive studies looking for potential ways to live longer. Ancient Egyptians came up with the idea of embalming their dead pharaohs (some not yet dead when embalmed). This century, scientists do it by uncovering the mysteries of cloning and stem cells implant.

But so long as death is inevitable, we need plan B (maybe even plan Bs). Hence we work diligently and leave our inspiring creations behind to make sure people remember us. We paint, make sculptures, build towers, write poems, invent technologies, even discover islands. If we’re lucky our stories will survive for years through school textbooks, encyclopedias, or even movies. Our statues will stand tall (and bigger than real size) in city parks. Streets, schools, universities, and hospitals will be named after us.

But that strategy doesn’t come without any loophole. We may fail or people may just fail to notice us, or worst, both. So we make sure we have insurance: we scout for a lifetime partner. The plan is to spoil her/him with invaluable niceties for longitudinal time frame. These are acts of investing positive memorable experiences about us unto her/him. Thus, when we (knock on wood) die one person will surely remember us even when our fellow earthlings or countrymen or citizens or officemen or schoolmates or, for heaven’s sake, friends won’t. By lingering through her/him, we live on (sort of) at least a little bit longer. But if this is human nature, that means our “scoutee” is playing the same trick. The good news is, there’s a good chance our plans work two-way. He/she becomes important to us, and vice versa. I think that’s what we call falling in love.

More good news about this strategy is, it comes with an added bonus. If things go well, we may get married and make children, which in biological terms is an event in which two individuals cooperatively write a new DNA sequences for a new living being. Our children would bear countless physical resemblances –eyes, nose, lips, skin, etc. Scientists believe that we parent have even handed down our limitless behavioral genetic scripts for their future use –they would be able to do things we typically would, and like things we typically do. And if that’s not enough, we still have time to teach them life (program them, satirically speaking). And so we live on (again, sort of).

I’m actually not sure which is our primary goal –the lingering or the regeneration part. But so long as we get both, why concern?

For me personally, I don’t know whether I’m too smart or stupid to fear death. So far, there was only one death I cried over. I’m nowhere suicidal, but when in comes to dying I have always wished that my death will be in discrete.

So, until I come up with better explanations or the courage to tell the truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth, please graciously spare me the question of why I’m currently without relationship. I swear, if even just one more soul dares to pop the question, the first thing he/she finds in his/her email inbox the next morning will be the complete and uncut version of this contemplation. So long this version is that he/she will regret ever asking.