Witness to Agency
In reading The New Breed, Kate Darling’s impressive reframing of the Western robot narrative, she describes our human tendency to anthropomorphize the world around us, whether animal, robot, or an object so simple as a stick. Darling argues that some cases of anthropomorphizing robots are desirable (such as in the case of caretaking/emotional wellness robots with the elderly) and others undesirable (such as in liability cases in which robots cause injuries to humans). Regardless of the ethics, however, I began to wonder at the metaphysical dynamics that underlie our tendency to anthropomorphize non-human beings and things.
Insurance Against the Great Alone
Ecologist and theologian Thomas Berry once write, “Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the universe.” In other words, every being has agency: the capacity to act independently in an environment. Taken broadly, every discreet piece of matter in the world has agency. Rocks stand still. Trees grow. Dogs bark. Cats toss their tails in the air immediately before or after boxing the ears of an unsuspecting victim. But our human agency is unique in that we seem to require validation of our own agency. Surely trees do not, nor rocks, nor even animals. But as humans, we demand that another agent pay witness to our own agency. It is as if we must insure ourselves against solopsism, a self-validating of our own existence: the great fear that we are alone — utterly alone.
The Price of Receiving Witness
And so our human agency must be witnessed to. But for this to happen, we must extend agency to the world around us. We must view the structure of the world as reciprocal. And the way we do that is by anthropomorphizing anything and everything around us. Only by having the world witness to our own agency can we lay claim to our own discreet identity, our own sense of agency, our own selves. Recognizing agency in beings outside of ourselves, then, becomes the price of receiving witness to our own agency.
And what is unique about this extension of agency to the world is that almost anything can serve as witness. Our capacity to invest humanity into our world means that the thing or being does not need to be moral (robots should not be expected to be so, even as we anthropomorphize them), nor does it require the being to be “alive” (see Tom Hanks’ touching relationship with Wilson — a volleyball), nor does it require that it even be tangible (see the epilogue of Cities of the Plains by Cormac McCarthy in which a dream-person acts as witness to the dreamer’s agency). All it requires is our willingness to view the things as a witnessing part of the principle reality: God, Existence, Oneness, Totality. It goes by many names, and every name attempts to describe that net of experience in which agency (both human and non-human) is reciprocated as a means to witness to another’s existence within that very net.
Not as Agents First, But Witnesses First
Kate Darling’s concerns about agency in robots are not merely ethical and legal, then. She is pushing at the margins of a metaphysical issue: What is agency? Who and what has it? And from where does it come?
As human beings, we must witness to the agency of all things, but especially of our fellow human beings. Because if we refuse to do so, we revoke that being’s capacity to be witness to our own agency. We break the chain of reciprocity which bears along its line empathy, compassion, kindness, creativity. We become our own god, our own nature, our own intelligence, our own tribe, our own system.
So we must step out into the world not as agents first, but as witnesses first. And in this outpouring of ourselves to others, we will discover our own agency, and with it, the Mystery that holds us all together.
