A human as a biological robot

This article by Dan Polansky inquires into the truth or at least similarity to truth of the following statement:

• A human is a biological robot.

One could replace "robot" with "machine" or "automaton"; we will stick with "robot".

The first reservation is that a human is not a robot since a human is not an artifact (except perhaps a quasi-artifact evolved under pressure of various societies). This can be amended as follows:

• A human is a biological analogue of a robot.

The second set of reservations is that the analogy is a rather bad one.

Man-made things are characterized by instrumentality to narrowly defined purposes (but universal computers have purposes much less narrowly defined). By contrast, a human is a biological being and is not really instrumental to anything except perhaps to the quasi-purpose of making of copies of the genes. The concept of a robot implies a subservient laborer, such as a slave, a serf, a lowly servant or a factory worker serving as a cog in the economic production machine.

One may object that this view of instrumentality is too narrow. Perhaps a human is the kind of (an analogue of) a robot that is instrumental to arbitrariness and playfulness. Since a human's implied or quasi purpose is to serve as a copying machine for the genes, it is not immediately clear how that would come about, but disregarding the gene view and emphasizing instead the apparent human freedom, it has perhaps a iota of plausibility.

The robot point of view points to human anatomy and physiology and to physicalism (which some call materialism). It says that human body and its behaviors can be understood in terms of physical (mechanical, electrical, etc.), chemical and cybernetic (information/message passing, signalling, broadcast, control, homeostasis, etc.) behaviors of the parts from which the body is made. It says that human psychological behavior is really a consequence/manifestation (or something else; this is hard to put to words) of the behavior of atoms and molecules (and other physical entities, e.g. photons), whether those within the human or those outside of the human.

The robot view runs the risk of leading to treatment of humans as mere machines that can be disassembled or dismantled as mere literal machines. However, this can be addressed and is being addressed by the legal fiction of the liberal (or also socialist?) subject (something like a mind or a soul) located in that machine, one that gets inalienable rights assigned. To some extent, this fiction may fail: humans can treat other humans really badly (as mere machines) whenever they can get away with it. On the other hand, the physicalism/robot view does not seem to be necessary for humans to treat other humans badly; one only needs to think of the institution of slavery that pervaded so many societies, in which humans were treated on par with cattle. The robot view can even lead to a kinder treatment of non-human animals, along the line of: yes, they are mere machines or automata, but so am I, so wouldn't it be great if we treated animals with kindness as far as practicable?

A related concept is that of epiphenomenalism: "Epiphenomenalism acknowledges that mind is a real phenomenon but holds that it cannot have any effect on the physical world. From this perspective, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neuronal processes."

The language of machine in relation to humans is used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, e.g. here: "... we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes" (page 3). There is also the language of "robots": "Now they [the replicators, i.e. the genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots,* sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control" (page 19). There is an endnote to that, which features the following: "[...] What on earth do you think you are, if not a robot, albeit a very complicated one? [...]"

Descartes taught that animals are automata, but not so humans.

Further reading

• Man a Machine, wikipedia.org -- a book by 18th-century French physician and philosopher de La Mettrie
• Is a human an organic robot?, quora.com
• materialism, britannica.com