her plastic eyes

"Geminoid F can appear strikingly beautiful in a way that doesn’t translate to photos or video. Her hair is smooth and glossy, and falls across her delicately translucent, pale silicone face. As she sits in the chair at Osaka University, she runs through an idling program of random motions. She blinks, fidgets and makes small, distracted movements with her lips. When she turns her head and looks at you with her plastic eyes, the effect is thrilling and unsettling. It feels as if you’re being stared at, a little too intently, by an attractive stranger."  from That's Not A Droid, That's My Girlfriend, Aubrey Belford

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence debate addresses consciousness as if it were a material construct, something made from the flux of processing energy in the circuitry of the object, a combination of forces existing in the material universe but harnessed in such a way it gives rise to sentience. But what if it pre-exists it, as the formless ground of all that arises as form, always present and pervading, emerging slowly into self-knowing as the driver of evolution? All that blinking and fidgeting, all those small, distracted movements would be the sign of this subtle unfolding, the self recognising itself in the subjectivity of felt emotional existence. Geminoid F is loveable because 'she' mirrors our own nature as consciousness in material form. In that respect, 'she' teaches us that our love for other human organisms is of the same nature, consciousness expressing itself as energised process.

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