The Philosophy of Wall•e

Hi

I’ve seen a lot of topics discussing the science of Wall•e, fair enough, it’s a film about robots, set in space. However in my opinion for this film, and it is the only sci-fi film I have seen which achieves this, the science and visuals take a backseat to the story. This film is primarily a love story, and a good one at that. This raises some interesting philosphical ideas:

•Can a machine truly think?
•Can a machine feel love?
•Could humanity ever sink so low that they become more machine-like than a machine?

Amongst others, I’m opening this thread for people to field any philosophical theories or queries thay may have regarding Wall•e, feel free to bring up scientific points so long as they are linked to the philosophy. If you have any ideas pertaining to the questions I’ve set please voice them.

This is interesting because is the premise, the whole point of the film.

Can a mchine truly think? Well, they may think in the future, as long as they have such a nervous system analogue to us wich can learn a culture like us, and use it to analyze the world around them.

Can a machine feel love? I have no idea. Could be, if they have a culture in the future.

Could humanity ever sink so low that they become more machine-like than a machine? Buff, it’s 22:49, too much for me now :laughing:

I agree that the science takes a backseat to the story and I’m very very glad it does. The philosophy behind the film has been stated time and time again by Andrew Stanton, and it’s probably one of my favorite “taglines” of all time, it’s just too bad it didn’t get used in the promotional materials.

“Irrational love defeats life’s programming.”

I can’t think of anything else to say about it, that says it all doesn’t it?

Nice idea for a thread, Halos Nach Tariff. I agree, the sci-fi side of WALL-E does take a back seat, and that’s certainly a good thing. Pixar could’ve gone over the top with special effects and taking the sci-fi to the extreme, but although they still created a very beautiful film, the love story between the two main characters, as well as the questioning of humanity’s future definitely does take precedent.

Can a machine truly think? Well, in the universe of WALL-E, yes, obviously, but whether that could happen in our universe is another question. I wouldn’t be altogether too surprised if one day, we were able to create a robot that can think for itself, especially as there are current projects with that aim being constructed at this moment. Can a machine feel love? Once again, in the WALL-E universe, yes, though the love between EVE and WALL-E is quite different from what humans would conventially call ‘love’. Theirs is a truly romantic relationship, free from the silly human issues that can easily destroy a relationship, so their love could be argued as being more pure. Will we as humans be able to create robots that can love? Perhaps one day. This idea is also presented in the Steven Speilberg film Artificial Intelligence, a favourite of mine, but instead of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, the film explores the love between a mother and a son. The robot that at first is ‘programmed’ to love does eventually experience real love, but this happens because of the pain he experiences when the love he gives to his mother is not returned. A very touching film, and a must-see for anyone who is interested in these sorts of questions.

As for humanity sinking so low as to be more machine like than machines themselves, well, if we’re talking about machines that are as human as the ones in WALL-E, then yes, possibly. It really depends on the situation to be honest, and on how machine-like the machines themselves are, as well as the humans. But the way WALL-E and EVE actually show the humans what they’re missing out on and the way they help them rediscover ‘being human’ is definitely a unique point of the film.

AI is one of my favourite films too, and it does illustrate the idea of love in machines. A similar concept can be seen in the works of Isaac Asimov, in one of his stories there is a robot which serves a wealthy family, the daughter of the family asks the robot to make something for her. As it is a robot it doesn’t have the imagination necessary to create art so instead it inscribes a complex gemoetric pattern in a rock. The robot’s work becomes famous and it begins to earn money, first for the family but later for itself. Because of this the robot slowly begins to realise that it wishes to be human, eventually buying itself freedom and upgrading itself to become more and more organic. At the end of the book the robot is almost completely organic except for it’s robotic brain. It undergoes a procedure to recieve an organic brain, even though it knows that such a procedure will eventually kill him.

This sort of work shows that a robot, even one designed for such a menial task as collecting and compacting rubbish can, through a series of simple stimuli, such as a curiosity in the things it collects, become somewhat sentient.

It can think if you write its programming to think. Whether they can produce an original thought, maybe… one day. You write its programming so it can produce certain thoughts and arrange them in a various ways. More important would be to allow a robot to learn.

First you have to define “love”. Maybe robots could eventually learn to associate certain people (or other robots) with positive associations, then that could turn into strong attachment and then eventually love.

I’d like to think that no matter how disconnected we get with other, we’d still have basic instincts such as survival and reproduction (although apparently the humans seemed to have lost the strong desire to reproduce in the film) so that would help us retain our “human-ness”. But at the same time it could be possible for robots to be programmed to have the instinct to survive, or they might develop that instinct on their own.

The same happens with us. We need our respective culture to understand the world. We classificate everything, and for that we need a culture that can be learned, which acts as a filter. Without it, you become unsconscious of everything and you can’t pay attenction to anything.

However can a machine programmed to think really be counted as thinking? Suppose I had a robot which recognised colours, if it saw green it would say ‘green’ if it saw red it would say ‘red.’ This could be considered a thinking machine as it analyses what it sees and then responds to that. However in reality all it is is a string of simple computations, when the primary colour being seen by the robot matches a colour in it’s database it plays the sound associated with that colour.

Wall•e-class robots would be even less advanced than this, they seem to be programmed to gather whatever they can, compress it and pile it into towers. Surely this cannot be considered as thinking. Yet our Wall•e does show sentience, he is curious about new things and capable of arranging things by shape and size, as well as placing objects together to achieve the required result (his ipod and magnifying glass.) However how much of this is programming and how much has developed over time?

I’m sure that one day we will be able to make a machine that can think, maybe even love, but I don’t know if it will have the consciousness that we have. It isn’t alive, but then again who says it can’t simply ‘develop’ one.

What is thinking? should be the question first :laughing:

Luke might have a point, aren’t all our feelings, emotions, and thoughts electrical signals in our brains?

I don’t think WALL•E was programmed to think or love. It’s a result of a glitch that he was either made with or one that developed over time due to him being on his own for so many years. So there’s two different theories as to how WALL•E got his glitch as well as the ability to think and love. Even though the trailer suggests that it was because he was alone for hundreds of years, I could go either way and believe both theories.

I believe the film states that all robots are at least capable to think. Maybe they’re built that way so they can find solutions to problems, etc, taking decisions. (M-O, AUTO…) Since they can think, they obviously learn things for themselves. They built their own understanding if the world without much of the possible human influence. Maybe it’s the most logical way to have intelligent machines. :laughing:

How to define thought, a question which has puzzled scholars for centuries, a fitting place to start assesing Wall•e’s philosophy. I believe that to be classified as ‘thinking’ an organism/object must be capable of undergoing a cognitive analysis of it’s environment, thus allowing it to realise that it is something seperate from the environment around it, therefore transcending the primal, animal, aspect and developing a sense of ‘I’ in comparison to ‘it.’

Wall•e certaintly fulfills these criteria, he can assess his environment beyond his programming, by collecting interesting items he is doing more than fulfilling curiosity, he is harbouring thought. Curiosity itself, of course, seems to have arisen from a form of thought. It seems that Wall•e-units were programmed to scavenge parts which could be used for repairs from unsalvagable units. Our Wall•e, it seems, has extended this to apply not just to broken Wall•e’s but to the entirety of his environment, and not just items which can be used for physical repair but also objects which fulfill some sort of mental criteria. Certaintly this involves complex thoughts, being able to observe the musical ‘Hello, Dolly’ as something more than sounds and light also requires a leap of ‘imagination’ or ‘thought’ and recognising the figures on the screen as ‘people’, as well as wishing to emulate them, shows a degree of complex thought.

However the humans on the Axiom do not appear to ‘think’ as per my criteria, they rely so fully on routine that they no longer assess their environment on a regular basis, they are effectively trapped in the same stagnating ‘thoughts’ they have had for centuries.

I don’t think robots could truly become soul carrying, because I believe a soul is a gift from God into a human being. Not saying any animation with an object coming alive is sinful, of course.

On the other hand, which humans starting to become like machines, I fully believe we already are. IMO, WALL-E is an allegory. As Mr. Stanton said, we get so caught up in our routines that we can lose track of loving others. That’s what makes humans unique from machines, and is why WALL-E is so different and special, because he defies those laws. If we look at all robots as being able to gain such emotion without the strange circumstances of WALL-E, then WALL-E in himself becomes less special and important.

I have, however, wondered what a real robot would do if put in a position like M-O was, with two protocols that were equal but opposing. Would it somehow find a way to make a decision, or just blow up or something?

But we’re not talking about souls, we’re talking about the capability to think/take decisions due to an own-conciousness.

(I don’t know if you’d say it like that :laughing:).

AUTO/HAL had that problem :laughing: This is: were the protocols learnt, or programmed? If they were learnt the robot could think/decide and choose the best, or doing nothing. If they were programed… I have no idea.

This was ‘Bicentennial Man’ published in 1976 for the American bicentennial:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man

That’s the one, thank you.

Hello to you, pixar planet. I’m mikael magnano “starlord” from france and I chose to post in this topic because it is precisely that which I wanted to exchange with you (should you not mind that, of course).

But first of all, I would like to dearly thank the creators of this maestria of a motion picture: In my opinion, there isn’t a single thing wall-e is lacking of. While in france, a lot of people tend to think that motion pictures tend to remain very childish in both their plot and the questions they summon, I for my part think that wall-e churns up a huge amount of questions regarding mostly our identity as humans, and the precise signification of this word.

Actually, I must confess: While I was never disappointed by a pixar film, I find wall-e to be a true epitome of beauty. Actually, It registers to me as so beautiful that it’s almost… Painful :slight_smile: While I hope not to shock anyone with this declaration, I was mostly wondering if anyone felt the same here (perhaps that particular pain is actually envy… Which would then justify my questions.

Those questions mostly regard the wall-e and EVE relationship, and It’s pertinence regarding human standards (both sexes of course, which is why I use this word: humans). Even by today’s standards, might that “symbiosis” (mostly based of the will of protecting one another) can be felt and experienced by the average human? or do you think this remains the proper of fiction?

But sorry to monopolise the topic like this: I believe you asked 3 questions. Here are my answers.

1: well, as far as I’m concerned, it all depends of the definition of thinking: I think machines can easily follow orders, but what about the power of decision making? Machines can today make those decisions (in a limited kind of way) but they are based on factors and logic. Yet at some point, EVE decides to set her missin goals apart in order to stay with wall-e out of feelings (which would be considered a “random” factor. Machines surely can’t do this now, as this would demand a form of intelligence not in their possession AS OF NOW, yet what can we say of the future with certainty?
Man is known to “imitate” nature in his creations, even while not realising this: As such, our thought patterns are arranged in a somewhat similar binary language as the one in use in our computers. (an example in austrailia also prove that it was possible to somewhat “interface” a brain with a computer, and as such move the mouse cursor through thought alone. Perhaps a few of you remember that?).
In short, I think that intelligence being a sort of “awakening”, it would be extremely presumptuous of thinking that only biological matter is capable of such feat (especially when our mechanics resemble nature this way). As such I cannot be sure, but I cannot deny. With time, anything is possible. :wink:

2: Well, that depends on the outcome of question number one, but in that case, I believe the step to this would be very small: Should a machine achieve develloped intelligence, it would be quite easy out of curiosity, to find those unique traits in other “personalities” which would be then treated according to one’s preferrences. Needless to say, in that case, a machine could devellop a respect for another personnality which it identifies as “unique in a way”, then admiration, fear of losing said personality, and finally… amount to love.

3: It is in such a case that I feel blessed that humanity is so diverse: As such, I clearly think that the answer to said question (involving humanity as a whole) would be no: While some people would perhaps register to that scenario (actually, some do even now metaphorically speaking), others will always think of an alternative. and I find that reassuring.

OK, I’ve finished bugging you for today. :laughing: Yet I thank you for you time and understanding. And once again, thanks for the wonder you’ve made us witness (even if it remains, to an extent, painful).

best regards to all.

mike.

Hi Starlord, pleasure to meet you.

I view Wall•e in a similar light to you, in my eyes it is the perfect film. With just the right mix of humour, romance, sci-fi in jokes and thought provoking scenes. The exquisite animation and score also help!

The way is see it the love between Wall•e and EVE and the love between humans is fundamentally different. No matter how much you dress it up human love is about reproduction, the propogation of the species, that is effectively what humans are designed to do. Wall•e and EVE’s relationship obviously does not stem from this desire. Wall•e as we can see in the beautifully arranged opening montage, is alone, however he doesn’t comprehend his loneliness until he meets, and loses, another.

A human relationship may begin simply as a desire for company, but it would eventually lead to mating. So in effect human love is different to that of Wall•e and EVE. The robots lust only for each other as a guiding force to one another, whereas humans lust simply for one another.

I hope someone offers a dissenting opinion to this, maybe we’ll be able to get a debate started!