In most of our lives—or, hopefully, all of our lives—there are moments that can be described as “enchanting ”—those magical times when someone or something puts a spell on us. The moment when you meet someone and fall in love at first sight. When you are contemplating a particularly beautiful landscape, breathing the fresh air. The time you devoured a particularly engaging book, immersed in its world and excited to find out what will happen next. Sooner or later, though, this initial enchantment often turns into disenchantment . A relationship becomes routine and the person we fell in love with seems to lose their charm. A big cloud of smoke from a nearby factory overshadows the landscape and pollutes the air. The book we have been reading with such excitement ends in an astonishingly disappointing way. The spell is broken, the magic is gone, the enchantment becomes disenchanted and we are disenchanted with it.
Luckily, there are also times when we experience re-enchantment : the old magic comes back or a new spell is cast. The people we love suddenly look and smile exactly the way they did when we met them for the first time. The wind blows the smoke away and a flock of birds rises into the sky from the forest as you gaze in awestruck wonder. The sequel explains the ending of the previous book in a way that renews your lost fascination.
Each of us has a story of his or her own enchantments, disenchantments , re-enchantments and the diverse relationships among them—personal experiences that define us as individuals. This book tells a story about such openings and closures and their interconnections in our contemporary culture, about the experiences that define us—at some level, to some degree and keeping great diversity in mind—as a contemporary “modern Western society”. There are two main areas that I find crucially important in relation to the presence and influence of processes of enchantment, disenchantment , and re-enchantment . The first area refers to our attitudes and beliefs about humans and robots as well as to interactions and relationships between them—particularly the possibility of intimate relationships as well as actual interactions that are already taking place. The second area refers to modernity: the values, beliefs, and modes of thinking typical for what we label as “modern,” our contemporary attitudes toward them, as well as our—probably still modern—accounts of premodernity and attempts to leave modernity behind and pursue in the direction of a kind of “beyond-modernity.” The processes of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment in both of these areas are strongly interconnected.
When we examine our past personal enchantments, disenchantments , and re-enchantments , we often come to the conclusion that they were not only—or maybe even not primarily—about the people or objects or any part of reality external to us, but were rather a matter of our own thinking. We notice that the routine in relationship was not the fault of the person we loved changing. Rather, it was a change in our own thinking that resulted in a different perception of that person. Or we notice that the landscape that enchanted us is not, in fact, as beautiful as what we see from our window every day, although we do not normally think of something that we see every day as capable of being enchanting at all.
A comparable situation occurs at the level of cultural enchantment, disenchantment , and re-enchantment —what and how we think, as well as why we think it, is a crucial matter. This book examines the question of thinking from a few different perspectives. First, I examine thinking as an illustration of processes of enchantment, disenchantment , or re-enchantment in the sense that I point to particular ways of thinking as an examples of each of the three abovementioned processes. Second, I view thinking as an expression of statements and attitudes that concern processes of enchantment, disenchantment or re-enchantment , particularly diagnoses that describe them, evaluate them and/or recommend their stimulation or implementation, or advise against it. Third, I look at thinking as a source and condition of enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment —the world or a part of it becomes enchanted, disenchanted or re-enchanted because we think about it in a particular way: in this book I focus on a magical thinking that makes enchantment and re-enchantment possible, in opposition to what we can call “modern rational thinking ”, which enables disenchantment —I emphasize that it is modern rationality , due to the fact that I do not think that only modern thinking can be recognized as rational, I do not consider magical thinking as simply irrational and I assume that magical thinking can be seen as rational in its own non-modern way. Fourth, I elaborate on thinking about thinking, that is, on fluctuations in evaluations of different modes of thinking, particularly magical thinking and its relation to modern rational thinking . I therefore discuss how our thinking contributes to enchantment, disenchantment , and re-enchantment (by being their expression), how it examines these processes (by diagnosing and evaluating them), how it constitutes these processes (magical thinking in the case of enchantment and re-enchantment ; modern rational thinking in the case of disenchantment ), and how it reflects on itself (that is, how we think about magical thinking and modern rational thinking).
This book is therefore about enchantment, disenchantment , and re-enchantment , about humans, robots and their interactions and intimate relationships , about magic , magical thinking and modern rational thinking, about modernity, premodernity and post-modernity, and finally about thinking: both the thinking about the abovementioned issues, and the thinking about the thinking itself, particularly about its diverse modes.
In Chapter 2, I discuss the question of robots enchanting humans. That is, the phenomenon of robots being perceived by humans as “magical” enough to develop intimate relationships with them. To examine this problem, I explore the debates in the field of robot ethics that concern intimacy robots, particularly sex robots and care robots . The chapter “Robots Enchanting Humans” thus discusses normative approaches that answer the question, “How should we think about robots, humans and intimate relationships ?” I discuss both the arguments of those who are enthusiastic about intimacy robots, who look forward to and are optimistic about them, as well as the positions of skeptics, who consider intimate relationships with robots to be a serious danger. I do not attempt to decide which side is correct. Rather, I aim to understand what cultural beliefs and values—particularly these connected with ideas about humans, robots and intimate relationships —these approaches express. I therefore show how attitudes toward intimate relationships with robots are an expression of more general tendencies and transformations of our cultural ideas of humans and intimacy . To make this point, I explore sociological diagnoses of contemporary transformations of intimate relationships . Finally, I argue that if robots are being viewed as able to enchant humans and to become their intimate partners, it is because humans are becoming increasingly disenchanted, in a double sense. Humans and the relationships between them are becoming disenchanted, first, in the sense that they are perceived as possessing no unique, extraordinary and “magical” qualities that cannot be rationally calculated and engineered into the robots—this is a disenchantment of humans and relationships between them. And humans are becoming disenchanted in the second sense, that people and the intimate relationships among them are increasingly perceived as a source of disappointment—this is a disenchantment with humans and relationships between them. Humans are therefore increasingly seen as both non-unique and problematic, while robots are increasingly seen as possessing all the advantages of humans with none of their disadvantages.
In Chapter 3, I turn to the issue of humans enchanting robots, in the sense that humans tend to perceive and think about robots as something more than mere machines. Rather than look at prognoses about future human-robot intimate relationships and ethical, normative evaluations of them from the field of robot ethics to answer the question of “what we should think about robots, humans and intimate relationships ,” I explore two other fields of inquiry. First, the field of Human Robot Interactions (HRI), which describes actual human robots interactions that are already taking place to answer the question, “How do we think about robots (when we actually interact with them)?” Second, I discuss a specific part of robot ethics discussions that are aiming to rethink our thinking about humans, robots and relations between them, and in that sense ask the question: “How should we think about our thinking about robots?”—this rethinking is taking place partially due to the fact that the actual interactions and experiences of robots described in HRI do not correspond to our ideas of humans, robots, and intimacy expressed in the discussions examined in Chapter 2. Therefore, while the thinkers discussed in the chapter “Robots Enchanting Humans” mainly aim to adjust relationships with robots to our ideas of humans, robots, and relationships, philosophers debated in the chapter “Humans Enchanting Robots” attempt to adjust our thinking and ideas about robots, humans, and relations to our actual interactions with the machines.
What I find common in phenomena diagnosed by HRI studies and the philosophical propositions developed by contemporary influential thinkers is that both can be interpreted as expressions of the enchantment of robots, thinking about them as something more than mere machines. While HRI scholarship shows that humans are enchanting robots in actual, spontaneous interactions with them, some philosophers suggest that it might be valuable to take these experiences and interactions seriously and to reflect and understand these robots in a similar enchanting way. In other words, HRI studies show how humans are enchanting robots in practice, while some thinkers suggest that it might be productive to enchant them in theory, as well. I argue, moreover, that both of these enchanting approaches can be interpreted in terms of magic and magical thinking: I identify similarities and analogies between magic and magical thinking on the one hand, and HRI and philosophical ideas, on the other. In doing so, I draw on both classic and more recent anthropological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of magical thinking. I discuss reevaluations of the status of magic and magical thinking from the second part of nineteenth century to the present and focus on shifts in its relationship to modern rational thinking. Chapter 3 also addresses the question “How should we think about the magical and modern rational thinking?” I argue that the contemporary growth in the presence of magic and magical thinking might be a result of the disenchantment of modern rational thinking: this disenchantment includes a disenchantment of modern rational thinking (we no longer believe in its power) and a disenchantment with modern rational thinking (we are disappointed with the actual results of the domination of modern rational thinking).
Both chapters discussed above therefore discuss the “enchanting robots” signaled in the title. First one focuses on robots that are enchanting humans by taking on the status of participants in intimate relationships . Second focuses on how humans are enchanting robots, by thinking magically about them. The two chapters thus aim to show that robots are enchanting humans because humans are enchanting robots. In both cases, the enchantment is a result of a twofold disenchantment , of and with human beings and intimate relationships with them, as well as of and with modern rational thinking and its results, respectively. Therefore, Chapters 2 and 3 show how we tend to be less anthropocentric (by disenchanting humans) and less Western-centric (by disenchanting modern Western rationality). In some sense, these two chapters are two sides of the same coin, since they describe relations between humans and robots from two different perspectives: what robots do with humans (Chapter 2) and what humans do with robots (Chapter 3).
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