October 27, 2011 • 32 mins
Frankenstein's Monster: What are the ramifications of mad science? Frankenstein's tortured creation has become an avatar for scientific horror. Join Robert and Julie as they explore the roots of Frankenstein's monster. Learn more about the past and future of science-gone-wrong.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey're welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. I'm Julie Douglas. Julie your
Halloween costume that you're wearing for this podcast. Um, I
noticed that your hair is really tall and you have
a really impressive white stream coming down the side. Yes,
(00:26):
are you the bride of Frankenstein's Monster? No, I'm Marge
Simpson in her later years. Oh well, well sorry, but
it looks like the bride of Frankenstein. What are you saying? See,
I never get my costumes right. But what about you?
What's what's going on over there? Well, as you can
tell by my by the burns on my body as
well as the reek of burnt urine that surrounds me.
(00:49):
Who's going to say something about that? Yeah? I am,
of course an alchemist, busy applying my trade in my laboratory,
trying to discover the secrets of life to turn to
transmute nettles into gold and uh, and turn one type
of animal into another and you'urn into gold. Of course,
I'm totally about the gold, and urine is kind of
gold looking, So there's gotta be a way to turn
(01:09):
into go. Yeah, you know, I appreciate your commitment to
the illusion. By the way, Uh, podcast room is really
small and enclosed. Well, you know, I'm hungent right now.
I'm committed to the idea I go all the way,
been burning here and all night. So both of these
play into what we're gonna talk about today, which is,
of course Frankenstein's Monster or Frank's monsters as you like
(01:31):
to call yeah, yeah, or some people just call the
monster Frankenstein. And and that's technically incorrect, but it's it's
been used to such an extent it's it's almost to
the point where it's okay to call the Frankenstein's Monster Frankenstein. Uh. Well,
and I think it's actually quite reasonable given that it
was this, this creature and made in Frankenstein's image sort
(01:51):
of burned man's image. Yeah yeah, and he never actually
names it. I mean it's uh, you know, the demon,
the creature and occasionally some more wordy to descriptions that
because it's a it's a rather poetic novel. The original
the original book Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary
Shelley eighteen. It's never been out of print, and uh,
(02:13):
if you haven't read it. If you have not read
this book, I I highly recommend you giving it a read.
It can be a little wordy at times, but it's
it's just really great. Uh that like Frankenstein, the Man
is uh, you know, it's very philosophical about everything, and
he's putting a lot of thought into this in the
in the monster is very intelligent as well, and it
engages in a lot of a lot of deep ponderings
(02:35):
about his own life and his purpose and what has
happened to him and all this misery that has has
befallen him in the state of mankind. I mean, it's
a it's an intelligent novel. Well the ways that the
movies really rarely are able to capture. Well, the movies
are more like fire fire scared, right, and and this
is more like, hey, let me tell you about my
(02:56):
existincial angst as a creature that was abandoned. Yeah, was
created by a man and by an imperfect man, and
abandoned on an imperfect world. And over the past month
I was asked by How Stuff Works to write an
article how Frankenstein's Monster works. And I set out to
write it, and uh, you know, I could have just
written a whole regigitation of the normal. Hey, there was
(03:17):
this lady Mary Shelley and she got scared in a
lightning storm and was in a story writing contest, and
then she wrote this, and then these people played Frankenstein
in the movie. And that's all well and good. All
the I mean, the the story of the novel and
the and the the pop culture significance of the of
the book and the idea is really cool and uh
and I can read it all day, and there are
plenty places on the internet already to read about it
(03:39):
all day. But I was really more interested in the
idea of Frankenstein's monster in our culture is this idea
that we can create life, that we can we can
take and not just create life in the way that
humans create life every day through approcreation, but the idea
that I can use my wisdom and my intelligence and
with one hand sort of flip off God and with
(04:00):
the other one make a little man that will walk
around and do what I tell it to. Well, in
this idea, too, that we perhaps just haven't discovered the
right element or the right thing, or the right piece
of knowledge to transcend our own humanness right into to
make a better version of ourselves. Yeah. And this the
idea too, has been around forever. I mean it. I
(04:21):
mean it goes back to just our basic like cognitive abilities. Uh,
to look at an object and imagine it alive. The
idea to anthropomorphize things and to and to personify even
like aspects of nature. You know, you have like the
Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculpture that is awakened by
the god Venus and turned into an actual lady and uh.
(04:42):
And you also have one of my favorite ideas, the
golem or and I found this interesting that you can
also since this is a Jewish idea, it can be
pronounced golm um, which is, I guess more in keeping
with the Hebrew. And the most famous version of this
was the Golem of of Prague, which is it is
a medieval myth and it eventually found its way into
(05:03):
new life in the ninet novel Drek Golem. In this
particular story, you have this guy, Rabbi Judah Low bin Besabel,
and he's an expert in the use of the magical
use of letters to create various magical effects. And these
are almost like incantations, right, I mean you could say
there are prayers, yeah, and then it gets into the
soul like there's a whole lot of stuff in in
Judaism and incamalo, the importance of the importance of names,
(05:26):
the importance of letters, and the importance of the name
of God, right and uh and so I mean you
have things like the Sefer Yasarrah. The Book of Creation,
which is often referred to as a guide to magical
usage by some Western European Jews in the Middle Ages
and in some of the involved various directions for creating
a goal, on some of which it involved taking the
name of God and rearranging the letters and putting them
(05:50):
on things and and bringing them to life. But in
the most of the tellings of this particular story of
the Golm of Prague, Besabel creates this clay humanoid because
gold basically means clot of earth, and he activates it
by placing um. He writes the word a meth meaning
that's a m E t h meaning truth and reality
on a shim tablet, and he places that under the
(06:12):
thing's tongue. Then it comes to life. Then he starts
using this golm to ring the bell at the synagogue.
But the only thing is you have to take the
tablet out of its mouth and turn it off, because
all it knows how to do is ring bells, apparently,
and he forgets to take it out of the creature's mouth,
and then it just runs wild one night, presumably, ringing
everything in sight like it's a bell. He's harassing people
(06:34):
are getting around. Yeah, it's like when the roomba escapes
from the living room that you want to vacuum and
you catch it in the bathroom eating the rug. That
kind of thing. Um. The rabbi has to hunt it down,
and when he finally gets there, he pulls the little
tablet out from under its tongue, and the word a
myth a m e t t h, which means you know,
life and all uh becomes the word meth m e
(06:55):
t h which means death and the and the golden
falls into dust. Um. And then the other tales as well.
There's this one story of a rabbi and the name
of JF and Prussia and he um. He has a
golem like like the candles in the synagogue, but the
golem can't really tell what's a candle. H. And what
a non candle is like it it basically thinks everything
is a candle, so it lights everything inside on fire.
(07:17):
So it's the programming doesn't work all that well. And
then there were apparently some stories to where there were
some ethical debates on the use of golems not only
for the use of you know, tasks and chores around
the synagogue, but the use of golems for the purposes
of of making the required number for the minya, and
which is the the qorum of a ten Jewish adults
(07:38):
required for certain religious observations, which indeed, I would feel
it would be like, all right, you need to tend
people to make this decision, and you're telling me three
of them were made out of clay. That yeah, especially
since we know that the column doesn't really have the
ability of speech, right right. That's what I thought was
interesting met this is that the it's predicated on this
(08:00):
notion that only holy men could create this golem, and
yet uh, the golm was going to be completely imperfect
in the shadow of man because the golm was not
created by God, right, And just there's an aside too.
I find it interesting that they are taking symbols rearranging
them to create artificial beings, which has a nice parallel
(08:22):
with modern programming and uh an artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, yeh.
We'll get into a little later. I haven't thought about that,
but this ties in well with the The idea of
Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus. I mean, that's right up front,
that's the subtitle for the book. Prometheus, of course, being
the titan that retrieves the fire. Uh, takes the fire
from the gods and gives it to humans and is
(08:44):
then punished by what being lashed to a stone so
that the birds can come in. Yeah, because the ego
that comes and eats the liver, and then unfortunately the
liver grows back. And then this is it's like groundhog Day.
Every day the same thing happens, just an endless groundhog
day of the liver doomed to have your liver eating everything.
But he took something that was the gods, the domain
of the gods, the fire, and he gave it to man.
(09:07):
And then now man has the ability to use this
fire and build up his civilization with it, and with fire,
of course, achieve great goods such as staying warm at night,
and great evil like burning cities to the ground, right right.
And I think it's so interesting to that Greek mythology
would would focus on this because you really mean, this
was such the turning point for man, right, the discovery
of fire and the power that it had and the
(09:28):
sustenance that it had. Um that you know, they had
to come up with this uh myth about it that
that uh celebrated it and then also said, uh, but
with this comes great responsibility, right right, which is another
sort of theme that we see in Frankenstein. Yeah. And
and of course you think of like the way fire
(09:49):
changed everything and how it powered and destroyed, I mean
the ability to to murder and create, to uh, to
steal from ts Eliott Uh and uh and one can't
help me be reminded of trees and centuries I mean
thousands of years later. Uh. The importance of electricity as well,
which is suddenly this Promethean fire that comes to us
through technological advancement that has all these great abilities. I mean,
(10:13):
electricity surrounds us today as the it's it's everywhere, it
is part of our civilization, is it's it's hard first
to imagine our modern lives without it. Oh, yeah, I
can't I can't can't see of a life divorced from electricity, right,
I mean, obviously, so much of the technology that we
enjoyed today wouldn't even exist. But during Mary Shelley's time,
electricity had really captured the imagination of people, and yet
(10:35):
it was quite feared because it wasn't truly understood, right.
It was a mysterious property. And I remember seeing reading
accounts to where people were really judgmental about the idea
of using them for electric chairs, because pretty early on
people were like, like Edison was like, Hey, this electricity
is great. Watched me fry this elephant, you know, topsy
things of that nature, and they were like, we could
totally fry prisoners with this. And there were some people
(10:57):
were like, how can you take this holy gift of electricity,
I mean it's too and use it for something horrible
like that, you're really debasing this wonderful thing. Well, what's
interesting about that too, is that Edison was in competition.
He had a C right, and it was a volta
that had d C the DC current, and so it
was Edison who was going around saying, Ah, don't fear
(11:20):
my a C current. It's not as dangerous as the
DC and I believe they are using the d C current.
I could have it switched around, but I believe they
are using a d C current on prisoners. And that
was sort of a scare tactic on his part to
be like to say to companies, you should really adopt
my my electrical currency rather than this other one. Just
as a side note, but the you know, in the
(11:40):
previous podcast, we were talking about the way, you know,
if you're shocked by heaven forbid coming into contact with
a live wire, you fly away from the outlet or
the source of electricity because your muscles are spasming. Well,
this is exactly the response that various scientists at the
day and Mary Sheelow's day, we're looking into the effects
of electricity on dead tissue. Yeah, and it actually became
(12:01):
sort of a sideshow. Really, this frog's dead, but watchford
happens when I stick alive fire to it? Right right?
Or this prisoner is dead, Look what happened? The prisoners
decapitated By the way they were doing this that I
think they were thinking about like science festivals, showing the
public this ability to reanimate a corpse. Yeah, it's like, look,
first we reanimate the frog legs and then they become
(12:23):
delicious all through electricity, right, right, And so people were
of course even more frightened, and they started to think
that electricity had the ability to to reanimate their loved ones,
and they were totally weirded out because they were like,
he's right, these frog legs are delicious and they can move. Um.
So Mary Shelley actually knew all about this, by the way,
(12:44):
because it's referenced in the book of Victor Frankenstein. I mean,
it's told like a lot of these older novels. It's
a one character talking about conversations with others, and Victor
doesn't share the details of how he creates life because
it's a horrible secret that destroyed his life and and
led to the dead of of everyone he holds dear
in life. So he's not going to burden anyone else
(13:04):
with the secret recipe. But he does mention in passing
a few different influences, one of which are these studies
into electricity. Yeah, and I mean, just everybody knows to
Marie Shelley's father was actually friends with the leading authorities
of the day on electrical research. So this was these
were conversations that she was privy to. And also, I
(13:25):
mean she's nineteen years old, so amazing that she had
amassed this amount of knowledge and was able to put
this together and this pastiche of of a story of
this monster. But there you go. I mean, there's the
basis for this idea that we could bring back life.
And in a moment, we're actually going to talk about homunculous.
Oh yes, we're gonna get into alchemy, one of my favorites, alchemy,
(13:47):
making a tiny little person and what it has to
do with cow guts. Right. Yeah. This podcast is brought
to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the
Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark
which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and
(14:07):
explore the answers to life's questions. All right, so we're
back alchemy. Now this is another we're talking about the
the influences that Victor Frankenstein cites in the book, and
he he starts off really into alchemy and and studying
the writings of various alchemists. Then he gets into the
(14:27):
modern sciences and sort of goes off in that direction.
So it's eventual creation of this monster of this artificial
being is kind of a synthesis of modern science and
alchemical ideas. Now, alchemy, if you go back through eighteenth centuries,
this is essentially a mix of early chemistry and occultism,
(14:49):
So you're crossing empirical research with mystical philosophy. Um. And
it's kind of Alchemy is kind of a big tent
when you get when you really start analyzing it, because
they're on one hand, people interested in transmitting metals um.
Right there there are people who are just prospecting essentially
from gold. So some people were citing more on the
get rich quick kind of aspects of alchemy. Some people
(15:10):
were really more into the occultists or philosophical aspects of it.
And some people were basically chemist in a day when
there's not really there's no chemistry yet. So if you
are interested in chemical properties, alchemy is where you are.
It's the only game in town for the most part,
at least in much of the world. Uh And and
certainly there's some actual scientific achievements that came out of this.
I mentioned reeking of burning urine, which which some of
(15:33):
these uh, these alchemists did because there was a great
deal of interest in urine and in the possibility of
turning it into gold. And seventeenth century German alchemists Hinnig
Brount distilled countless buckets of urine uh in attempt to
turn turn it into gold, and as you might expect,
the experiment failed to produce results, but it did allow
(15:54):
them to discover the element phosphorus. So you have situations
like that where even in alchemy, in this study of chemistry,
people are actually making real discoveries, and as you point
out before, without the aid of the scientific method, right,
so it's you know, which obviously would have farreted out
a lot of what was wrong with alchemy, but at
the time it was a great way to try to
(16:15):
interrogate the physical world around you. Right of course, where
does this get involved with? Like why alchemy and Victor
Frankenstein And a lot of this comes down to the
idea of the homunculous or homunculi and that's the plural.
And this is an idea that's fascinated me for ages,
just because on one level, what's so grotesque and steeped
in medieval um nonsense that you know, I can't help
(16:37):
but just fall in love with it. So I was
researching this, researching how to create a homunculous and yes
for myself. Um and and not just in the old
fashioned way of just screwing up your compost heap until
it comes alive. M though that's also involved in this.
You know, the early idea that when material rots, it
turns an insect like that's a basic misunderstanding of how
(16:59):
organic works. And so a lot of these alchemical ideas
of how to create life stem from misunderstandings of how
it works. And this idea that that we basically that
it was within our reach, even in the Middle Ages,
to understand it and control it. So the idea of
the homunculus is basically basically comes down to I can
grow a little person, not just like an animal. I
(17:21):
can not only make an animal, because they're also alchemical
um recipes for say, turning a headless cow into a
swarm of beast, which I think I'm going to share
that one on the blogs soon. But but I was.
But but the idea of the monthless is also that
it is a reasoning creature that you're making. It's not
it's maybe not quite a human, but it is like
(17:41):
a little human, like a tesque little humanoid, right, grotesque
little humor, which I think is fascinating because I can
kind of inhabit that perspective at that time to think like, okay,
this would be possible. Maybe I can't make a full
grown human, but I can make it in miniature, you know,
sort of like my sea monkeys over here. Yeah. Yeah,
well you know it's it's lost, you know, in these
false concepts of spontaneous generation, like we said, magical tomfoolery,
(18:05):
but they're basically pondering the possibility of creating an artificial
quote rational animal unquote through uh learned manipulation of organic tissue. Okay,
so what is that organic tissue? Because that's that's where
it becomes a little cringe worthy. Okay, Well, I have
to read part of the recipe because and this comes
from the Book of the Cow, which is which the
(18:26):
what I guess this is French is the Liberva I
think it might be Latin Latin. I'm sorry, yeah, but
it's the Book of the Cow because the cow factors
prominently into these, uh these recipes. And so I'm just
gonna read a little here until Julie stops me. Um.
But it goes a little something like this, and and
this is from Mike vander Luke's abdominal mixtures the Libertvaca
(18:50):
in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of
Natural Magic, he writes, then describing the recipe in the book.
With the mixture of sperm and sunstone, the magician inseminates
a cow, or are you. He then carefully plugs up
its vagina with the sunstone and smears its genitals with
the blood of the animal that was not chosen for insemination.
Then the cow that you must be placed in a
(19:12):
dark house in which the sun never shines. Its food
must be mixed with the blood of other animals. While
awaiting the moment of birth, the magician prepares a powder
made of the ground sunstone, sulfur, magnet, and green tutilla
stirred with the sap of the white willow. The unformed
substance to which the you or the cow gives birth
must be placed in this powder, whereupon it will instantly
(19:33):
grow a human skin. The newborn homoculous must be kept
in a large glass or lead vessel for three days
until it is very hungry. Then it is fed on
its decapitated mother's blood for seven days until it is
developed into a complete animal, it can henceforth be used
to perform certain feats. Um. All right, I'm just gonna
go and stop a whole another paragraph of just because
(19:54):
it gets down. Once you've created it, you like put
it into this this other vat and you grow it
a little more, and then you can you can kill
it and like spirits guts on your shoes and you
can walk on water. But the crazy thing is here
is aside I think being the original recipe for hagus.
It completely reminds me of of when we've talked about
(20:14):
growing tissue before and scaffolding um tissue. I mean that's
not to say that you know this, this modern day
technology is based on alchemy, but it's interesting that that
idea it's very similar to what we are now doing
because we have the technology, right. Yeah, all of this
was based in the idea of the humans could mimic
(20:34):
and manipulate natural reproductive processes. I mean, especially they were
really confident about insects. They were like, insects, that's easy,
I can I can make bees all day and uh
and and and then that the greater idea was that, yeah,
we we've kind of got this snack. We can make
some momuncula and then let I'm loose, which you know
again today, Hey, we can grow an ear from this tissue.
(20:56):
We have to scaffold it and bake it for a while. Yeah.
In in reading these just detailed grotesque recipes for how
to make a monculie too. For some reason, I was
reminded of various Cypress Hill songs where be Real just
basically raps about like how to grow like a detailed
um recipe for growing marijuana or for smoking it. And
(21:17):
I was I was like, wouldn't it be awesome if
there is a Cypress Hill song where they're just laying
out how to make a homunculi? That would be or
like the Anarchist's Guide to Homunculi. Yeah, that would be awesome.
But I mean the other side of this, too, is
that this represents like such a dangerous idea, and this
was something that like people who were afraid, Like, it's
very unlikely that too many people wasted their time trying
(21:39):
to actually do this, but a lot of people probably
wasted their time, uh freaking out about the idea that
people were doing this. They were like, oh my goodness,
they are these alchemists, and they're they're they're doing this
and they and if this works, they have such power
they have they have power over nature. They have power
that rivals that of God, all through their their magic
and their science and their art. Well, the Book of
(22:00):
Caw actually probably was the undoing of alchemy if you
think about it, because it wasn't this the first cohesive
effort to put all of this sort of science and
occult these recipes together and try to make sense of it.
It's like, all right, we're alchemists. These are the things
that we sort of believed in. And then people were
like look at it and they're like, wow, we this
is really what we've been doing. Yeah. Yeah, like taken
all together, this just really seems like it's not working.
(22:21):
That being said the most learned of the day. That's
that was a hot tone to have on your bookshelf right,
And also it was some people thought it was absolutely
putrid and abomination against nature to even be talking about
it was good reading in another way. Yeah, But of
course alchemy would eventually see its day. Chemistry would rise,
(22:41):
even though in some critics actually argue that alchemy prevented
chemistry from really going for a long time because it
was such a I mean, it was also a kind
of a taboo area, you know. But eventually alchemy dies off.
And uh. There's another area where we really see this
idea of of mimicking the human form, cre eating the
human body, and that is in the field of robotics,
(23:03):
specifically in the field of the creation of automatons, which
of course are like you know, mechanical men. Uh that
they're not really robots. They don't actually uh take in
sense data and uh in in in process the sense
data and then make a decision about what action they're
gonna take. There's no computation, but they're like wind up men,
wind up ladies, dolls that dance. But we've discussed the
(23:26):
pooping duck, of course. But as I say, some of
them mimic actual human biology. And again here we have
this idea of trying to clone the human experience, whether
you know it's artificially or physically um in these and
we've talked about the pooping duck quite a bit. Yeah,
Vodka Song is actually the French engineer from the seventeenth
(23:49):
century eighteenth century dream of these up. Yeah, and he
was he was fascinated according to some historians, because he
was fascinated with digestion and defecation, uh the way, because
he had rather troubled bowels himself. Um. And then automatons
also date back to the day like Leonardo da Vinci
or even even further back into the past. Leonardo DaVinci
(24:10):
was a course fascinated with biomechanics. How does the body move,
how do muscles work? And so he had plans for
this and apparently even built this mechanical night that that
while you know, don't get too excited, it probably was
not walking around doing chores around the house, but on
some level mimicked the movements of the human body. You know,
he was, he was fascinating. It's like, this is how
(24:31):
the the mechanics of the body work. And I reproduced
these with wood and string and and hinges. It was
a vast pulley system. And I believe that he would
have dinner parties and roll out the robotic nitis. He
was like, you know, cocktail thing to chat about that
never survived? Is that correct? Is that? Is that the
instance in which the church decided that it was abomination
(24:56):
as well, and the church was a lot of people
would get kind of freaked out. Autumatono, we destroy them. Yeah,
Albertus Magnus supposedly had some sort of a they called
an android in some cases, but you know, some sort
of artificial man, and and uh, his his own pupil
freaked out about that and destroyed it, according to again
according to stories. But yeah, the idea here is that
(25:17):
that people were looking at humans, looking at them as machines,
and then trying to replicate a machine. And I have
this a really interesting idea emerges, a really just one
of the big you know, existential ponderings and part of
part of the horror of the Frankenstein story, both in uh,
in the original novel and in our modern interaction with it,
and that is, if a machine can mimic the human body,
(25:39):
then is the human body nothing more than a biochemical machine?
If I can make it, then what does that say
about me? Like? If I'm if Frankenstein makes this monster,
this human monster, why is it a monster? Does you know?
Does it have a soul? Is it? Am I equal
to it? If it is something special? Then am I less?
The problem of consciousness? Right? Yeah, you get into like, uh,
(26:02):
you know, I think therefore I am French philosopher Reneatic
Carts of you nature is primarily mechanical, but he avoided
the messier existential complimications by describing the human soul as
an independent force. The Carts critic Gilbert Ryle would the
later described as the ghost in the machine, the idea that, yeah,
our bodies are machines, but our our soul, that's something different,
(26:22):
that's something separate, and that ties right into the cognitive
blindness that we all have. The brain cannot perceive itself.
We exist in our own blind spot right well, and
and still we are trying to find that blind spot,
you know. So scoot forward to today when we have
the Blue Brain Project, and we've talked about this before,
but that's the attempt to reverse engineer the brain by
(26:43):
building a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain.
And it's one hundred trillion synapses, more specifically modeling components
of the mammalion brain in precise cellular detail and simulating
neuronal activity in three D. So the person that is
doing in this is is actually sort of wondering if
(27:03):
once he's able to successfully reverse engineer the human brain,
if we'll be able to see that that seat of consciousness,
this bubble, this of perception that we see everything through.
Could we map it, could be point to it? Um
does that change our understanding of our humanness? But to
me it also brings into question that the same question
(27:24):
that Mary Shelley was um exploring, is what happens when
you do create this version of yourself that assuming you know,
you can reverse engineer your own brain and then you
um could map it to uh computer program has uh
say an emotional database, your own an emotional database. Uh
(27:44):
that sort of corresponds with it, let's say with questionnaires
that you've filled out. Okay, so now this brain could
operate on its own and essentially be you just you know,
in this database. What what happens with that? What's what
sort of responsibility we have for creating a version of
ourselves that might actually have a seat of consciousness? Yeah?
(28:05):
Does it happen? We don't know, But yeah, does it
have rights? Does it get to be a citizen? I
mean you get into all this weird day which is
something else encounter with the with the contemplation of ais. Yes,
at what point does I mean is an artificial intelligence
on par with human intelligence? I mean you get into
the whole idea of the technological singularity and the idea
that that a computer intelligence would even supersede the human
(28:28):
intelligence and the and and exceed our our capabilities. And
this isn't too crazy of a conversation considering that we've
talked to, you know, Dr Ronald ark And over at
Georgia Tech about the the ability to try to create
nuanced emotions in a machine, which is what they're trying
to teach. It's very rudimentary right now, but that doesn't
mean that, uh, you know, a computer model or a
(28:49):
machine might begin to react in the ways that we do.
And if that's the case, uh, I don't know. Is
it weird? Do you have this version of yourself out
there that you abandon that you just get tired of
looking at your own brain that you've created. Yeah, I mean,
and elsewhere in the science is too. I mean, we're
creating synthetic bacteria in the lab where we continue to
break apart DNA and map map the genomes of various
(29:12):
species we um. I mean. And then as far as
physics go, I mean, we're colliding particles. We're trying to
unlock the mystery of the universe. Itself, like gravity exists,
and yeah, there's a there's a lot of potential in
these two if not create an actual Frankenstein's monster, but
to create the Frankenstein's monster as the I mean, the
idea of the Frankensteience monster creates something that really forces
(29:33):
us to reevaluate who and what we are and what's
and where we have, where we have risen to with science,
and then how how they they change in scientific illumination, um,
you know, how it changes our own our understanding of ourselves. Yeah,
and that's why I think it's so interesting that Dr
Arkin focuses on ethics so much, um, in terms of
(29:53):
robotics and what means fifty years from now, hundred years
from now, back to just the idea of the like
the hormon idea of the monster itself. What's what's your
favorite film adaptation of Frankenstein. Well, I really like the
one with Robert de Niro in it, simply because, well,
for two reasons, one good and one bad. Uh. The
good reason is that I think that it's pretty faithful
(30:17):
to the actual text and that you know, you've got
a Frankenstein monster that is very intelligent, um, has very
deep thoughts and is trying to express those. On the
other hand, you've got Robert de Niro, a fine actor, wonderful,
but I don't know about de Niro as Frankenstein because
he's got a little bit of a New York accent
(30:39):
trying to say, well, did this happen to me? And
there's no way they could have been using New York
parts because they're having to import most of that exactly. Yeah,
it would be made out of like cockney parts. Yes,
I'm conflicted about that. Yeah, and I'm not I'm not
saying that de Niro isn't a wonderful actor. He is,
but just not has been. I don't of he is anymore.
(31:01):
I'm just saying Frankenstein probably wasn't is a greatest role
of his life. You you, I actually have a roof.
I haven't seen this one in years, but I remember
there was a TV movie where he had Patrick Bergen
I believe is his name, as as as Victor and
then Randy Quaid played the monster. Yeah, and it was
Is it a comedy? No, No, Randy was playing it straight.
(31:23):
I mean Randy was slapp is a very talented actor. Um,
it was just mainly remembered for his stuff, his more
comedic roles. But but yeah, I remember him as being
really good as the monster. It was a pretty like
like the version you're talking about with Kenneth Brawna. It was.
It was pretty accurate. I mean, it was pretty faithful
to the text. You know, began and ended in the Arctic,
(31:46):
and I remember just being really captivated by it when
I watched it as a kid, Right, I would I
would be very interested to know what your favorite adaptation is. Yeah, yeah,
like Karloff the fire Fire one, because I mean there's
my It's what that one too? Yeah? Or you're more
of a hammerman. Do you prefer to the like the
monster from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell which looks
(32:06):
like the big like Harry gorilla man with stitches on
its head. I mean, there's just so many cool, cool
variations that have popped up over the years. All right, well, um,
Matt is telling us we have to stop. I had
more to share. I had so much more to tell
you about the alchemy. But but when that's being shut down,
you'll have to write in and complain about it. If
(32:27):
you want to share non complaints with us, you can
find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are Below the
Mind on both of those, and you can always find
us at Blow the Mind at how stuffourth stot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey're welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. I'm Julie Douglas. Julie your
Halloween costume that you're wearing for this podcast. Um, I
noticed that your hair is really tall and you have
a really impressive white stream coming down the side. Yes,
(00:26):
are you the bride of Frankenstein's Monster? No, I'm Marge
Simpson in her later years. Oh well, well sorry, but
it looks like the bride of Frankenstein. What are you saying? See,
I never get my costumes right. But what about you?
What's what's going on over there? Well, as you can
tell by my by the burns on my body as
well as the reek of burnt urine that surrounds me.
(00:49):
Who's going to say something about that? Yeah? I am,
of course an alchemist, busy applying my trade in my laboratory,
trying to discover the secrets of life to turn to
transmute nettles into gold and uh, and turn one type
of animal into another and you'urn into gold. Of course,
I'm totally about the gold, and urine is kind of
gold looking, So there's gotta be a way to turn
(01:09):
into go. Yeah, you know, I appreciate your commitment to
the illusion. By the way, Uh, podcast room is really
small and enclosed. Well, you know, I'm hungent right now.
I'm committed to the idea I go all the way,
been burning here and all night. So both of these
play into what we're gonna talk about today, which is,
of course Frankenstein's Monster or Frank's monsters as you like
(01:31):
to call yeah, yeah, or some people just call the
monster Frankenstein. And and that's technically incorrect, but it's it's
been used to such an extent it's it's almost to
the point where it's okay to call the Frankenstein's Monster Frankenstein. Uh. Well,
and I think it's actually quite reasonable given that it
was this, this creature and made in Frankenstein's image sort
(01:51):
of burned man's image. Yeah yeah, and he never actually
names it. I mean it's uh, you know, the demon,
the creature and occasionally some more wordy to descriptions that
because it's a it's a rather poetic novel. The original
the original book Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary
Shelley eighteen. It's never been out of print, and uh,
(02:13):
if you haven't read it. If you have not read
this book, I I highly recommend you giving it a read.
It can be a little wordy at times, but it's
it's just really great. Uh that like Frankenstein, the Man
is uh, you know, it's very philosophical about everything, and
he's putting a lot of thought into this in the
in the monster is very intelligent as well, and it
engages in a lot of a lot of deep ponderings
(02:35):
about his own life and his purpose and what has
happened to him and all this misery that has has
befallen him in the state of mankind. I mean, it's
a it's an intelligent novel. Well the ways that the
movies really rarely are able to capture. Well, the movies
are more like fire fire scared, right, and and this
is more like, hey, let me tell you about my
(02:56):
existincial angst as a creature that was abandoned. Yeah, was
created by a man and by an imperfect man, and
abandoned on an imperfect world. And over the past month
I was asked by How Stuff Works to write an
article how Frankenstein's Monster works. And I set out to
write it, and uh, you know, I could have just
written a whole regigitation of the normal. Hey, there was
(03:17):
this lady Mary Shelley and she got scared in a
lightning storm and was in a story writing contest, and
then she wrote this, and then these people played Frankenstein
in the movie. And that's all well and good. All
the I mean, the the story of the novel and
the and the the pop culture significance of the of
the book and the idea is really cool and uh
and I can read it all day, and there are
plenty places on the internet already to read about it
(03:39):
all day. But I was really more interested in the
idea of Frankenstein's monster in our culture is this idea
that we can create life, that we can we can
take and not just create life in the way that
humans create life every day through approcreation, but the idea
that I can use my wisdom and my intelligence and
with one hand sort of flip off God and with
(04:00):
the other one make a little man that will walk
around and do what I tell it to. Well, in
this idea, too, that we perhaps just haven't discovered the
right element or the right thing, or the right piece
of knowledge to transcend our own humanness right into to
make a better version of ourselves. Yeah. And this the
idea too, has been around forever. I mean it. I
(04:21):
mean it goes back to just our basic like cognitive abilities. Uh,
to look at an object and imagine it alive. The
idea to anthropomorphize things and to and to personify even
like aspects of nature. You know, you have like the
Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculpture that is awakened by
the god Venus and turned into an actual lady and uh.
(04:42):
And you also have one of my favorite ideas, the
golem or and I found this interesting that you can
also since this is a Jewish idea, it can be
pronounced golm um, which is, I guess more in keeping
with the Hebrew. And the most famous version of this
was the Golem of of Prague, which is it is
a medieval myth and it eventually found its way into
(05:03):
new life in the ninet novel Drek Golem. In this
particular story, you have this guy, Rabbi Judah Low bin Besabel,
and he's an expert in the use of the magical
use of letters to create various magical effects. And these
are almost like incantations, right, I mean you could say
there are prayers, yeah, and then it gets into the
soul like there's a whole lot of stuff in in
Judaism and incamalo, the importance of the importance of names,
(05:26):
the importance of letters, and the importance of the name
of God, right and uh and so I mean you
have things like the Sefer Yasarrah. The Book of Creation,
which is often referred to as a guide to magical
usage by some Western European Jews in the Middle Ages
and in some of the involved various directions for creating
a goal, on some of which it involved taking the
name of God and rearranging the letters and putting them
(05:50):
on things and and bringing them to life. But in
the most of the tellings of this particular story of
the Golm of Prague, Besabel creates this clay humanoid because
gold basically means clot of earth, and he activates it
by placing um. He writes the word a meth meaning
that's a m E t h meaning truth and reality
on a shim tablet, and he places that under the
(06:12):
thing's tongue. Then it comes to life. Then he starts
using this golm to ring the bell at the synagogue.
But the only thing is you have to take the
tablet out of its mouth and turn it off, because
all it knows how to do is ring bells, apparently,
and he forgets to take it out of the creature's mouth,
and then it just runs wild one night, presumably, ringing
everything in sight like it's a bell. He's harassing people
(06:34):
are getting around. Yeah, it's like when the roomba escapes
from the living room that you want to vacuum and
you catch it in the bathroom eating the rug. That
kind of thing. Um. The rabbi has to hunt it down,
and when he finally gets there, he pulls the little
tablet out from under its tongue, and the word a
myth a m e t t h, which means you know,
life and all uh becomes the word meth m e
(06:55):
t h which means death and the and the golden
falls into dust. Um. And then the other tales as well.
There's this one story of a rabbi and the name
of JF and Prussia and he um. He has a
golem like like the candles in the synagogue, but the
golem can't really tell what's a candle. H. And what
a non candle is like it it basically thinks everything
is a candle, so it lights everything inside on fire.
(07:17):
So it's the programming doesn't work all that well. And
then there were apparently some stories to where there were
some ethical debates on the use of golems not only
for the use of you know, tasks and chores around
the synagogue, but the use of golems for the purposes
of of making the required number for the minya, and
which is the the qorum of a ten Jewish adults
(07:38):
required for certain religious observations, which indeed, I would feel
it would be like, all right, you need to tend
people to make this decision, and you're telling me three
of them were made out of clay. That yeah, especially
since we know that the column doesn't really have the
ability of speech, right right. That's what I thought was
interesting met this is that the it's predicated on this
(08:00):
notion that only holy men could create this golem, and
yet uh, the golm was going to be completely imperfect
in the shadow of man because the golm was not
created by God, right, And just there's an aside too.
I find it interesting that they are taking symbols rearranging
them to create artificial beings, which has a nice parallel
(08:22):
with modern programming and uh an artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, yeh.
We'll get into a little later. I haven't thought about that,
but this ties in well with the The idea of
Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus. I mean, that's right up front,
that's the subtitle for the book. Prometheus, of course, being
the titan that retrieves the fire. Uh, takes the fire
from the gods and gives it to humans and is
(08:44):
then punished by what being lashed to a stone so
that the birds can come in. Yeah, because the ego
that comes and eats the liver, and then unfortunately the
liver grows back. And then this is it's like groundhog Day.
Every day the same thing happens, just an endless groundhog
day of the liver doomed to have your liver eating everything.
But he took something that was the gods, the domain
of the gods, the fire, and he gave it to man.
(09:07):
And then now man has the ability to use this
fire and build up his civilization with it, and with fire,
of course, achieve great goods such as staying warm at night,
and great evil like burning cities to the ground, right right.
And I think it's so interesting to that Greek mythology
would would focus on this because you really mean, this
was such the turning point for man, right, the discovery
of fire and the power that it had and the
(09:28):
sustenance that it had. Um that you know, they had
to come up with this uh myth about it that
that uh celebrated it and then also said, uh, but
with this comes great responsibility, right right, which is another
sort of theme that we see in Frankenstein. Yeah. And
and of course you think of like the way fire
(09:49):
changed everything and how it powered and destroyed, I mean
the ability to to murder and create, to uh, to
steal from ts Eliott Uh and uh and one can't
help me be reminded of trees and centuries I mean
thousands of years later. Uh. The importance of electricity as well,
which is suddenly this Promethean fire that comes to us
through technological advancement that has all these great abilities. I mean,
(10:13):
electricity surrounds us today as the it's it's everywhere, it
is part of our civilization, is it's it's hard first
to imagine our modern lives without it. Oh, yeah, I
can't I can't can't see of a life divorced from electricity, right,
I mean, obviously, so much of the technology that we
enjoyed today wouldn't even exist. But during Mary Shelley's time,
electricity had really captured the imagination of people, and yet
(10:35):
it was quite feared because it wasn't truly understood, right.
It was a mysterious property. And I remember seeing reading
accounts to where people were really judgmental about the idea
of using them for electric chairs, because pretty early on
people were like, like Edison was like, Hey, this electricity
is great. Watched me fry this elephant, you know, topsy
things of that nature, and they were like, we could
totally fry prisoners with this. And there were some people
(10:57):
were like, how can you take this holy gift of electricity,
I mean it's too and use it for something horrible
like that, you're really debasing this wonderful thing. Well, what's
interesting about that too, is that Edison was in competition.
He had a C right, and it was a volta
that had d C the DC current, and so it
was Edison who was going around saying, Ah, don't fear
(11:20):
my a C current. It's not as dangerous as the
DC and I believe they are using the d C current.
I could have it switched around, but I believe they
are using a d C current on prisoners. And that
was sort of a scare tactic on his part to
be like to say to companies, you should really adopt
my my electrical currency rather than this other one. Just
as a side note, but the you know, in the
(11:40):
previous podcast, we were talking about the way, you know,
if you're shocked by heaven forbid coming into contact with
a live wire, you fly away from the outlet or
the source of electricity because your muscles are spasming. Well,
this is exactly the response that various scientists at the
day and Mary Sheelow's day, we're looking into the effects
of electricity on dead tissue. Yeah, and it actually became
(12:01):
sort of a sideshow. Really, this frog's dead, but watchford
happens when I stick alive fire to it? Right right?
Or this prisoner is dead, Look what happened? The prisoners
decapitated By the way they were doing this that I
think they were thinking about like science festivals, showing the
public this ability to reanimate a corpse. Yeah, it's like, look,
first we reanimate the frog legs and then they become
(12:23):
delicious all through electricity, right, right, And so people were
of course even more frightened, and they started to think
that electricity had the ability to to reanimate their loved ones,
and they were totally weirded out because they were like,
he's right, these frog legs are delicious and they can move. Um.
So Mary Shelley actually knew all about this, by the way,
(12:44):
because it's referenced in the book of Victor Frankenstein. I mean,
it's told like a lot of these older novels. It's
a one character talking about conversations with others, and Victor
doesn't share the details of how he creates life because
it's a horrible secret that destroyed his life and and
led to the dead of of everyone he holds dear
in life. So he's not going to burden anyone else
(13:04):
with the secret recipe. But he does mention in passing
a few different influences, one of which are these studies
into electricity. Yeah, and I mean, just everybody knows to
Marie Shelley's father was actually friends with the leading authorities
of the day on electrical research. So this was these
were conversations that she was privy to. And also, I
(13:25):
mean she's nineteen years old, so amazing that she had
amassed this amount of knowledge and was able to put
this together and this pastiche of of a story of
this monster. But there you go. I mean, there's the
basis for this idea that we could bring back life.
And in a moment, we're actually going to talk about homunculous.
Oh yes, we're gonna get into alchemy, one of my favorites, alchemy,
(13:47):
making a tiny little person and what it has to
do with cow guts. Right. Yeah. This podcast is brought
to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the
Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark
which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and
(14:07):
explore the answers to life's questions. All right, so we're
back alchemy. Now this is another we're talking about the
the influences that Victor Frankenstein cites in the book, and
he he starts off really into alchemy and and studying
the writings of various alchemists. Then he gets into the
(14:27):
modern sciences and sort of goes off in that direction.
So it's eventual creation of this monster of this artificial
being is kind of a synthesis of modern science and
alchemical ideas. Now, alchemy, if you go back through eighteenth centuries,
this is essentially a mix of early chemistry and occultism,
(14:49):
So you're crossing empirical research with mystical philosophy. Um. And
it's kind of Alchemy is kind of a big tent
when you get when you really start analyzing it, because
they're on one hand, people interested in transmitting metals um.
Right there there are people who are just prospecting essentially
from gold. So some people were citing more on the
get rich quick kind of aspects of alchemy. Some people
(15:10):
were really more into the occultists or philosophical aspects of it.
And some people were basically chemist in a day when
there's not really there's no chemistry yet. So if you
are interested in chemical properties, alchemy is where you are.
It's the only game in town for the most part,
at least in much of the world. Uh And and
certainly there's some actual scientific achievements that came out of this.
I mentioned reeking of burning urine, which which some of
(15:33):
these uh, these alchemists did because there was a great
deal of interest in urine and in the possibility of
turning it into gold. And seventeenth century German alchemists Hinnig
Brount distilled countless buckets of urine uh in attempt to
turn turn it into gold, and as you might expect,
the experiment failed to produce results, but it did allow
(15:54):
them to discover the element phosphorus. So you have situations
like that where even in alchemy, in this study of chemistry,
people are actually making real discoveries, and as you point
out before, without the aid of the scientific method, right,
so it's you know, which obviously would have farreted out
a lot of what was wrong with alchemy, but at
the time it was a great way to try to
(16:15):
interrogate the physical world around you. Right of course, where
does this get involved with? Like why alchemy and Victor
Frankenstein And a lot of this comes down to the
idea of the homunculous or homunculi and that's the plural.
And this is an idea that's fascinated me for ages,
just because on one level, what's so grotesque and steeped
in medieval um nonsense that you know, I can't help
(16:37):
but just fall in love with it. So I was
researching this, researching how to create a homunculous and yes
for myself. Um and and not just in the old
fashioned way of just screwing up your compost heap until
it comes alive. M though that's also involved in this.
You know, the early idea that when material rots, it
turns an insect like that's a basic misunderstanding of how
(16:59):
organic works. And so a lot of these alchemical ideas
of how to create life stem from misunderstandings of how
it works. And this idea that that we basically that
it was within our reach, even in the Middle Ages,
to understand it and control it. So the idea of
the homunculus is basically basically comes down to I can
grow a little person, not just like an animal. I
(17:21):
can not only make an animal, because they're also alchemical
um recipes for say, turning a headless cow into a
swarm of beast, which I think I'm going to share
that one on the blogs soon. But but I was.
But but the idea of the monthless is also that
it is a reasoning creature that you're making. It's not
it's maybe not quite a human, but it is like
(17:41):
a little human, like a tesque little humanoid, right, grotesque
little humor, which I think is fascinating because I can
kind of inhabit that perspective at that time to think like, okay,
this would be possible. Maybe I can't make a full
grown human, but I can make it in miniature, you know,
sort of like my sea monkeys over here. Yeah. Yeah,
well you know it's it's lost, you know, in these
false concepts of spontaneous generation, like we said, magical tomfoolery,
(18:05):
but they're basically pondering the possibility of creating an artificial
quote rational animal unquote through uh learned manipulation of organic tissue. Okay,
so what is that organic tissue? Because that's that's where
it becomes a little cringe worthy. Okay, Well, I have
to read part of the recipe because and this comes
from the Book of the Cow, which is which the
(18:26):
what I guess this is French is the Liberva I
think it might be Latin Latin. I'm sorry, yeah, but
it's the Book of the Cow because the cow factors
prominently into these, uh these recipes. And so I'm just
gonna read a little here until Julie stops me. Um.
But it goes a little something like this, and and
this is from Mike vander Luke's abdominal mixtures the Libertvaca
(18:50):
in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of
Natural Magic, he writes, then describing the recipe in the book.
With the mixture of sperm and sunstone, the magician inseminates
a cow, or are you. He then carefully plugs up
its vagina with the sunstone and smears its genitals with
the blood of the animal that was not chosen for insemination.
Then the cow that you must be placed in a
(19:12):
dark house in which the sun never shines. Its food
must be mixed with the blood of other animals. While
awaiting the moment of birth, the magician prepares a powder
made of the ground sunstone, sulfur, magnet, and green tutilla
stirred with the sap of the white willow. The unformed
substance to which the you or the cow gives birth
must be placed in this powder, whereupon it will instantly
(19:33):
grow a human skin. The newborn homoculous must be kept
in a large glass or lead vessel for three days
until it is very hungry. Then it is fed on
its decapitated mother's blood for seven days until it is
developed into a complete animal, it can henceforth be used
to perform certain feats. Um. All right, I'm just gonna
go and stop a whole another paragraph of just because
(19:54):
it gets down. Once you've created it, you like put
it into this this other vat and you grow it
a little more, and then you can you can kill
it and like spirits guts on your shoes and you
can walk on water. But the crazy thing is here
is aside I think being the original recipe for hagus.
It completely reminds me of of when we've talked about
(20:14):
growing tissue before and scaffolding um tissue. I mean that's
not to say that you know this, this modern day
technology is based on alchemy, but it's interesting that that
idea it's very similar to what we are now doing
because we have the technology, right. Yeah, all of this
was based in the idea of the humans could mimic
(20:34):
and manipulate natural reproductive processes. I mean, especially they were
really confident about insects. They were like, insects, that's easy,
I can I can make bees all day and uh
and and and then that the greater idea was that, yeah,
we we've kind of got this snack. We can make
some momuncula and then let I'm loose, which you know
again today, Hey, we can grow an ear from this tissue.
(20:56):
We have to scaffold it and bake it for a while. Yeah.
In in reading these just detailed grotesque recipes for how
to make a monculie too. For some reason, I was
reminded of various Cypress Hill songs where be Real just
basically raps about like how to grow like a detailed
um recipe for growing marijuana or for smoking it. And
(21:17):
I was I was like, wouldn't it be awesome if
there is a Cypress Hill song where they're just laying
out how to make a homunculi? That would be or
like the Anarchist's Guide to Homunculi. Yeah, that would be awesome.
But I mean the other side of this, too, is
that this represents like such a dangerous idea, and this
was something that like people who were afraid, Like, it's
very unlikely that too many people wasted their time trying
(21:39):
to actually do this, but a lot of people probably
wasted their time, uh freaking out about the idea that
people were doing this. They were like, oh my goodness,
they are these alchemists, and they're they're they're doing this
and they and if this works, they have such power
they have they have power over nature. They have power
that rivals that of God, all through their their magic
and their science and their art. Well, the Book of
(22:00):
Caw actually probably was the undoing of alchemy if you
think about it, because it wasn't this the first cohesive
effort to put all of this sort of science and
occult these recipes together and try to make sense of it.
It's like, all right, we're alchemists. These are the things
that we sort of believed in. And then people were
like look at it and they're like, wow, we this
is really what we've been doing. Yeah. Yeah, like taken
all together, this just really seems like it's not working.
(22:21):
That being said the most learned of the day. That's
that was a hot tone to have on your bookshelf right,
And also it was some people thought it was absolutely
putrid and abomination against nature to even be talking about
it was good reading in another way. Yeah, But of
course alchemy would eventually see its day. Chemistry would rise,
(22:41):
even though in some critics actually argue that alchemy prevented
chemistry from really going for a long time because it
was such a I mean, it was also a kind
of a taboo area, you know. But eventually alchemy dies off.
And uh. There's another area where we really see this
idea of of mimicking the human form, cre eating the
human body, and that is in the field of robotics,
(23:03):
specifically in the field of the creation of automatons, which
of course are like you know, mechanical men. Uh that
they're not really robots. They don't actually uh take in
sense data and uh in in in process the sense
data and then make a decision about what action they're
gonna take. There's no computation, but they're like wind up men,
wind up ladies, dolls that dance. But we've discussed the
(23:26):
pooping duck, of course. But as I say, some of
them mimic actual human biology. And again here we have
this idea of trying to clone the human experience, whether
you know it's artificially or physically um in these and
we've talked about the pooping duck quite a bit. Yeah,
Vodka Song is actually the French engineer from the seventeenth
(23:49):
century eighteenth century dream of these up. Yeah, and he
was he was fascinated according to some historians, because he
was fascinated with digestion and defecation, uh the way, because
he had rather troubled bowels himself. Um. And then automatons
also date back to the day like Leonardo da Vinci
or even even further back into the past. Leonardo DaVinci
(24:10):
was a course fascinated with biomechanics. How does the body move,
how do muscles work? And so he had plans for
this and apparently even built this mechanical night that that
while you know, don't get too excited, it probably was
not walking around doing chores around the house, but on
some level mimicked the movements of the human body. You know,
he was, he was fascinating. It's like, this is how
(24:31):
the the mechanics of the body work. And I reproduced
these with wood and string and and hinges. It was
a vast pulley system. And I believe that he would
have dinner parties and roll out the robotic nitis. He
was like, you know, cocktail thing to chat about that
never survived? Is that correct? Is that? Is that the
instance in which the church decided that it was abomination
(24:56):
as well, and the church was a lot of people
would get kind of freaked out. Autumatono, we destroy them. Yeah,
Albertus Magnus supposedly had some sort of a they called
an android in some cases, but you know, some sort
of artificial man, and and uh, his his own pupil
freaked out about that and destroyed it, according to again
according to stories. But yeah, the idea here is that
(25:17):
that people were looking at humans, looking at them as machines,
and then trying to replicate a machine. And I have
this a really interesting idea emerges, a really just one
of the big you know, existential ponderings and part of
part of the horror of the Frankenstein story, both in uh,
in the original novel and in our modern interaction with it,
and that is, if a machine can mimic the human body,
(25:39):
then is the human body nothing more than a biochemical machine?
If I can make it, then what does that say
about me? Like? If I'm if Frankenstein makes this monster,
this human monster, why is it a monster? Does you know?
Does it have a soul? Is it? Am I equal
to it? If it is something special? Then am I less?
The problem of consciousness? Right? Yeah, you get into like, uh,
(26:02):
you know, I think therefore I am French philosopher Reneatic
Carts of you nature is primarily mechanical, but he avoided
the messier existential complimications by describing the human soul as
an independent force. The Carts critic Gilbert Ryle would the
later described as the ghost in the machine, the idea that, yeah,
our bodies are machines, but our our soul, that's something different,
(26:22):
that's something separate, and that ties right into the cognitive
blindness that we all have. The brain cannot perceive itself.
We exist in our own blind spot right well, and
and still we are trying to find that blind spot,
you know. So scoot forward to today when we have
the Blue Brain Project, and we've talked about this before,
but that's the attempt to reverse engineer the brain by
(26:43):
building a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain.
And it's one hundred trillion synapses, more specifically modeling components
of the mammalion brain in precise cellular detail and simulating
neuronal activity in three D. So the person that is
doing in this is is actually sort of wondering if
(27:03):
once he's able to successfully reverse engineer the human brain,
if we'll be able to see that that seat of consciousness,
this bubble, this of perception that we see everything through.
Could we map it, could be point to it? Um
does that change our understanding of our humanness? But to
me it also brings into question that the same question
(27:24):
that Mary Shelley was um exploring, is what happens when
you do create this version of yourself that assuming you know,
you can reverse engineer your own brain and then you
um could map it to uh computer program has uh
say an emotional database, your own an emotional database. Uh
(27:44):
that sort of corresponds with it, let's say with questionnaires
that you've filled out. Okay, so now this brain could
operate on its own and essentially be you just you know,
in this database. What what happens with that? What's what
sort of responsibility we have for creating a version of
ourselves that might actually have a seat of consciousness? Yeah?
(28:05):
Does it happen? We don't know, But yeah, does it
have rights? Does it get to be a citizen? I
mean you get into all this weird day which is
something else encounter with the with the contemplation of ais. Yes,
at what point does I mean is an artificial intelligence
on par with human intelligence? I mean you get into
the whole idea of the technological singularity and the idea
that that a computer intelligence would even supersede the human
(28:28):
intelligence and the and and exceed our our capabilities. And
this isn't too crazy of a conversation considering that we've
talked to, you know, Dr Ronald ark And over at
Georgia Tech about the the ability to try to create
nuanced emotions in a machine, which is what they're trying
to teach. It's very rudimentary right now, but that doesn't
mean that, uh, you know, a computer model or a
(28:49):
machine might begin to react in the ways that we do.
And if that's the case, uh, I don't know. Is
it weird? Do you have this version of yourself out
there that you abandon that you just get tired of
looking at your own brain that you've created. Yeah, I mean,
and elsewhere in the science is too. I mean, we're
creating synthetic bacteria in the lab where we continue to
break apart DNA and map map the genomes of various
(29:12):
species we um. I mean. And then as far as
physics go, I mean, we're colliding particles. We're trying to
unlock the mystery of the universe. Itself, like gravity exists,
and yeah, there's a there's a lot of potential in
these two if not create an actual Frankenstein's monster, but
to create the Frankenstein's monster as the I mean, the
idea of the Frankensteience monster creates something that really forces
(29:33):
us to reevaluate who and what we are and what's
and where we have, where we have risen to with science,
and then how how they they change in scientific illumination, um,
you know, how it changes our own our understanding of ourselves. Yeah,
and that's why I think it's so interesting that Dr
Arkin focuses on ethics so much, um, in terms of
(29:53):
robotics and what means fifty years from now, hundred years
from now, back to just the idea of the like
the hormon idea of the monster itself. What's what's your
favorite film adaptation of Frankenstein. Well, I really like the
one with Robert de Niro in it, simply because, well,
for two reasons, one good and one bad. Uh. The
good reason is that I think that it's pretty faithful
(30:17):
to the actual text and that you know, you've got
a Frankenstein monster that is very intelligent, um, has very
deep thoughts and is trying to express those. On the
other hand, you've got Robert de Niro, a fine actor, wonderful,
but I don't know about de Niro as Frankenstein because
he's got a little bit of a New York accent
(30:39):
trying to say, well, did this happen to me? And
there's no way they could have been using New York
parts because they're having to import most of that exactly. Yeah,
it would be made out of like cockney parts. Yes,
I'm conflicted about that. Yeah, and I'm not I'm not
saying that de Niro isn't a wonderful actor. He is,
but just not has been. I don't of he is anymore.
(31:01):
I'm just saying Frankenstein probably wasn't is a greatest role
of his life. You you, I actually have a roof.
I haven't seen this one in years, but I remember
there was a TV movie where he had Patrick Bergen
I believe is his name, as as as Victor and
then Randy Quaid played the monster. Yeah, and it was
Is it a comedy? No, No, Randy was playing it straight.
(31:23):
I mean Randy was slapp is a very talented actor. Um,
it was just mainly remembered for his stuff, his more
comedic roles. But but yeah, I remember him as being
really good as the monster. It was a pretty like
like the version you're talking about with Kenneth Brawna. It was.
It was pretty accurate. I mean, it was pretty faithful
to the text. You know, began and ended in the Arctic,
(31:46):
and I remember just being really captivated by it when
I watched it as a kid, Right, I would I
would be very interested to know what your favorite adaptation is. Yeah, yeah,
like Karloff the fire Fire one, because I mean there's
my It's what that one too? Yeah? Or you're more
of a hammerman. Do you prefer to the like the
monster from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell which looks
(32:06):
like the big like Harry gorilla man with stitches on
its head. I mean, there's just so many cool, cool
variations that have popped up over the years. All right, well, um,
Matt is telling us we have to stop. I had
more to share. I had so much more to tell
you about the alchemy. But but when that's being shut down,
you'll have to write in and complain about it. If
(32:27):
you want to share non complaints with us, you can
find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are Below the
Mind on both of those, and you can always find
us at Blow the Mind at how stuffourth stot com.
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