Aquinas watches Alita: Battle Angel

I just finished watching Alita: Battle Angel and I would first like to say, before anything else, that it was an amazing film! I like the cliffhanger in the end. The movie ought to have a part two, and I’ll be eagerly waiting for the part two.

            Anyways, there were parts of the movie which I want to talk about in a Hylomorphic Dualist perspective. Hylomorphic Dualism is the view on the mind’s relationship to the body (and vice versa) taken from the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of matter and form. Things of our experience, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, are composed of matter and form. Take, for example, a black leather shoe. The matter, or the material cause, of the leather shoe is obviously the leather. The form, or the formal cause of the leather shoe is its patterns, or the structure it exhibits, like its blackness, size, etc.

            Things of our experience are then composed of form and matter. They won’t exist unless form instantiates matter. After all, we can’t wear blackness and size 10, and leather can exist without being a shoe. For something to be a particular thing that it is, therefore, it must have a particular form and a particular matter that can have that form. It is also important to take note that, in the ordinary sense anyway, although matter cannot exist without form, forms can actually exist without matter, as in immaterial substances like angels, according to Aquinas. Hence, matter and form, though they must be combined so that material things may exist, are distinct aspects of a being.

            For living things, though, there is a special case on the distinction between form and matter. The form of living things is what is called a “soul”. And in us human beings, since our souls are rational souls, while it may depend on our sensory faculties to gain knowledge, it can act apart from the body when abstracting or conceptualizing what we sense. Hence, our souls can, even though it cannot be considered as a complete being in and of itself given that it’s just a form of a matter, survive bodily death.

            This view on the mind and body, I maintain, is the only plausible view on our human personhood and what makes us unique beings in this world. The problems with the alternatives to Hylomorphic Dualism (i.e. Cartesian Dualism, Eliminative materialism) are incoherent for instead of solving the so-called “mind-body problem”, it sparks more problems like, say, problems of interaction, or that the arguments for these alternatives are guilty of circular argumentation. Of course, this post isn’t going to look at the arguments for and against Hylomorphism and deal with the issue of philosophy of mind per se, for this post is more of a “movie review” in the perspective of my view on the mind and body, not a defense of my view on the mind and body (for more info: here, here, and here for a few examples). I think what has been said so far suffices to be a quick intro to Hylomorphic Dualism in order to somehow understand what I’m gonna talk about in this post.

            In the beginning of the movie, Dr. Ido, a cyborg scientist, finds a disembodied female cyborg with a human brain. He rebuilds the cyborg and names her Baymax. No, not really, He names her “Alita”. Alita, however, doesn’t remember anything from her past, although her brain is fully intact. Now, at this point, the Hylomorphic dualist won’t be shocked, since, as we have seen, though matter and form have to be put together to constitute an existing material thing, matter is not identical from form. The brain, therefore, isn’t identical to the rational soul, or the mind. Though brain activities are somehow, someway correlated with our rationalizing or consciousness, they are not the same, just as although in a leather shoe, the size and the color are correlated with the leather, the size and the color isn’t the same as the leather. The brain, therefore, can be fully intact, or in the right shape, in a body while at the same time the capacity for thought may be damaged or the capacity for rationalizing may not be practiced perfectly.

            Alita, however, is not a rational animal. She is a machine. Alita, therefore, is more like an advanced super computer than a human being. So, it may be less misleading if the analogy to be used in Alita’s “memory loss” is a formatted flash drive, in which it’s former files are now gone (tech geeks, I’m correct, am I not?), rather than a man who has an Alzheimer’s disease. Alita’s “brain”, therefore, isn’t really like a brain in a human, but rather like a CPU for a computer. Her supposed “mental activities”, then, are more like when a calculator goes from “2” to “+” to “2” to “=” to “4”. And those symbols that come out of the screen when a calculator is used for computing equations, are mere meaningless pixels apart from an interpreter, and therefore presuppose a mind who can interpret it. Hence, Alita’s “thoughts” are not thoughts at all, but are mere mechanical algorithms, who cannot count as symbols at all unless interpreted as symbols by an interpreter.

            It would also follow from this that Alita isn’t a moral being, since she cannot really know what she ought to do and choose whether or not to do what she ought to do, but that she only does what she’s programmed to do (she’s good at fighting because she programmed to fight).

            But what has been said so far might be contradictory from what Alita does in the movie. Those who watched the movie might react, “but Alita is obviously conscious, she’s obviously capable of rational thought, emotions, etc.” and you may be right about this. But if ever you are right, it’s because the creators of Alita or any other sci-fi movie that’s like it has a wrong conception of the mind. For me, it’s as if Alita’s character has a mind that’s identical to her brain. Again, from the hylomorphic point of view, this is incorrect. The brain’s activities (firing of certain motor neurons, say) may be related with the mind, but the brain isn’t the mind, any more than the shape of something is the matter of something, although they are both needed and are related in a material thing (the roundness and the rubber in a rubber ball isn’t the same, obviously). Add to this the fact that Alita isn’t actually a rational being, but a machine, meaning rationality isn’t inherent in her, and the whole concept of a robot capable of intelligence falls.

            Another thing that is worth pointing out in the film is the fact that Nova, the real villain in the film, can transfer his consciousness into another person’s body/brain, and hence can use another person as a puppet. From the Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, a form of a thing does not exist in a “third realm” or a “platonic heaven”, but is rather existing in the very matter that it informs. My rational animality isn’t apart from me, existing in somewhere else, in which I just “participate in”, but rather, rational animality exists in me. Indeed, my rational animality isn’t your rational animality, dear reader. Though forms or essences like rational animality can exist as a universal in a person’s intellect, “the natures themselves, which are conceivable universally, exist in things” (From Aquinas’ De Anima, II. 12. 380).

            My form therefore, cannot inform someone else’s matter, nor can my matter instantiate someone else’s form. But my consciousness is a faculty of my soul, my form. My consciousness, then, cannot be transferred to someone else’s. The “consciousness transferring”, then, of Nova in the movie, is metaphysically absurd. It’s impossible. (Hylomorphism also then, if it isn’t obvious yet, rules out the possibility of reincarnation.)

            The last thing that I want to talk about is the part of the movie wherein Hugo, Alita’s human “boyfriend” supposedly “survives” after he gets decapitated and when his head gets transferred in a cyborg body and manages to live afterwards, though he still died in the end after falling from a factory tube in Zalem (Hugo’s relationship to Alita was immoral, by the way, for Eros has to be manifested by a human to another human, since Eros, according to natural law theory, is directed towards procreation and unity; this is obviously impossible between a human and a robot. Hugo’s relationship to Alita isn’t a relationship between two lovers, then, but between a human and a sex toy). When Hugo gets a cyborg body, from the hylomorphic point of view, he ceases to be what he was before his decapitation, for a cyborg body is obviously different from a human body, and hence a different form. Hugo, then, strictly speaking, didn’t survive his decapitation, for he has a different form now. In other words, he ceases to be Hugo after his decapitation, he is now a robot. The head of the cyborg, then, isn’t Hugo’s head, but rather what used to be Hugo’s head. It also would follow that his capacity for rationality ceased to exist after decapitation, and the post-decapitation Hugo is just operating from algorithms imposed in his robot body. It is again an absurdity that post-decapitation Hugo, or cyborg Hugo, “remembers” Alita, for cyborg Hugo doesn’t have the mind of the human Hugo.

            There’s much more to be said, maybe. But what has been said is enough to show that modern Sci-fi movies like Alita: Battle Angel are presupposing a very strict materialistic view of the world, wherein forms are neglected. Aquinas, then, while he may like the visual effects of such movies if he could’ve watched one, would be very disappointed of such bad philosophical views taken by these movies. He might even probably oppose these movies so radically, since they obviously have the tendency to corrupt a person’s knowledge about the world and about the means by which we learn it. One ought, then, to watch modern Sci-fi movies at their own risk, for it may radically affect their spiritual lives.