--Dr. Catherine Halsey, Halo (season one, episode two)
"Covenant's whole religion is based on things like this. Things from another time, things left behind. They roam the galaxy looking for pieces, looking for clues."
--Reth, Halo (season one, episode two)
No matter how far it is set in the future, science fiction cannot escape the deeper metaphysics that transcend evolving technology and its increasing impact on human societies. Matters like consciousness and its capacity for emotion, autonomy, and choice cannot be rendered nonexistent because some people ignore them in the name of philosophically secondary scientific issues. Halo tackles all of these and more with a higher emphasis on philosophical issues of psychology (which is just phenomenology), politics, and transhumanism than anything else. Even Cortana and her creator Dr. Halsey verbally distinguish between the body and across the first season, and ultimately, Paramount's Halo is really about emotion, the potential for individuality in autonomy, a unity of humans and artificial intelligence, and the human capacity to bring misery on other people in the name of allegedly ending human misery.
Master Chief, the central icon of the Halo multimedia franchise, is of course the main character, a Spartan soldier for the United Nations Space Command. Like Witchers, Spartans are supposedly devoid of emotion after undergoing harsh processes to make them effective at killing. Master Chief and his companions Kai, Vannak, and Riz of Silver Team are quite effective in combat because of this. Initially, they are intentionally blind to the social indoctrination they have internalized while a chemical pellet suppresses their emotion. This is all for the sake of engineering superhuman warriors that excel only at obeying a selfish government and killing whatever enemies they are thrown at by their handlers, but a former Spartan student who escaped the training program insists that the deprivation of emotion can be reversed by taking the pellet out of the body.
When physical contact with an alien artifact triggers dormant emotions, Master Chief quickly begins expressing autonomy in ways that threaten the authoritarian, utilitarian bent of the United Nations. As scientist Catherine Halsey prepares an artificial intelligence called Cortana to take over the bodies and minds of the Spartans, the experience of touching the artifact gives him the desire to return to do so again, providing him with memories of a childhood he had forgotten about and with bursts of emotion that return to normal once he pulls out the chemical pellet with the help of Cortana. For the first time since the young age when he was abducted and shaped into a biologically modified human, John 117, the Master Chief, is able to feel steady, strong, diverse emotions.
Fellow Silver Team Spartan Kai removes her pellet after seeing John (Master Chief) remove his, and she very outwardly starts to deviate from the cold demeanor of the Spartans that still have their implants. This puts her, like John, on a collision course with Dr. Halsey, who an egoist and a utilitarian who thinks that as long as favorable results come in the end, any means is permissible to achieve those results. She admits to the father of her only child that she would indeed sacrifice everything for the sake of the future success of her scientific and psychological work, not even pretending to hide her utilitarian disregard for any inconvenient truth or obligation that conflicts with her arbitrary whims to aid human evolution while trampling on humanity at the same time.
She mistakes emotionalism for emotion. Too stupid to even hint at the sharp distinction between reason and science while she embraces a legion of metaphysical and epistemological errors herself, she states that emotion ruins humans and makes them their own worst enemies. She thinks it logically follows from the possibility of emotion being misused (but she does imply she is an atheist, which makes her an even greater imbecile for thinking moral obligations to better the species could exist without a deity to ground them) that emotion will be misused. Like the fools who think that the capacity for sexuality, alcohol, or vehicles to hurt people means sexuality, alcohol, and vehicles are evil or irrational, she needlessly dehumanizes people as emotional beings despite still appearing to have her full range of emotions. The Cortana program, an AI that can be accessed by Spartans and that can even override their actions and their very consciousness, is fashioned to step in if it comes about that Halsey can no longer control her Spartan test subjects with the unilateral reach she wants.
One of the goals of her work is to protect humans from an extraterrestrial alliance with its own seeming version of theonomy, one that unfortunately is scarcely explored. There is great storytelling promise in an alien-held theonomy, both to explore what theonomy entails as a metaphysical-religious philosophy and to explore the epistemological nature of theonomy. Halo could have even clarified the parallels between the Covenant and humanity both being groups that gravitate towards religion and science simultaneously, with there being no philosophical contradiction between the two. The two, whatever the nature of the phenomena in the external world beyond human perception and whatever the nature of the uncaused cause beyond its causal powers and beginningless existence, are both confined by the laws of logic that constitute the only necessary truths in all of reality. It is only due to reason that not only anything can be true or even possible about anything else at all, but that it is possible to know certain things that are true and understand things that might even be false.
Beyond the alliance of alien races that form the Covenant wanting to become like ancient beings regarded as gods, gathering artifacts from prior eras, and despising humans, however, very little about them or their distinctively religious worldview is actually revealed. Like all of the human characters, these aliens talk and act as if they believe things that cannot be logically verified, such as that their conscience proves moral obligations. Regarding this matter, Master Chief once asks a child target of the UNSC, "Would you let a kid be executed?" The two of them agree that it is wrong, but due to nothing more than personal, emotional discomfort. It is objectively and demonstrably true that neither scientific outcomes nor personal emotion ground or reveal morality, if obligations indeed exist, but it is also true by necessity that emotion is the second most philosophically important part of humans after the capacity for rationalistic awareness and the devotion to truth and moral longing it can inspire. It can only interfere with someone's rationality, which is a grasp of the laws of logic that underpin all things and are neither a scientific or psychological existent, if someone allows it to, however difficult it might be to control it. Emotion is also what allows for pleasure of the deepest kind to be felt even towards the necessary truths of reason, the uncaused cause (God), fellow humans, and science itself, though Dr. Halsey fails to discover or acknowledge any of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment