Hiroshi Ishiguro the roboticist and his humanoid robot

We use avatar bodies all the time and in many different senses. However, in order to understand this we have to first come to terms with an old, familiar and often under-appreciated friend: the body. Throughout our lives it is our constant companion. We are wed to it in the most hyper-literal sense of the common expression ‘till death do us part.’ Yet, Kabbalah adds in another characterization which problematizes our locked-in corporeal identity by asserting that the body is a garment.

The soul has a number of garments in the Jewish mystical tradition. They are not all of equal status. Functionally, a garment trades on the fact that it simultaneously reveals and conceals. With finer reflection, we might even put forth the notion that its disclosures come via dissimulations. This contention is founded upon the dual significance of the Hebrew word beged [בגד] which means both a ‘garment’ and ‘betrayal.’ Clothing is misleading as it screens the naked truth and masks the underlying form. Its opacity opens a gap between reality and appearance.

The most basic treacherous play involves the division between the public outer garments of speech and action and the inner undergarment of thought which normally remains private. Ambiguities are cultivated every time I question if your thoughts correspond to and are adequately expressed by your words and deeds. By knowing the extroverted self can we fully be aquatinted with the inner person? Socially we struggle with this everyday with each interpersonal encounter.

None withstanding the formidable challenges of these garments, we must face an even more perplexing dilemma when we quiet the mind and stare at ourselves in silence in the mirror. Who is behind this skin and these eyes? Every time we look at ourselves through a medium of external reflection—when we are caught by the camera—we temporarily wander outside of ourselves. It is an odd release. So accustomed to sensing our center of consciousness localized within our flesh, this view from beyond turns the observer into the observed, the subject into an object. One might even compare it to a kind of out-of-body experience. Seen from this foreign perspective, we can contemplate the necessity of the body as the anchor of our personal identity.

Unlike the Greek philosophic aspiration to shed the ‘dark matter prison house’ of the body and roam free as pure mind or soul, the greatest expositors of Jewish esotericism have extolled the virtues of the body. It is a home. Among the garments of the soul, it is the levush ha’miyuchad or unique clothing. Not only is it unique, but in the congruence of soul and body, it captures our unicity. We a unified with it and as such, cannot be haphazardly separated from it nor can it be rendered easily transferable.

Without delving into a full exposition, one could say that all of the statements about marriage and divorce in Jewish law apply equally to the relationship of soul to body. Binding them together is no insignificant matter nor is the cessation of ties. That said, what we really are addressing is a ratio–the proportionality of body to spirit.

In many instances the Sages evoke the expression ‘like a monkey in face of a man [human].’ Once again, our monkey really refers to a body, and the human (Adam) is the spirit. Sometimes this is depicted as the relationship of mind to heart wherein the heart embodies or houses the experiences of the mind. It ‘fleshes’ them out and contains them. So too, in the mind itself, concepts tend to serve as ‘bodies’ for pure ideas or intuitions. Every level of reality carries with it this kind of pairing.

What then is an avatar body? Is it not something secondary or supplemental? Even in grammar we run across this: a noun may sometimes mask itself in a pronoun. In Hebrew the point is made even stronger by the terms from the first, second and third person pronouns. The first person is called the guf rishon or literally the first body (“I”), second person is guf sheini or second body (“you”) and the third person is the guf shelishi or third body (“him, her, it”). To put it differently, when “I” become a “you” or a “him/her” it is akin to one monkey controlling the body of another. Even the indefinite pronoun ‘anybody’ (read any-body) is addressed to any person. The person is known through the body and the body is operated by the person inside but this can be extended in a endless chain of power relations–pronouns in place of nouns.

Our monkey-body is similar to a robot body as we briefly explained in the previous article. Historically, this notion may also be seen as steeped in kabbalistic tradition in that we find the first usage of the term ‘robot’ in the science fiction play Rossum’s Artificial Robots (R.U.R.) by Karel Čapek in 1921. He reportedly got the inspiration for the term (which in Czech means ‘servant’) from the famous Jewish legends of clay golams which were themselves forerunners to what we think of as an automaton or synthetic life. In Kabbalah, there is a strong opinion that human life began as a golam in that the Genesis narrative speaks of Adam having been a clay body formed from the ground and only afterwards having ensoulment.

There is even some comparison of the artificial body (the robot as golam) and the natural body. If you happen to have caught the reboot of the Battlestar Galactica television series that ran from 2004-2009, the whole idea was that robots evolve from glorified toaster ovens and tin cans to walking bio-body suits that are indistinguishable from humans. The best robot is the one that ascends to the human level and becomes more and more like its creator. Just as the Torah outlines how we as created beings are supposed to become more and more like God–to resemble the Divine–though the performance of mitzvot (commandments), we too reiterate this process (as exemplified in this fictional dramatization) of making machines that wish to become more and more human. While we cannot now map out the full implications of this, suffice it to say that the blurring of the boundary between the organic and the artificial, human and machine, is a very big topic in Jewish esoteric thought.

As far as historical precedents for avatar bodies (robotic or otherwise) we can retrieve one of the most fascinating examples from the Zoharic reading of the Purim story in the Book of Esther. Without going beyond the CliffsNotes of this 4th century BCE episode, let us simply say that the Jews who were subjects to King Achashverosh were endangered by a nefarious plot from his advisor Haman. The leader of the Jews at the time was Morderchai who was the cousin of Queen Esther and together they thwarted this evil plan to ultimately produce a sensational Jewish victory.

At the level of the surface meaning Esther manages to conceal her Jewish identity while being forced to marry King Achashverosh. According to the Zohar (III 276b) however, Esther avoided ever coming into contact with Achashverosh in the most wondrous of ways: she was able to remain safely with Morderchai while an avatar body (or some would say a ‘demon’) fashioned in her image was sent to be with Achashverosh.

Jan Scheuermann overcomes her quadriplegia with a robotic arm she controls with her mind (2012)

Thus, she avoids spiritual and physical harm to her person in much the same way that modern roboticists hope to prevent people who have hazardous jobs from being placed in direct danger. For instance, there are now prototypes of firefighting robots which can enter into the most precarious situations where a building is engulfed in smoke and flames and search for survivors. Police are testing the robotic equivalent to S.W.A.T. which can be the first ‘man’ in on a high stakes drug bust where, if there is a shoot out, they can absorb the shots whilst fearlessly and even non-lethally subduing violent criminals. Aerial drones already take to the skies the world over leaving their pilots thousands of miles away, out of the combat zone in the comfort of safety. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Zohar riffs off the implicit meaning of Esther’s name which comes from hester or ‘hidden.’ In line with this reading, she is hidden from the king and replaced with a avatar replica which can be remotely controlled. In this way, she still affects the outcome of the story from up close even while maintaining her distance. From this one instance, we may surmise that a redemptive future may hold many more possibilities for tele-robotics and avatar driven exploration and/or work in perilous or undesirable conditions.

The idea of a replacement body is beginning to surface in mainstream medicine as the solution to aging, disease and even death. In Part Three, we will explore the avatar body as the key to the Jewish notion of resurrection of the dead.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/networks/brains-monkeys-and-avatars-part-3/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/brains-monkeys-and-avatars-part-1/

Print PDF