Chapter 3
Ozma of Oz
b. Tiktok and the Tin Man
As some of you may know, this passage from Chapter 4 of Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz is one of my favorites:
. . . standing within the narrow chamber of rock, was the form of a man – or, at least, it seemed like a man, in the dim light. He was only about as tall as Dorothy herself, and his body was round as a ball and made out of burnished copper. Also his head and limbs were copper, and these were jointed or hinged to his body in a peculiar way, with metal caps over the joints, like the armour worn by knights in days of old. He stood perfectly still, and where the light struck upon his form it glittered as if made of pure gold.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ called [her companion, the hen,] Billina , . . . ‘It isn’t alive.’
‘I see it isn’t,’ replied [Dorothy], drawing a long breath.
‘It is only made out of copper, like the old kettle in the barn-yard at home,’ continued the hen, turning her head first to one side and then to the other, so that both her little round eyes could examine the object.
‘Once,’ said Dorothy, ‘I knew a man made out of tin, who was a woodman named Nick Chopper. But he was as alive as we are, ‘cause he was born a real man, and got his tin body a little at a time – for the reason that he had so many accidents with his axe, and cut himself up in a very careless manner.’
‘Oh,’ said [Billina], with a sniff, as if she did not believe the story.
‘But his copper man,’ continued Dorothy, looking at it with big eyes, ‘is not alive at all, and I wonder what it was made for, and why it was locked up in this queer place.’
‘That is a mystery,’ remarked Billina, . . .
Dorothy stepped inside the little room to get a back view of the copper man, and in this way discovered a printed card that hung between his shoulders, it being suspended from a small copper peg at the back of his neck. She unfastened this card and returned to the path, where the light was better, and sat herself down upon a slab of rock to read the printing.
‘What does it say?’ asked [Billina], curiously.
Dorothy red the card aloud, spelling out the big words with some difficulty; and this is what she read:
SMITH & TINKER’S
Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking
MECHANICAL MAN
Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment
Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live
‘How queer!’ said Billina. ‘Do you think that is all true, my dear?
‘I don’t know,’ answered Dorothy, who had more to read. ‘Listen to this, Billina’:
DIRECTIONS FOR USING:
For THINKING: – Wind the Clock-work Man under his left arm, (marked No. 1.)
For SPEAKING: – Wind the Clock-work Man under his right arm, (marked No. 2)
For WALKING and ACTION: – Wind Clock-work in the middle of his back,
(marked No. 3.)
“Well, I declare!” gasped [Bellina], in amazement: ‘if the copper man can do half of these things he is a very wonderful machine. But I suppose it is all humbug, like so many other patented articles.’
‘We might wind him up,’ suggested Dorothy, ‘and see what he’ll do.’
. . .
Dorothy had already taken the clock key from the peg.
‘Which shall I wind up first?’ she asked, looking again at the directions on the card.
‘Number One, I should think,’ returned Billina. ‘That makes him think, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, and wound up Number One, under the left arm.
‘He doesn’t seem any different,’ remarked [Billina], critically.
‘Why of course not; he is only thinking, now,’ said Dorothy.
‘I wonder what he is thinking about.’
‘’I’ll wind up his talk, and then perhaps he can tell us,’ said the girl.
So she wound up Number Two, and immediately the clockwork man said, without moving any part of his body except his lips:
‘Good morn-ing, lit-tle girl. Good morn-ing, Mrs Hen.’
I have discussed this passage with children of different ages and in many different countries. One of the most memorable discussions I have had took place in an elementary school in Newton, Massachusetts, about 165 km. from my hometown. The children were third and fourth-graders who had volunteered to join my discussion group.
I asked these kids whether a robot could think.
“There’s no proof,” said both Ross and Sam, “that a robot cannot think.”
Rachel suggested that a real brain could be put into a robot and then the robot could think.
Nick was unimpressed. “If it had a real brain,” he objected, “it wouldn’t be a machine.”
More discussion revealed that, of the dozen children in this discussion group (ages nine to ten and a half) only Matt thought that a robot could be constructed that would actually have real thoughts. I urged the others to produce an argument that might convince Matt he was wrong. And I suggested to Matt that he might think of an argument to win over the others.
Ross and Sam remained pessimistic about settling this question with an argument. There is no proof one way or the other, they kept saying. They were inclined to agree with Nick that a robot with a living brain, if such a thing were possible, wouldn’t really be a robot anyway. But Sam was skeptical that such a thing could be put together. He seemed to be concerned about whether one could make all the needed connections so that the living brain could tell the robot body what to do.
I persisted in my request for an argument. “Can anyone think of an argument to prove that something like Tiktok, that isn’t alive, cannot have real thoughts?” I asked.
Finally Paul obliged. “A way of proving it,” he said,
is this. The only thing that can think is a brain. And the only things that have brains are people and animals. And even if we did put a brain inside a computer, like Nick said, it wouldn’t be a computer anymore, or a robot.
Paul’s statement of the case wowed me. Elegant reasoning like that is what I hope to get from my university students, but seldom do. It was presented with the confidence of a professional.
Of course, Paul didn’t formulate his argument unaided. He developed it out of the preceding discussion. But that is part of what made the argument impressive. It puts together succinctly and perspicuously all the main considerations the group discussion had turned up. I was pleased with it on two levels. On the most basic level, I was glad for the confirmation that Paul and some of the others in the group had come to understand the value in trying to find premises from which one could put together a logically compelling argument for the conclusion one is interested in defending. People in our society certainly have the idea of an argument as a outspoken disagreement. If you say that badminton requires more skill that table tennis and I insist, perhaps vociferously, that the reverse is true, we have an argument, but not in the sense of ‘argument’ that a philosopher is most likely to be interested in. Paul, though not yet ten years old, showed that he knew exactly what I wanted when I asked for an argument. Moreover, he was able to use the general discussion to provide him with the materials he needed for his argument. Furthermore, the argument he was able to come up with, drawing on the discussion of those nine and ten-year-olds fits right in with what many professional philosophers are saying these days. As John Searle puts it in his book, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1997, 170),
We know that human and some animal brains are conscious. Those living systems with certain sorts of nervous systems are the only systems in the world that we know for a fact are conscious. We also know that consciousness in those systems is caused by quite specific neurobiological processes.
Of course there are philosophers, good philosophers, who disagree with Searle. But the point I want to make is that Paul and the other children in that group are fully able to join the contemporary discussion of consciousness, what it is and which entities might have it. They do not have to wait until they become university students to take part in that conversation. And a classic children’s story, like the one about Tiktok can be the stimulus for awakening their intuitions and stimulating their reasoning generators.