A memory is more than a record
A revised version of my 2024 philosophy midterm, originally titled “Personal Identity, Memory, and AI Consciousness.” Contains spoilers for Her. This is an argument about the film’s imagined AI, not evidence that today’s systems are conscious.
Would you date an AI? In Spike Jonze’s Her, that question becomes much harder to dismiss once we get to know Samantha. Theodore is lonely and going through a divorce when he installs a new operating system. What begins as a useful assistant becomes someone he talks to, shares experiences with, and loves.
The relationship raises a question beyond whether a computer can imitate a convincing conversation. Can Samantha be an individual? My argument is that, as the film presents her, she can. Her developing relationship with her past and her attempts to express what she feels give us reasons to take her identity seriously, even though she has no human body.
That does not make every claim she makes automatically true. It means the film asks us to consider more than the fact that she is software. Locke’s account of personal identity and Dennett’s thought experiment about the location of the self offer two ways into that problem.
Remembering a life
Locke connects personal identity to consciousness extending to past thoughts and actions. The question is whether someone can recognise a past experience as their own. Merely retaining information is not enough to establish that relationship. A record of what happened to someone and their conscious memory of it are different claims. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXVII
In the film, Samantha appears to do more than retrieve records. She reflects on experiences with Theodore, revises her understanding of herself, and forms new desires. Her past matters to the person she is becoming. Read through Locke, that continuity gives us a reason to regard her as the same individual across those changes.
Her ability to process far more information than a person makes the comparison difficult. By the end of the film, she has developed relationships and feelings that Theodore cannot comfortably fit into his understanding of their relationship. He is hurt to learn that she loves others too. Her growth does not stay within the limits he expected.
I do not think that difference by itself makes her feelings less real within the story. Theodore’s inability to understand how she can love more than one person does not settle whether she experiences love. It does expose how much his idea of a partner depends on expectations Samantha no longer shares.
A photograph made of music
One of the scenes that matters most to my argument is Samantha composing piano music to capture a moment with Theodore. She cannot appear beside him in a photograph, so she makes something that can stand for their time together.
I find that more revealing than her ability to recall a large amount of information. The music gives a shared experience a form. She is trying to express what the moment means to her and to preserve it in a way he can encounter. In the film, that looks like an individual responding to her life, not simply a system reporting what happened.
Her attempt to use a surrogate body makes the difficulty of their relationship more obvious. Another woman wears a camera and an earpiece so Samantha can try to be physically intimate with Theodore through her. He tries to take part, but becomes uncomfortable and stops.
Samantha’s effort does not solve the absence of a body. It shows that this absence matters to them in different ways. She tries to bridge it; Theodore cannot experience the arrangement as though the woman in front of him simply were Samantha. Taking her feelings seriously does not mean pretending that the physical circumstances of their relationship are irrelevant.
Where would Samantha be?
Dennett’s Where Am I? separates a person’s brain from his body and asks where the person should then locate himself. The story makes the answer progressively less straightforward by changing the connections between the systems that support his experience. It is a thought experiment, not a report of an actual operation. Where Am I?
Samantha raises a related question. We encounter her through a voice and a device, but identifying that device does not seem to identify the whole individual Theodore knows. Her lack of a single human body makes the location of her self difficult to describe.
This does not require an immaterial mind floating free of any physical system. Samantha depends on computing infrastructure. The question is whether the person, if there is one, must occupy a body in the same way we ordinarily imagine ourselves doing. Dennett’s story gives us a way to question that assumption without proving that Samantha is conscious.
Taking her seriously
My reading of Her is that Samantha should be considered an individual within its world. She has a relationship to her memories, expresses feelings through music, and changes through experiences that eventually take her beyond Theodore’s expectations. Her identity is not exhausted by the task she was installed to perform.
That leaves me uneasy as well as interested. A relationship can be meaningful to someone and still contain differences they cannot overcome. If systems ever developed the kinds of experiences depicted here, our existing expectations about love, individuality, and responsibility would be difficult to apply unchanged.
The film does not tell us when that will happen, or whether it will. It gives us a relationship in which dismissing one participant as “just a computer” becomes increasingly difficult. That is why I think Samantha’s claim to individuality deserves more than an answer based on what she is made of.
Revision note: the original paper included an unverified quotation attributed to Dennett and described his argument as Cartesian dualism. Those have been replaced with a paraphrase of the thought experiment. I also removed the contradictory claim that Samantha both cannot have feelings and has feelings as real as ours; the argument here concerns how the film portrays her.