Data is a living robot made from synthetic materials who possesses intellect and consciousness

“Data” is the name of the character played by Brent Spiner in the Star Trek films and television shows.[1] He is a synthetic life form constructed from metallic alloys, circuitry, and organic-like materials that simulate a human body, and he has both great intellectual capabilities and a form of sentience and self-awareness.

Data struggles to understand humanity. Over the course of his fictional life, he obtains a programming upgrade that allows him to experience emotion, which leads him to struggle even more with what it means to be human. Gradually he expands his consciousness and becomes a more fully developed sentient being. He ultimately sacrifices himself to save his human crewmates.

Data stands in a long line of fictional characters who are artificially created beings—robots, golems, puppets, statues, and monsters.[2] The fictional device often has been used as a metaphor for what it means to be human, or as a way to provide an outsider’s commentary on humanity.

Data is that type of metaphorical character, but that is not what I mean when I say that we are Data. No, my meaning is not metaphorical in the same fictional sense at all.

Humans are living robots made from organic materials who possess intellect and consciousness

We are not just like Data. We are of the same kind as Data.

In other words, we are robots of organic construction. Instead of metal substructure and silicon circuity beneath our skin, we have bone and carbon-based cellular structures that support a complex system of vessels, communication lines, nerve endings, and synapses. Our species of Homo sapiens is an emerging life form that appeared on our planet in our current form only about three hundred millennia ago. Our brains did not learn the rudiments of language until one hundred thousand years ago, and since then over a relatively short geological time span, our brains have evolved to develop advanced intellectual, social, and cultural capabilities based on language. We quite literally have become living robots of the same category as a creature like Data, evolving and developing new capacities as we learn to be who and what we are.[3]

Like Data we struggle with what it means to be human

Our species did not come into being with full knowledge of how to use our capacities and how to live as self-aware sentient creatures. A hundred millennia into the development of language, we do not understand our own humanity or how to communicate clearly even some of our most basic needs and desires. We have emotions and feelings, but they confound us. Our consciousness is hard to define, but it defines us, even if we cannot explain it fully or pin it down in our brains, and even if what we often imagine as “self” is indeed an illusion. Like Data we are learning machines, struggling to understand who we are, creating what it is to be human in real time.

That is how we are most like Data. We are organic mechanisms attempting to become human, while simultaneously exploring both what it means to be human and the universe in which we live. And that is fine with me. I do not consider it reductionist in the slightest. We don’t need to imagine ourselves more than organic machines. It is enough that we struggle to be human. That is what is important and most interesting about us.

It is also what is most interesting about the universe. Why does the universe generate living machines such as us? Why do we have the capacity to examine ourselves and question who and what we are? Why do we want to become more than what we are? To be what we imagine we could be?

Perhaps because we are exactly like Data.

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[1] Data was introduced as a character in the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series in 1987. Wikipedia 2022. Data (Star Trek). Last edited on June 13, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_(Star_Trek)

[2] The many examples include movies such as Her and Blade Runner, the Pinnochio story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the myth of Pygmalion, Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, even C3PO and R2D2 of Star Wars.

[3] If it seems difficult to conceive of humans as advanced robots, read one of our most accomplished cognitive scientists and natural philosophers. Daniel Dennett describes the evolution of the complex operations of the brain over thousands of years of natural selection and concludes that consciousness can be defined as a virtual machine operating on an organic substrate. In his widely held view, humans are exactly like living robots running on advanced software and organic parts. “’Of course we’re machines! We’re just very, very complicated, evolved machines made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we are conscious, so there can be conscious machines – us.’” Dennett (1991), pp. 431-432.