the angry sea

I always shake my head when I see someone neatly arranging all their pillows on their bed for the day, only to take them off again at night. But back when I was in primary school, that used to be me. My bed was completely filled up with stuffed animals, during day and night. And I did not just like stuffed animals, I really felt for them. So when I had enough of one particularly creepy looking penguin, I would not just move it because I would be afraid of it feeling left out. When I went to sleep at night and I had to choose between the animals that would be put on the floor to make space for my own body, I would cycle through the crowd so as not to offend any of the poor toys. At a very young age, I was not only 'subjectifying' my nightly companions, I was empathising with them to the point of not allowing myself my favourite bear to hug every night.

Stuffed animals, being pretty close to animals, are quite commonly seen as subjects. There are lots of stranger things that we assign a sense of 'creatureness' to. An example of a very abstract subjectified entity is the sea. When the old Greeks would see a hefty sea, this would be ascribed to an angry Poseidon. Through such a human like character, the sea would gain emotions like frustration or calmness. Not only the Greeks were guilty of this anthropomorphism. Wikipedia has a list of water deities that contains hundreds of separate characters assigned to the sea or other bodies of water. I get it, personally. Even though I do not quite agree with the image of a bare chested Poseidon riding around angrily on his chariot (I never really understood how this worked underwater), I still think of the sea as a subject. When the tide rolls in heavily with lots of white wash, it is as if I feel the anger of the sea. Somewhere I know that this is just a combination of the tide and wind, but it does not feel like that. And when I see the sea, it feels reassuring, even intimate. How is it possible that a mass of water can feel like a closer friend than many humans?

Getting back to the subject of subjects, the term creature often pops up when thinking of objects and subjects. Every creature is a subject, and any subject is almost always a creature. Anything that is an object can therefore not be a creature, and there are only few example of non creatures that are seen as subjects, the rest being objects. Confusing, but intuitive. What I find an interesting addition, is that subjectification does not necessarily imply that something is a subject. When we subjectify a teddy bear, this does not necessarily mean we would also call this a subject in many definitions of the word. It seems to rely on context and the way we think about a certain entity whether or not this is a subject. Even though we know that there is not such a thing as a teddy bear with emotions, we still feel the warmth and love that we assign to it in a momentary lapse of reason.

Where this is a strategy that comes in handy in many cases, there is a lurking danger in this convenience. If we can subjectify an object at will, could we also objectify those we would call subjects just as easily? The answer is that we can, and we have. When I first read about this topic, I immediately - after reminiscing on my stuffed penguins - thought of animals. Many people will defend the idea that their dog is a subject. They describe good old Woofer as intelligent, handsome and most importantly as a good boy. - Spoiler alert: this story will now take a darker turn than stuffed penguins and good boy Woofer. - Cattle and poultry are different stories. The animals we keep for the production of our milk, eggs and meat do not have names. When possible, many of us live happier lives when we do not think of the process these animals go through, we are better off seeing them as machines. What we call subjects at one time, we objectify at another. This sort of relativism is something that humans are very good at. In a day, we can drink one glass of milk from happy cow Maria that runs around the neighbour’s land and we can drink one glass of milk that just comes from a carton, end of thought process. We lock out our own guilt by changing the status of these cows without even noticing it.

The dynamic process of switching between objects and subjects is a danger to watch out for in artificial intelligence as well. We still exist in a paradigm in which robots do not have emotions. Robots like this battery picking one still are not angry, nor are they content. They are robots that are fine where they are, without being subjectified. However, if we do end up in a situation in which robots gain aspects of creatureness and we start creating actual subjects, we should acknowledge this. Instead of pretending for convenience, I hope that we can be honest in admitting that these subjects deserve respect. With that, I will take a minute of silence for all my stuffed animals who are now locked up in a box in my parent’s attic. For those that we subjectify, deserve to be subjects.