With Alberto’s secret plan carried out and working smoothly, Alberto and Sophie made it to survive the major’s final blow. Sneaking out of the book major had been working on, they turned out to be invisible people living immortally in an external world. Sophie was really exalted about the brand new chapter of her life, especially at the thought of the 100-percent exemption from major’s arbitrary and tyrannical manipulation. All of sudden, she transferred herself from a poor puppet to a totally free man, a truly master of her own. She will be controlled by no one. How amazing life is! Thought Sophie.
But not before long, something changed. It was when Sophie and Alberto managed to find major and his daughter Hilde, who were then talking at the table over dinner, that Sophie unexpectedly cried. Alberto gave her a stroke and asked,”Why are you crying? What is it?”
“She’s so lucky to be a real person living in a real world. Perhaps I’m envying Hilde all this…her family life.”
“But you have a family yourself.”
“But we left all that behind, didn’t we?”
“By no means.It’s only major who left it behind. He has written down the final word of his book, my dear, and he will never find us again.”
“Does that mean we can go back?”
“Definitely, anytime we want…”
“Ok, it’s now. I want to return!” Sophie interrupted Alberto and declared.
“Why?” Alberto was brutally baffled.
“It’s human nature, Alberto. I want my family, my friends and everything with me. I can’t live without them. ‘Man is condemned to be free’, as Sartre put, so to exist is to create your own life. You remember? And that’s my life.”
“I told you.”
“My plan is to restart and rewrite everything, creating a world of my own.” Sophie continued,” and I want everything around me remaining the way it is and it should be. So Alberto, let’s return to where we were initially and bring out of everything major’s control finally. We are condemned to let our own world be free!”
“Sounds philosophically great dear! Ok, I’ll give it a whirl. See you soon…”
“See you…”
They disappeared in the shadows…
Return: Sophie’s World Of Her Own
Chapter one Human nature
Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots.
“Do you think robots have any morality or virtue as human beings?”asked Sophie.
“I’m not sure. Maybe not.” Said Joanna.
“How about their nature? Good, or evil?”
“Nature? I’ve never heard of robots having nature! Funny! They don’t even have lives. They’re inanimate, dude.”
“What a poor girl! You’ve never thought the way we are brought into the world just the way robots are created. From the side of mechanism, human being is merely the robot that eats. You wouldn’t guess what I’ve experienced but we ourselves are in the minds of a man writing a book about us…” Surprise as well as confusion occurred on Joanna’s face. “Oh no, forget it. But why not robots be ‘born’ with ‘robot nature’?” Sophie added.
“You really confound me Sophie. What’s mechanism, what are you talking about?… Well, presume you were right, my answer is: robot’s nature is neither good nor evil. It depends. And it depends on what programs they’ve been set with by human beings in the first place. “
“Excellent answer, I have to say. And what do you make up of man? I mean human nature, is it good, or evil? That’s really what I wanna talk about today.”
“Come on, Sophie. What makes you so questioning? You’ve changed.”
“Curious only. But you’re whatsoever right, from now on, I’m a wholly new Sophie! You answer it please, my friend. By the way, being questioning is what make Socrate Socrate. We call it Socratic method or spirit.I just…”
“That’s enough! All right, I’ve been taught that human is good by nature, and…and I think so.
That’s it.” Joanna became impatient.
“So sue me,” Sophie bursted into mischievous laughter and went on about human nature,”just kidding. Don’t be that serious please. We’re just working on an interesting philosophical project. Don’t feel that annoyed.”
Joanna nodded and her impatience seemed to ebb away.
“You said robot is neither good or evil and presumed I was right, but you didn’t prove that human nature was the same case. That’s paradox. Or, it turns out you don’t believe human nature is the same as that of robot at all.”
“No, I don’t buy that. Human beings are animate, reasonable and superior. They can sense, think, plan and decide everything on their own while robots absolutely can’t. They’re totally different.”
“AI is flourishing, man. Maybe one day robots can exactly be but not mock ‘real people’. I mean, they can function exactly the same way human beings do. But let’s set it aside. In terms of what you said, there is nothing to do with human beings’ good nature. You are jumping to the conclusion according to Hume. And what do you think of animal nature? They’re animate too.”
“Hume? Don’t do that again, a bunch of weird names!I have nothing more to say. But think about it. What would happen if human nature was evil, or not good? There would be punching, killing, slaughtering or the like day in and day out, just like the wildly cruel animals. The strong would survive and the week would die. No societies, no governments, and even no tribes would be formed. There is no way for human beings to civilize. No way. People simply lived isolated from each other, barbaric and uncultured. And I say it again, the strong would end up with survival, the week would end up with death. What a bloody law of jungle!”
“You take a Darwinism or rather Social Darwinism tone! It sounds extremely like Darwin’s doctrine that goes the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. But he never went so far himself that he said people would be totally isolated. Neither did he relate the so-called law of jungle to the human nature.”
“Rascal, you do it again!”
How poorly educated, how ignorantly naive she is! Thought Sophie. And she said with a little pride, sort of boasting of her omniscience as though she was a little incarnated God, “It doesn’t matter honey. We’re discussing something that matters. Calm down, you don’t want to behave that way again, do you? I’m so into this topic that I wanna tell you everything I know.”
“You owe me one, rascal! Be quick! Go on! I am all ears and will be silent now.” Joanna said disagreeably.
“You’re pretty kind honey. Ok, let’s revert to our topic. I will be rathe quick.” So Sophie continue,”Darwin didn’t start his evolutionary theory–as we call it–with human nature, whether good or evil, but with tremendous observations coming from his longstanding experiences of world cruises. However, Tomas Hobbes did though.
“Hobbes deeply believed human nature is undoubtably evil, and they would always seek to maximize their personal interest. So in the case of society having not been formed, the state of nature of human beings would push their lives into ‘wars of every man against every man’, no rule, no order and no justice considered in the slightest. It would be as barbaric and uncultured as you’ve pictured. But his theory didn’t fail for the reality–the formulation of societies. That’s because he also deeply believed that at bottom it’s the fear of death that causes human beings to form societies for their own good, and even tyranny is better than chaos in some way. In other words, the formulation of societies exists in the human beings’ evil nature for maximization of interests. You’re not willing to live in Pre-society, are you?”
“That’s interesting and reasonable, kind of I mean.” Joanna began to be ensnared by what Sophie had been saying and couldn’t help commenting.
“You begin to get the point. That’s nice.” An approval smile spread on Sophie’s face. “The biological researches have also shown that even our genes deep in our bodies are decisively and relatively selfish. A bestseller named the Selfish Gene reported it. It seems to me that human beings are all their lives in the pursuit of interest. The ‘interest’ herein is something with which they can survive or be mentally pleasant. Just imagine: what would you do if
someone or something be a menace to you to survive or to be pleasant, Joanna?”
Joanna was engrossed in thoughts for one minutes or so and then replied,”Not quite settled. But if it was a person, I guessed at least I would dislike him. And it was a thing, unless too colossal or terrible to handle, and I would smash, beat or throw away it without any ado.”
“Yeah, so would I. So you see, by nature people would like everything to be good for them if the timing, the condition permit. It requires decisions, regardless of reasonable or unreasonable. But the problem is, what’s the criterion to judge human nature to be good or evil?” Sophie looked at Joanna in her eyes, thinking something.
“Virtues are good. Anti-virtues are evil. But I’m still not sure whether human nature is totally consistent with what virtues requires us to do or not. Seems not. Things should be more than complicated. I’m perplexed.”
“You’re right! But before clarifying the criterion, let’s take a look back at Aristotle, who thought virtues are not necessarily germane to human nature.”
“A familiar name. Finally!”
“Not finally but we’re approaching the conclusion. Aristotle thought there are two kinds of virtues. One is intellect, and the other is character, both of which are required experience, time and habituation if you wanna attain them. It’s quite necessary. For Aristotle, nature is something that would never behave differently under any given circumstance. For example, a stone hurled into sky would eventually fall down to the ground no matter where you hurl it–of course, on earth. That’s nature. You got it?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve learned it at school, the physical law such as the law of gravity, which perfectly conform itself to everywhere. That’s nature. And to survive or to be mentally pleasant is human nature as we demonstrated, which is definitely applicable to all of us. But what’s more than complicated as you noticed, is that there are no commonly shared virtues and people differ in virtues. “
“Then how Aristotle tackled this? Tell me.” asked Joanna.
“For him, he came to the conclusion that virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them. That is to say, human nature is neither good nor evil in Aristotle’s perspective. One of the most great and respected Chinese thinkers, Confucius hold almost the same opinion.”
“Great minds think alike!” Joanna was convinced in awe,” Human being is probably a sheet of…white paper with nothing written on. You can tell whether he is good or evil, because he is neither good nor evil. They’re unadulterated white papers.”
“You’re taking the same tone as John Locke now!”
“But wait! Does it indicate that human nature is as same as ‘robot nature’ for their neither-good-nor-evil feature? But I’m still confused, human beings are in sense different than robots for they are their own authors to write their book of lives. Robots are definitely not. By the way, what do you mean by saying that human being is merely the robot that eats and we are from a book or something?”
“That means you are not a stringently real ‘you’ because you’re created, acting in a book called Sophie’s World written by a man. We call him major. So in fact you’re merely like a robot with AI who keeps eating for life. We too.” said a voice.
“Alberto! Psyched to see you again!” Sophie shouted excitedly.
“Is that true? You tell me, Sophie!” Joanna’s mind was led completely astray again.
“I’ll tell you later on.”replied Sophie who faced up to Alberto and said,”How can you make it to be here? It’s just chapter one I guess. Amazing!”
“Remember it is a renewed start? I just resume playing my role but in advance. Since we can choose anytime we want to return, we can choose anyplace to remake it. Nothing magical!”
“Right.”
“By the way, I’ve heard of everything you two just were talking about on my way here.”
“How can you do it?” asked Joanna, who was impressed by the newcomer.
“Doesn’t matter. But I’m gonna say something about it, very briefly.
“Human nature in essence is nothing but depending on what lens you’re watching through. So it could be good, evil, between or neither. So there are great amounts of arguments. But have you ever thought taking human nature itself as the lens to observe it?
“Now human nature is permanently the way it is, it must be the way it should be, which is preeminently transcendent.
“Protagoras, one of the greatest Natural Philosophers, once said,’man is the measure of everything.’ And he’s right. We can say, ‘human nature is the measure of everything good.’ Human nature must be good, or what good are we to exist otherwise? This’s the very point that we can hardly defy.”
“But it defies my comprehension, sir.” said Joanna, bewildered.
“I think, therefore I am.” Sophie muttered. “I am, therefore I count. I count, therefore I’m good by nature. The reasonable is that which is viable, or vice versa, that which is right survive. Now human nature is permanently the way it is, it must be the way it should be. It’s unquestionably good.
“Oh no. I am, therefore I count. I count, that’s because the fact I exist take priority over I am. ‘Existence takes priority over essence.’ Existence is unquestionably good and human nature is permanently existent as long as there exist human beings. And the core of human nature is to survive or to be mentally pleasant. To survive is to be mentally pleasant. To survive is to exist. To be mentally pleasant is to represent humanity. Existentialism is humanism thereby. “
“‘Man is condemned to be free’, as Sartre put, so to exist is to create your own life. That’s my life. And it’s human nature.”Sophie and Alberto said almost simultaneously.
“It’s good!”Sophie exuberantly announced.
“What’s the problem with you, Sophie”, cried Joanna.
“Alberto! We are going to create our own world!” Sophie’s eyes are sparkling.
“No. Because you’ve never thought that you got it all wrong from the very beginning.”said
Alberto, loudly laughing.
“What? Say it again?”
“Cuz I am Alberto Knag but not Alberto Knox.”
“Major!”
Damn! They looked the same!
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