Dollhouse: It’s Simply a Matter of Hardware and Software

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.” John Watson, 1930

{Warning: This entire series on Dollhouse and Humanity includes references to plot points in the second season. If you don’t like to have secrets spoiled you may not want to read this series until you’ve seen all the episodes.}

Meet Topher Brink. Topher is the programmer of the Dollhouse. In the Whedon-verse he is the “geek”. Picture Wash, Andrew and Xander all thrown into one character and that is Topher. He is jittery, socially obtuse, and likes to reference Star Wars in everyday conversation. The difference, in this case, though, is that Topher is a genius. Not only is he a genius, but he knows it, and finds himself constantly having to correct those who are unfortunate enough to not be as smart as him.

As the programmer, Topher is tasked with creating the personas for the dolls’ engagements. He has access to a hundreds (thousands?) of personalities that he combines and shapes to create the perfect doll. He has revolutionized the imprinting process in the LA dollhouse, allowing dolls to be imprinted in a matter of minutes instead of hours.

Topher is absolutely sure of the science. A personality gets downloaded onto a wedge, the wedge gets loaded into the chair, the doll sits in the chair, and in no time the doll becomes whomever the customer has ordered. When the engagement is done, the doll is wiped of this persona and goes back to a neutral doll-state, with no memory of what has happened.

“The wipe is clean” Topher says more than once. It is, for him, a matter of only hardware and software. So long as the doll has the active architecture and is wiped of their original personality, the software (personality to order) is downloadable, tweakable, and ultimately wipeable. The science is sure.

Or maybe not.

Echo, one of the most requested dolls, seems to have this ability to remember imprints. This is even before Alpha dumps 40 personalities into her at the same time. Of course, this could be written off as a fluke. Echo is special. Alpha is special as well. But even the other dolls, like Victor and Sierra begin to show signs that the hardware/software approach to personality is flawed. In this case, instead of remembering imprinted personalities, Victor and Sierra remember their bond while in their doll-state, and that bond then affects the engagements. (e.g., Victor, imprinted with the personality of Roger, rejects Miss Lonely-hearts because he has fallen in love with someone else – Sierra—even though he doesn’t know her name).

It is impossible, according to Topher. The science is sure. On more than one occasion Topher emphatically says, “This should not happen.”

Can we reduce a person to a matter of hardware and software? Would the glitches that occurred in the dollhouse with the wipes, happen if the technology was even better?

Agent Paul Ballard disagrees with Topher’s scientism. After infiltrating the Dollhouse, Paul explains that he is there to rescue these dolls from slavery (which we will talk about in an upcoming post), and that, despite all of Topher’s hardware/software mumbo-jumbo, the process does not account for a human’s soul.

How does reductionism impact how we understand the nature of the person?

Nancey Murphy, in In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem, wrote the “nonreductive physicalist” chapter, and she argues that concepts such as moral responsibility and spirituality are compatible with the idea that humans are entirely physical (there is no such things as an immaterial soul). She argues that humans’ higher functions are constructed of our biology, but cannot be reduced to our biology. She says,

“Consider two children playing with Lego bricks. One (the antireductionist) says, ‘Look there’s a house and a car and a dog and a plane.’ The other (the reductionist) says, ‘No, all there really is, is Lego bricks.’” (p.135)

Topher would be the reductionist.

We talk about nature and nurture informing who we are. And yet, psychologists like John Watson believed that he could make anyone anything with the right psychological manipulation.

And so, that becomes the question: What makes someone human? Is a doll only human when they are imprinted with a personality? Are they only human when they finally receive their original personality back at the end of their contract?

These are the questions that we’re going to be exploring in the next several posts. Stay tuned for:

Dollhouse: When is a person human? Is a Doll human?

Dollhouse: Choice or Slavery?